Gabriella
Alone.
The word arrived before her eyes opened, settling over her like the rough fabric of the mattress pressing against her bare skin—that scratchy, intimate weight that carried the ghost of Mateo's heat in every thread.
The bed squeaked beneath her as she shifted, a cradle of emptiness where a man had been, and the absence of him was its own kind of ache, separate from the deeper throb between her thighs.
That ache was a dark, sweet bruise of a thing, a deep pulse echoing up through her body to the raw, swollen tenderness of her lips where his teeth had marked her in the dark.
She pressed trembling fingers to the swollen flesh.
His hunger. His possession.
Heat coiled, tight and low, a serpent of remembered pleasure unspooling through her belly even as her eyes adjusted to the grey morning light filtering through the warped shutter.
The room smelled of them—of skin and salt and the intimacy of two bodies that had stopped pretending—layered beneath the ever-present rot of the jungle that pressed against the walls like it was waiting to be let in.
God.
She'd never been taken like that. Never wanted it like that—never wanted anything with that particular, desperate, full-body hunger that had obliterated every reasonable thought she possessed.
The way he'd gripped her hips, fingers digging bruises into her flesh while he drove into her again and again, relentless and consuming, his breath ragged against her neck.
The way he'd whispered her name like a prayer and a curse, the two things wound so tightly together she couldn't have separated them.
The way her body had shattered under his, white-hot pleasure obliterating everything—the fear, the uncertainty, the knowledge she may not make it out of this ordeal alive, the memory of hands on her ankle in dark water.
Jungle sounds pressed in from all sides, the canopy conducting its relentless morning orchestra—the liquid pour of a bird she couldn't name, the mechanical sawing of insects, the distant territorial shriek of a parrot cutting through the green haze like a blade.
The air inside the room thickened around her, a suffocating, humid shroud that made each breath feel more like drinking than breathing.
She sat up. The bed shifted and hit the wall behind her with a dull wooden crack. Her eyes moved to the corner where Mateo's pack had been leaning against the peeling plaster wall the night before.
Gone.
He was gone.
Her ribs locked, air catching in her throat like a hook finding purchase.
No. He wouldn't leave. Not after last night. Not after everything he said, everything we did.
But doubt slithered around her heart, as cold and constricting as the hand that had grabbed her ankle.
What did she really know about him? She had catalogued him the way she catalogued everything—methodically, hungrily, believing the data she collected—and the data had told her he was trustworthy, decent, hers in the way that a thing becomes yours when you have given it everything you have left.
But she was a scientist. She knew better than anyone that data could be manufactured.
What do I actually know? I know how good he feels in the dark. I know how he says my name. I know nothing else for certain. Nothing, other than how possessive and demanding he was in bed—and God help her, how much she had wanted every second of it.
She pushed to her feet, the floorboards cold and gritty beneath her bare soles, and crossed to the door.
Beyond the thin wood, the sounds of the camp were already in full morning motion—boots stomping on packed earth and thudding across wooden planks, the clatter of equipment being loaded, the low, rapid-fire exchange of men's voices in Spanish, a woman's laugh somewhere distant and sharp as a bell.
She expected to hear José's demanding voice cutting through all of it, but she didn’t.
The door opened before she reached it.
Mateo stepped in, and his eyes widened when he saw her a few feet from the door—close enough that his forward momentum nearly carried him into her, close enough that she caught the warm, familiar scent of him before anything else registered.
“That's dangerous,” he admonished, his voice low and immediate, pulling the door shut behind him with a quiet deliberateness, clearly understanding what thin walls meant.
His dark eyes moved over her with a swift, assessing sweep that softened at the edges when he found her whole.
“We leave within the hour. Do you need anything?” he asked gently, the shift in his register from operative to something more personal happening so fast it gave her emotional whiplash.
Don't be disarmed by that. She held her own gaze steady, kept her voice neutral. “A toothbrush,” she admitted.
He nodded without comment—no teasing, no deflection—and left again, the door closing behind him with that same careful quiet.
He came back, she thought. She stood in the middle of the small room and let that fact settle through her.
I hope he never leaves again. She didn't know what to do with that thought.
He returned within minutes, a small bundle of supplies in hand—a toothbrush, a bar of soap wrapped in paper, a white linen cloth, a bowl of clean water. The small, practical mercy of it, the fact that he had thought of these things, undid a fraction more of her carefully maintained composure.
She allowed herself a small chuckle. “If I ask for a five-course breakfast, will that be just as fast?”
He smiled, kissed her forehead, and said, “Hurry and get ready.”
She thanked him, washed up, brushed her teeth, and threw on a clean set of his clothes. “Ready when you are,” she said, trying to make light of the situation but stopping short when his hungry eyes roamed over her.
“Have I ever told you how hot you look dressed in my clothes?” he asked, reaching her in a few strides to pull her into his arms. Heat and his scent enveloped her, raising her heart in a way that sent her stomach fluttering.
Even more so when she felt him harden beneath his clothes, the imprint clear given how close he held her.
“I would do anything to have the chance to crawl back into bed with you again.”
She gave a small smile against his chest. “I don’t know if I could survive another night like that.”
His arms squeezed. “You will. I’ll train you and fill you up every night to the point you won’t be able to live without me.” He kissed the top of her head and rolled his hips against her, tearing a soft moan from her lips.
“Mateo don’t …” she pleaded. “I know we need to move but it’s hard enough telling you no.”
“That’s supposed to be my line Gabriella,” he said with a smile in his voice. Letting her go, he did one more look over, dark brown eyes hungry but controlled. “Stay close to me at all times.”
She nodded.
They moved through the camp together, Mateo a half-step ahead and slightly to her left—that position she had come to recognize as deliberate, the one that placed his body between her and the widest angle of exposure.
The men stared.
Not with the open, leering aggression of the night before—that had been beaten and broken out of at least four of them—but with a flat, watchful hostility that settled on her skin like a film she couldn't wash off.
Hard eyes above unshaven faces, tracking her movement with the calculating patience of men who were waiting for the moment her protection became negotiable.
Don't look down. Don't flinch. You are a bitch, and you have earned it. She kept her chin level and her eyes forward and stayed in the half-step of safety that Mateo's body created around her.
The pressure in the camp was a physical thing—an underlying current running beneath the surface of every interaction, every glance, every conversation that stopped a beat too long when they passed.
The charge before a storm breaks. She had spent enough time studying natural systems to recognize the particular quality of tension that preceded catastrophic change.
This is going to break, she thought. Whatever is holding this together, it is going to break soon.
Once cleared, the whole unit moved out into the outskirts of the jungle, the convoy of vehicles grinding through the mud and undergrowth with the grim efficiency of a machine that had done this many times before.
Mateo led—it was just her and him in the vehicle at the front, José riding separately with another cluster of men farther back in the column, which told her everything she needed to know about the current temperature of that particular relationship.
“Here, sit up front,” Mateo said, nodding to the passenger seat, and she was surprised—genuinely surprised, the invitation cutting against the grim hierarchy she had been navigating for the last few days.
“Won't that piss off your henchmen?” she asked, the word henchmen landing with a dry edge she hadn't entirely planned, but she obliged anyway, pulling herself up into the seat.
He smirked at that—the smile reached the corners of his eyes and made him look briefly, devastatingly human. “Who cares. I have to go into town first anyway to scope the city.”
The unit waited in the village while they rode out together, the message sent back down the column to begin their route in approximately an hour.
The vehicle moved through the jungle track with the lurching, bone-rattling rhythm of tires finding and losing purchase on wet red earth, the canopy dragging occasional wet fingers across the roof, vines slapping the windscreen and releasing in long green streaks.
Every rut and root the tires found transmitted directly through the seat beneath her, and the deep, intimate soreness between her legs made itself known with every bump.
She was not going to complain about that.
She adjusted her position against the seat and kept her face entirely neutral.