Gabriella #4
Mateo moved first. His hands on her shoulders, his fingers pressing just shy of pain, betraying how frayed and desperate he was.
“I need José,” he said. Low. Intense. The operative voice gone, replaced by something unguarded and urgent.
“I need him to lead me to the real target … Obscura. The operation runs the real criminal syndicate that’s in charge of this smuggling ring.
That's why we're still in this. That's why I can't just walk you to the nearest US embassy and disappear.”
Obscura. There was that phrase again—Gil had used it, now Mateo. The same phrase, from two men who apparently occupied different sides of this equation.
Her mouth was pressed in a thin line, irritation bleeding into every word she spoke. “Why do you need to get to them?”
“It’s complicated—” He started but she cut him off.
“Then what was last night?” The question tore out of her, ragged and humiliating and completely, absolutely necessary. “What was any of this? I thought you were going to start being honest with me!”
“It was real!” His grip tightened on her shoulders, the pressure of it grounding and present.
“Everything between us is real, Gabriella. I swear to God …” Mateo scrubbed a hand over his face, the gesture cracking through the controlled surface of him, fatigue and something rawer breaking through in the wake of it.
His broad shoulders held a tension that had been there so long it had become structural.
“I didn't want it to happen like this. My orders were to keep surveillance, gather intel, and stay in contact with my handler. But when I saw them coming for you …” He exhaled a harsh and ragged breath, stripped of performance. “I couldn't stand by.”
“Orders?” she asked.
The word landed between them and sat there, reorienting everything around it.
“I’ve been undercover,” he clarified, his eyes holding hers. “Assigned to infiltrate Nox, the smuggling ring.”
Her breathing was picking up again, erratic inhales as she demanded answers from him. “Infiltrate? I thought you were in charge of it?”
“I am, but … José is the point of contact with Obscura. I never planned for Nox to move the other night. But someone tipped Obscura off about your data.” A pause, loaded and deliberate.
“Again. So Nox was ordered to rush in looking for you and gather the remaining goods so we could leave the country. And when I took you, I sent out a distress signal.”
Her world tilted.
Undercover. She turned the word over in her mind with the methodical focus of a scientist encountering an unexpected variable—examining it from every angle, testing its implications against the known data.
Undercover meant he had a handler. Undercover meant there was a government agency on the other side of this.
Undercover meant the man who had held her through the worst night of her life was simultaneously someone she had never met.
“You lied to me,” she whispered. “Again?”
“Yes,” he said softly, and there was no pride in it, no deflection, no performance of regret. It was only flat, unvarnished guilt. “To protect you. To protect the mission.”
She took a step back, and he let her, his fingers releasing her to watch her leave. She was shaking her head, the motion slow and continuous like something winding down. “Protect me? You kidnapped me! Oh god, my friends.”
His expression hardened, not with cruelty, but with the density of stating a fact he wished were otherwise. “If I hadn't, you'd already be dead.”
Dead. The word was so simple. So complete.
She wanted to argue with it, wanted to find the gap in the logic, because that was what she did—she found the gap, she questioned the methodology, she demanded the peer review.
But she had been there on the beach. She had seen the men with rifles. She had felt what came after the water.
She knew he wasn't wrong. He had saved her. She knew that now with certainty. However, it didn’t change the fact that the souls of her dead friends weighed on her conscience.
She wanted to hate him. She should hate him.
The rational, self-preserving part of her brain assembled a comprehensive case for hating him, built it from kidnapping and lies and days of danger and fear and the particular betrayal of a man who had made her trust him while keeping his real identity in a locked room she hadn't known existed.
But the raw sincerity in his voice, the way the last few days had been, how he cared for her, the words he had spoken in the deep of the night … made it impossible to look away.
She wanted nothing more than to bury her face in his chest, have him wrap his strong arms around her.
We can get past this, she thought. But we both just need to come clean with one another.
She took a deep breath. “Let's say I believe you. What does that mean for us? Are we together? A thing?”
He gave her a knowing smile, and it took everything to not stalk back over to shake him. “I want us to be a couple … no, more than that,” he admitted.
His deep timbre voice sent pleasure across her body and settled into her bones. “More than that?”
“I love you.” The words landed softly between them.
Oh.
My.