But he knew that, for her, the turtles meant the world. Which meant they meant the world to him as well.
Despite what had happened on the beach tonight, Gabriella wasn’t aware that he’d worked hard to ensure any active turtle nests had been moved before the stolen goods were dug up—he’d done it quietly, alone formonths, and in ways that required covering his tracks twice, because the men that reported to him within Nox would not have understood and would have asked questions he wouldn't have had answers for.
Even more so if they knew the reasons as to why he’d had a turtle tattooed over his heart the week after he’d met Gabriella, inked into his skin by a man three towns over. It served as a silent and solemn oath—to her. She didn’t know that meeting her had reignited the part of him that still wanted to do good inthe world, even in the small and quiet ways available to a man in his complicated position.
Even if it risks this entire assignment going sideways, apparently. Even if it risks my own life.
And yet, he had watched the deaths of both the sea creatures he cared for and the scientists he had made friends with over months of shared meals and shared work. The guilt coiled tight and permanent in his gut, pressing upward into his chest where it joined the rest of what he carried. He felt every life taken on that beach as a direct, physical impact—as if the blows had landed on him personally. This assignment, this night specifically, had strained him in ways he was no longer capable of managing alone, had reached into places he’d believed were protected and left marks he didn’t know how to account for in any after-action report.
He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to tell her about the task force, his handlers, their names, the extraction windows he’d memorized, and the code names that had been carved into the operational margins of his existence for three years. He hungered to share with her the specific, technical reality of what he was and who he worked for and what tonight wassupposedto have been. He wanted to lay it all out for her the way she laid out data, clean and complete, and let her see the full shape of it.
But he knew that was a selfish desire. He wanted to tell her the truth in hopes that she would hate him less, that she might understandwhyhe'd deceived her, and that was not a good enough reason to endanger her. Because giving her that knowledge, about his assignment and the task force,wouldput her in terrible danger.
I've lied to her for this long to protect the task force and their operation,he thought.I can lie to her for a little longer to protect her.
Besides, if José—that twisted old bastard who wassupposedto serve as Mateo’s second-in-command within Nox—suspected the real reason why he kept Gabriella by his side … He’d flay her alive for even a scrap of information and relish in the agony it would inflict on him given the nature of their relationship.
And if José learned anything about Mateo’s assignment? The entire architecture of the task force’s operation would collapse, and the scum it was built to ensnare would scatter before the net closed around them.
Then everything I’ve done … all the horrors I’ve caused and atrocities I’ve committed will be for nothing.
To keep Gabriella alive, protect his identity, and keep the task force’s operation in play, he had to kidnap her. To finish his assignment, he had to remain the liar she knew him to be now. But he could give her the one thing that required no operational details or additional context, a blunt promise without bravado.
“Gabriella,” he said in a lower register, “I will not let them hurt you. I’ve seen how they treat women. That will not happen to you as long as I’m alive.”
He meant it with every fragment of himself.
“You’ll see that I’m not the man I pretended to be,” he said quietly, his voice stripped of the controlled, professional polish and left with what was underneath—rough with the emotions he had been managing at arm’s length for months and was no longer entirely able to contain. “But right now, you’re with me. And Iwillget you out of this. One way or another.”
She stared at him, fury and fear occupying her face in equal measure, neither winning, both present as he directed the boat off to their destination. To him, it seemed like the face of a woman who wanted to hate him but couldn’t fully commit to it. He understood that feeling intimately from looking at himself in the mirror. He hated himself for being the cause of this entire situation.
Behind his words was a promise he couldn’t afford to break and a truth he couldn’t yet reveal. Time was the one resource he had never been able to manufacture or extend, and he had very little of it left. But he would spend every second of what remained doing everything in his power to keep the woman who had found her way into the center of him—past every defense he’d constructed, past every careful layer of the man he’d built—alive.
CHAPTER 5
GABRIELLA
Gabriella knew immediately they were heading inland.
Tortuguero was remote by nature’s design—reachable only by boat or small plane, cut off from roads and shielded by river and jungle, the kind of place that existed at the edge of the accessible world and had organized its entire identity around that fact. She’d lived among the locals for months, learned the rhythms of the tides and the hidden paths and the way the land breathed through its seasons—the way the river moved differently in the dry weeks, the way the birds shifted their patterns before rain arrived, the quality of the air at different hours. She thought she understood this place.
She’d been wrong.
The boat veered towards a narrow break in the foliage, a gap in the green wall of the riverbank that was invisible until you were almost upon it. It was the kind of opening that required prior knowledge to find in the dark. The engine dropped to a low growl as Mateo guided them in, his hands on the controls carrying the ease of someone who had made this specific approach before.
They reached the bank, and the boat's bow ground softly into the mud. Gabriella’s unease sharpened into something cold and tight at the sight of a dark SUV tucked beneath layers of camouflage netting. The vehicle’s outline was further broken by the deliberate arrangement of branches across the roof and hood.
So whatever this is, it had been planned for a while.How long had she been oblivious to everything?
The question arrived with a specific, familiar weight—the weight of a woman who had asked it before, in a different context, standing in a doorway, staring at evidence that had been present long before she’d allowed herself to see it. The fool’s particular shame: not that the deception existed, but that she had participated in her own deceiving.
You always trust the warmth in their eyes, Gabriella.
Justin’s eyes had been warm, too, in the beginning—warm and attentive and completely, convincingly present. She had catalogued that warmth the way she catalogued everything, filed it underevidence of genuine feeling, built an entire life on top of the conclusion. She had come home early from a conference because her panel had been canceled, her key already in the lock before she’d registered the second car in her driveway that she didn’t recognize.
She had stood in the doorway of her own bedroom for three full seconds before her body understood what her brain was still refusing to process.
Her phone had been in her hand before she’d consciously decided to reach for it. She knew they lived in a state that allowed for single party consent for recording—she had known that, had filed that legal detail away years ago in the part of her brain that collected information against the possibility of needing it. She had taken photographs with the steady hands of a woman in clinical shock. Her husband and his mistress hadbeen so …involvedin their fornicating that they hadn’t even noticed her or heard the door when she slammed it shut behind her. She’d driven to a hotel and sat on the floor for an hour before she could make herself speak.