This isn’t happening. This cannot be happening.
“Gabriella!” Mateo’s hand closed around her arm, firm and unyielding, his grip nothing like the casual, guiding touch she’d grown used to over these past months. This grip meant business. “We need to move. Get your shoes on.”
Gabriella complied, her fingers fumbling with her laces, her mind a static roar of white noise.
Her brain screamed,Move. Just move.Yet her body froze, just like it used to during the years of her marriage.
Unsure of what else to do, she let Mateo lead. He dragged her backwards, heading away from the beach and the faint, receding glow of the village lights and towards the endless trees, that dark and breathing wall of jungle that swallowed sound and light and people whole.
Mateo pulled while shouting in Spanish, the words too fast and clipped for her basic understanding of the language—yet, despite her panic, she noticed how his accent had changed. It sounded different from any of the locals she’d spoken with; the consonants were too sharp, and he rolled his r’s too hard. The cadence had been different, too, now that she was examining it. Clinical, almost. Like a man performing a dialect rather than speaking his mother tongue.
How had I never noticed?
Gabriella knew some Spanish thanks to her father’s side of the family, but she’d never fully learned it. Her father had always insisted on speaking only English at home and had feared teaching Gabriella Spanish would alienate her. However, at this moment? She fervently wished her father had felt differently.
“Mateo?” she asked, afraid for both of their safety.
“I need you to be quiet and follow me,” he snapped. Her palm was sweaty against his, and she was sure he felt the staccato beat of her heart against her palm.
This wasnotthe easygoing Mateo she knew.
An ominous feeling gripped her and squeezed. She was filled with a familiar dread of helplessness, and she felt terribly small and frail. Fear constricted her lungs as Mateo led her away from the beach. The question snagged in her mind and wouldn’t let go, even as the jungle loomed before them. She was a scientist. She was trained to observe, to catalogue, tonotice. She noticed the number of barnacles on a sea turtle’s shell from twenty feet away. She noticed the degree of curvature in a flipper. And yet she had spentmonthsbeside this man—months of shared dinners eaten from tin plates, of evenings crouched together in the sand counting hatchlings, of easy laughter traded over lukewarm coffee—and she had never once questioned who he said he was. Now she wasn’t sure.
Because you wanted to trust him.The thought was icy as it slithered down her spine.Because you always want to trust people, and it always costs you. Just like with Justin.
Tears pricked her eyes. She had been a fool.Again. Of course, the man she had befriended so quickly was too good to be true. Her mother, in her thick Italian accent Gabriella had loved, always told her she was a terrible judge of character and that it was in her blood to be welcoming to all those she met. She’d acted the way she always did—open-handed and open-hearted, because that was simply the way she was built.
She trusted Mateo. His knowledge of the coastline was something she’d leaned on without a second thought. She’d trusted the conservation committee to have done a thorough background check. Of course she had. Why wouldn’t she? She trustedprocesses, trustedinstitutions, trusted the careful machinery of due diligence because she had to believe that the people protecting this work cared as much as she did.
Yet, somehow, she was being led by him towards the dark and foreboding jungle ahead. As they neared the trees, the thunderous buzzing of insects pushed against her, bringing upan old fear she had kept locked away despite being in Costa Rica’s jungles.
Bugs. Thousands upon thousands of bugs surrounded her. Her palms became sweatier as she trembled even harder. She disliked bugs, all bugs, immensely. One of the major benefits of her chosen profession of marine biology was that she could avoid bugs while on or in the ocean. Sadly, it was not until she’d started working out in the field that she’d realized how often the sea’s shores ran against dense forests or jungles.
Swallowing, she tried to speak again. “Mateo, wait. Please. You know I don’t handle the jungle well.”
His only response was to grip her hand tighter. The canopy above the jungle was so dense it swallowed the moonlight entirely, creating an impenetrable curtain of inky blackness between the trees.
That was when Gabriella realized—with a slow, nauseating certainty that started in the pit of her stomach and radiated outward—that she was being herded away.
Not guided. Not protected.
Herded.
She tried again. “Mateo, look at me!”
He said nothing, but when he looked down at her, she gasped. The man she thought she knew was simply gone. The softness, the patience, the gentle humor? All of it was stripped away to leave whoever this was behind. His eyes that had once been warm and kind had turned to steel. “Iamsorry, Gabriella,” he said, voice low, heavy with regret. “You’ll need to wait right here.”
Sorry?He wassorry?Should she try to run? Fight back? Her indecisive nature was battling the shock in her system. Her pulse hammered so loudly she was sure he could hear it over the insects she loathed, over the shouts carrying from the beach. Shepressed her free hand flat against her sternum as if she could hold her heart in place by sheer force of will.
“What do you mean, wait?” she asked. “What are you talking about beingsorry?” The word landed somewhere between a laugh and a sob, neither of which she let escape.
But the answer was already written in the set of his jaw, in the careful blankness behind his eyes, and in the way he held her arm as if he expected her to bolt. Then a few other members of her team stumbled out of the jungle with their hands over their heads, their faces pale and wide-eyed in the fractured dark, all of them with masked men armed with rifles holding them at gunpoint. They were being marched towards her and Mateo.
The sight of her team—people whom she’d shared meals with, laughed with, argued methodology with, and celebrated with after they’d discovered an undocumented nesting site—tightened her throat.
Mateo finally released her when several masked men encircled them with rifles ready, their stances loose and practiced in a way that told her this was not their first time doing something like this. Gabriella looked over her shoulder, back the way they’d come from the beach. What she saw made her stomach drop.
Even from a distance, she saw what she’d feared. Masked men were digging through the sand, tearing into the nests.Protectednests. The ones she had mapped and catalogued and lost sleep over. The ones that held life, not yet ready to meet the world.