Is it getting suddenly hot?It sure felt like it despite being a cool seventy degrees. She cleared her throat. “No. There’s been an increase in nesting sites being plundered, and I’ve even written down a few I saw tonight in my notes,” she said, pointing with her pencil to a few coordinates she listed.
Mateo’s dark brows rose. “I always seem to forget how meticulous you are with your notes.” He hummed to himself before he nodded, his expression shadowed. “With all of us working together, I’m sure they’ll get what’s coming to them.”
“Not soon enough,” she said with a sigh. She pulled her leather bound notebook closer to her and made a note about the newest female that was cresting the beach. “I don’t know how anyone could be so heartless to hurt sea turtles. I mean, look at them!” Gabriella waved her pencil, gesturing to the dozens of lumbering figures scattered across the beach. “Look at how cute they are!”
“People can be cruel when there’s money to be made and few choices about how to make it,” Mateo replied with a somber tone. He cleared his throat before he asked, “You still think your research can save them?”
She beamed a smile at him. “The data we’ve been able to collect about their mating patterns, nesting sites, and migration routes will be hugely beneficial to the scientific community.”
Which was true. Each data point they sent helped every year with cataloging whether the species was dying or not. She had a feeling that Mateo cared deeply for the turtles himself given he bore a giant tattoo of one across his chest that she had snuck glances at.
His brown eyes crinkled towards her, the light of the moon making them look warm and mysterious, and she felt the air escape her lungs.Why is he so sinfully attractive?
“Are you always trying to save something, Dr. Valentino?” he asked, a small grin tugging at his mouth. He said her formalname in a teasing manner before looking out to the ocean. It had been one of prides, finishing her degree to come pursue her passion here in Costa Rica, leaving behind years of pain.
Though hearing him use the title made her laugh, the sound carried by the breeze that floated between them. “It feels like it. You remember me telling you how I grew up on a farm, right? There was always one animal or another that needed tending.”
“That sounds exhausting.” He crossed his arms over his chest, the shirt stretching against firm muscle that made her mouth arid.
Yemaya grant me strength, she thought, referencing the Caribbean Goddess of the sea. She had recently learned of the Goddess, also considered a protector of women and children, from one of her colleagues here. “It was exhausting, though I’d imagine not as exhausting as being a turtle trying to crawl up a beach to lay eggs.”
“True. Couldn’t your family decide on which animals to save? Surely you could have eaten a few,” he jested, the wind brushing his shirt open to reveal a hint of the sea turtle tattoo underneath.
She scoffed. “To me, the farm animals were my friends. You think I’m indecisive as an adult? You should have seen me as a kid. I was never comfortable eating my friends.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Though my cousins had zero issues. The Italian side of my family was more accustomed to killing than I was,” she joked.
She remembered her cousins, Beatrice and Sienna, chasing her around their Tuscan farmhouse, each holding a headless chicken while wearing matching mischievous grins. She missed them dearly. Headstrong and passionate, they felt like the complete opposite of her. They were one of reasons she had found her strength to move forward, first after her parents died and then later after her divorce.
Mateo’s chuckle broke her train of thought. “True, it is hard to eat your friends.”
“Not if it’s consensual," she shot back, feeling brave in her flirting as heat rose to her cheeks.
His brow furrowed as his eyes locked onto her, as if he was recalling an unpleasant memory on her behalf. “I hope that for you,” he said gently, “it’s always consensual from now on.”
The way he so delicately alluded to all she’d suffered at the hands of her ex-husband and the trauma of her marriage emphasized how much he’d learned about her during their time together. It was scary how close they had gotten recently, and how much of herself she had shared with him. A part of her thought she should feel ashamed of how shattered she’d been before she’d learned to stand on her feet again.
But she wasn’t. Not with Mateo.
“With someone like you? Always,” she murmured. She saw something briefly pass his features before he managed to catch himself.
His chuckle died off until the silence between them stretched, broken only by the rush of waves and the distant calls of howler monkeys deep in the jungle—those mournful, guttural cries that rolled out of the dark tree line like a warning cry. Gabriella had always loved that sound. Tonight, however, it raised the hair on the back of her neck.
Mateo turned towards her, and his dark eyes lingered a moment longer than necessary, her breath catching, before he looked to the water behind her.Odd.She’d caught him doing that more than once this evening, the subtle drift of his attention away from her and towards the horizon or the tree line. She’d chalked it up to vigilance. He knew this coastline better than she or any of her colleagues.
“Where is your phone Gabriella?” he asked, though his words carried an edge to it.
“My phone? I always leave it in the room when I know I might be submerged,” she responded reasonably. He would know that, because previously they had discussed how he would do the same.
Then Mateo’s stance changed, his shoulders tightening beneath the fabric of his button-up, the easy looseness of him drawing inward like a tide pulling back before a wave. The amiable warmth that had always radiated off him—his steady, unhurried ease that had made her trust him—flickered for a brief moment. She would have missed it if she hadn’t been used to studying him in silence.
“Mateo?” she asked, turning towards him. “Is everything?—?”
The crack of automatic gunfire shattered the night.
The sound was nothing like the movies. It was sharper, harsher. Shefeltit as much as heard it. A brutal, mechanical tearing of the air that drove itself straight through her chest and knocked the breath clean out of her. For one horrible, suspended second, Gabriella didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Her pencil slipped from her fingers and disappeared into the wet sand.
Screams followed, scattering across the beach like startled birds. The serenity of Tortuguero dissolved into chaos as figures moved towards the trees, and her colleagues—herfriends—became nothing more than shapes swallowed by darkness and panic. Gabriella’s heart lurched as fear squeezed the air from her lungs.
A motor roared across the water. A boat covered in green camouflage cut through the waves and slid up the shoreline, its hull grinding against the wet sand in a sound that scraped along her nerves. Men in masks leapt from it, rifles slung across their backs, voices barking commands she didn’t understand. The moonlight caught the metal of their rifles, and her mind went perfectly, horribly blank.