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 wordhenchmenlanding 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.
“What are we checking out?” she asked, feeling bold in her questions now that they were alone. The question came easier without the weight of watching eyes and cocked ears.
Mateo's voice spoke over the crunching of vines and leaves beneath the tires, rain beginning to patter softly on the hood in the light, in the exploratory way of a sky deciding whether it was committed to the idea. “Just confirming the safe house is still clear to use and that there isn't anyone we want to avoid stationed.”
“You mean like the US military?”
He glanced over to her and paused for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Like the US military.”
She sat with that for a moment, watching the green walls of the jungle slide past the rain-speckled windscreen. She hadn’t thought they could enter countries like this without repercussions. The jungle ended abruptly.
One moment they were swallowed by green walls—the dense, pressing cathedral of the rainforest with its multi-story canopy and its permanent twilight and its smell of rot and life inextricably bound together—and the next they stood at the edge of civilization. A dirt road stretched before them, rutted and overgrown but recognizable as the work of human hands rather than natural accident. Buildings clustered in the distance—small, ramshackle structures of painted concrete and corrugated iron that marked the outskirts of a nameless Panamanian town, their colors faded by sun and rain to the washed-out palette of places that had never had enough of anything.
Gabriella's heart swelled at the sight with a force that surprised her.
She braced her hands on her knees, leaning forward, sucking in air that didn't taste like rot and vegetation—air that tasted of dust and diesel and the faint ghost of cooking fires, which was not clean exactly but wasdifferent, was human, was evidence ofa world that continued to exist beyond the green walls that had held her for days. “We made it,” she breathed, the relief in the words so raw it embarrassed her.
“Indeed, we did,” Mateo said, and when she glanced at him, she caught something in his profile—a fractional softening, quickly contained—that told her the sight of it meant something to him too.
They approached the town with caution, with an understanding that reaching a destination and being safe at a destination were not the same thing. Mateo kept one hand near the gun tucked into his waistband, his eyes moving in a continuous, methodical sweep—rooftops, windows, doorways, the dark spaces between buildings where threats arranged themselves and waited. The town accepted their arrival without ceremony, the streets carrying on their quiet mid-morning business around the slow roll of the vehicle.
A small market operated at the edge of town where the last of the buildings gave way to open ground, its stalls clustered together in a loose, improvisational arrangement that had long since calcified into permanence. The stench hit her through the open window before they stopped—overripe fruit sweating in the heat, its sweetness tipped past pleasant into something fermented and cloying; dried meat hanging from hooks above a stall, dark and desiccated, buzzing with the attentions of fat black flies; unwashed bodies and sweat layered thick as grease in the press of the midday crowd. The staccato percussion of haggling voices cut through a wall of sound built from buzzing insects and the tinny, distorted music bleeding from cheap radios balanced on crates and window ledges. Dust ground beneath her boots as they moved through it, fine and pale and persistent, working its way into every crease and seam. The press of hostile stares from vendors and locals crowded tightaround makeshift stalls followed her movement through the market like a physical pressure, a current running against her.
Gaudy plastic goods gleamed in the harsh, flat afternoon light—children's toys in colors so bright they seemed aggressive, plastic kitchen implements, knock-off sunglasses laid out on velvet cloths—the flotsam of manufactured goods washed up against the base of genuine need.
The stench of rot and desperation. This is where people end up when the world forgets about them. And why men join operations like Mateo’s.
Mateo moved through it efficiently, the tourist performance stripped away now, replaced by something more clipped and purposeful. He bought supplies—water in plastic bottles fogged with heat, protein bars, and ammunition from a seller three stalls back who accepted the transaction with the blank, professional neutrality of a man who had never once asked a question that could get him killed. Gabriella stood beside Mateo, hyperaware of the weight of attention that settled on them both like a second layer of the afternoon heat—too many eyes, too much interest, the particular level of scrutiny that this kind of place reserved for outsiders who arrived with money and urgency.
Mateo moved with confidence.But confidence didn't equal competence.He'd gotten them this far, and she was grateful—genuinely, viscerally grateful in the way you were grateful for things that stood between you and the specific darkness that had been reaching for you—but Panama wasn't safety. Panama was just a different kind of maze.
They were nearing their vehicle when the voice arrived.
Deep. Male. Dripping with a brand of arrogance that knew he was the largest, most dangerous presence in every room he'd ever entered and had simply stopped pretending otherwise.
“Well, well.”