José ignored the jab. He motioned for Mateo to come over, one thick finger tapping the map. “We were told to wait here for a day, and then we will enter into Colombia. Someone should be expecting us.”
Someone.Mateo studied the map, his eyes moving over the marked route with an analytical eye. His pulse had quickened—not with fear, not yet, but with the electric charge of proximity to the thing he’d been chasing. The marker on the map sat in a region he recognized from intelligence briefings, a corridor used for exactly the kind of movement José’s organization specialised in.
Mateo said, “That’s dangerous territory.”
“It is. But it is where Obscura told us to go,” José said with a shrug, “so that is where we will go.”
But why?The question was right there, sitting at the front of his teeth.Who is giving the orders, José? Who is in charge of Obscura?
Mateo asked, “José, if we both agree that this isn’t the best course of action, then why don’t we both talk with them about it?”
José still didn’t look up from the map. “I already spoke with them. Their reasons are theirs alone.”
It was time to gamble. Mateo had waited long enough, climbed as high as he could without killing or replacing José himself, and this was the moment to push. “Then let me talk with them. Maybe I can change their mind.”
At this, Josédidlook up and met Mateo’s gaze. Dark eyes met dark eyes, the challenge absolutely explicit, the pretense of subordination finally, deliberately abandoned.
This is it.He felt the decision settle through him like a puzzle piece sliding into place.End the charade. Right now. Push him to the edge and see what falls out.
“No,” José said, “you don’t get to make that call.”
“Given I am in charge of Nox, I think I do,” Mateo responded back.
José laughed then—a loud, boastful sound that filled the small room and ricocheted off the rendered walls, the laugh of a man who found something genuinely, deeply amusing rather than threatening.
That’s wrong.The instinct fired before the thought completed itself.That laugh is wrong. That’s not the laugh of a man being challenged. That’s the laugh of a man who knows something I don’t.
Mateo felt his gun holstered at his back, his body tensing with the particular readiness that lived below conscious thought, the readiness that years of living undercover had burned into him. “What’s so funny?—”
The first of many screams tore through the camp.
It came sharp and sudden—a single human voice hitting a register of pure, unprocessed terror—then cut off quickly, swallowed by the abrupt bark of gunfire. Then chaos followed, crashing in from all directions simultaneously.
The sound of doors being smashed to splinters, of wood giving way under boot-driven force, came from nearby—one or two houses away, perhaps. The thunder of boots pounding across packed earth. More gunfire cracked through the village in controlled bursts—not wild, not panicked, but efficient. Precise and ruthless. This was the gunfire of professionals who had done this before, who had trained for exactly this, and who knew what they were doing.
“What the fuck?” Mateo turned sharply towards the door, his hand moving to the weapon at his back in a motion so ingrained it required no instruction from his conscious mind. He didn’t know who was about to burst through that door, but he wasn’t going down without a fight.
He was shot in the back before his hand reached the gun.
Pain bloomed like wildfire through his shoulder and down his chest. His arm went numb and heated all at once. Like a battering ram swung by a giant—a force so total and so sudden his body registered it before his brain did, before the sound even fully resolved in his ears. It drove him forward and down, his knees finding the floor with a crack that sent white sparks across his vision. His hand went to his chest on pure instinct and came away red.
Oh.
More pain arrived a half-second later, and it was excruciating. It was a white-hot column of pure, obliterating agony that started at the entry point near his collarbone and detonated outward in every direction simultaneously—up through his shoulder, down through his ribs, deep into the cavity of his chest where something was now profoundly, catastrophically wrong. Each breath he attempted pulled fire into him, his lungs working against a pressure that had no business being there, the simple mechanical act of breathing suddenly requiring every fragment of concentration he possessed.
Shot.His brain delivered the word with clinical flatness even as his body screamed.I’ve been shot.
He looked down at his upper chest, at the spreading red darkness soaking through his shirt, at his own fingers pressing against the wound with a pressure that did nothing to address what was happening underneath them. The blood was warm. That was the detail that registered through the shock—howwarmit was, almost gentle, spreading through the fabric with a slow and patient thoroughness that had nothing gentle in it whatsoever.
Think.Every trained instinct he possessed fired at once, shouting through the static of the pain.I am not dead. I am not dead,yet. I do not have much time. Think.
José’s voice came from behind him, carrying his tone of unhurried, boastful banter. As if they were still having a conversation. As if everything was entirely, perfectly according to plan. “Pity you had to go out this way, Mateo. Sally is going to be devastated. She really loved you.”
Loved.Past tense. Mateo turned his head, the motion sending a fresh wave of blinding agony radiating from his chest outward, and looked at the man he had spent years building a duplicitous relationship with. José stood with the gun still raised, the barrel a dark eye aimed at a man already on his knees, and his expression held no more regret than if he’d just stepped on an insect.
Mateo gripped his chest, his fingers pressing harder against the wound, reaching for his weapon with his other hand—a reflex, a final calculation—as José stepped forward and kicked it from him with ease.
“Your game is over.” José sounded confident and satisfied as he smiled down at Mateo. “You couldn’t just listen to me when I handed you everything on a plate? You were in charge of Nox in name only, but you couldn’t marry my daughter and then you fucked that white bitch instead.”