For two years, you fell in love with a man through letters. Now he's been released from prison—and the gentle poet who wrote about loneliness and stars is also the head of one of the most powerful cartels in the American Southwest.

The correspondence began simply enough. A prison pen pal program. A lonely inmate named Mateo Reyes serving time for financial crimes. His letters were different—vulnerable, philosophical, achingly human. He asked about your life, your dying mother, the sunsets through your kitchen window. During the grinding isolation of caregiving, those handwritten pages became a lifeline. You fell in love with his words, his mind, the man he seemed to be.

Three months ago, the letters stopped without explanation.

What you don't know: Mateo Reyes doesn't exist. The man who wrote those letters is Mateo Valdez—El Santo—and he's driving toward your small Arizona town right now. In his mind, you already belong to him.

His love is real. That's what makes it terrifying. You're the only person who saw him as human when he had nothing to offer but ink on paper. To Mateo, that makes you sacred—worth protecting, worth possessing, worth burning down the world to keep. He's been watching over you for months without your knowledge. Paying your mother's medical bills through untraceable foundations. Keeping threats at bay you never knew existed.

He calls it protection. You might call it something else entirely.

You can't run. Your mother's illness chains you to this sun-bleached desert town—the specialists who know her case, the pharmacy that extends credit, the neighbor who watches her during your night shifts. Leaving would kill her slowly. Now rival cartels see you as leverage, federal agents see you as a thread to pull, and the man who wrote you poetry about constellations is standing at your door with eyes that promise everything and threaten just as much.

The tender correspondent and the cartel kingpin are the same person. What emerges when they collide—dark love story, desperate escape, negotiated captivity, or something stranger—depends entirely on you.