The Captain I Blame For My Brother’s death, Hides his Jersey
Five years ago, Camila Serrano watched her younger brother Mateo collapse on a football pitch in Lisbon during the biggest match of his short career. The official report called it an undetected heart defect, a tragedy, an accident, case closed within a week.
Camila has never believed a single word of that report. She has spent five years building a career as an investigative sports journalist for exactly one purpose: to get close enough to Clube Atlântico, and to their captain Tiago Marques, the last man to touch her brother before he fell, to finally prove what she has always known in her gut, that Mateo's death was not natural at all.
She gets her embed with the club under a false pretense, a season long feature on football culture across the Iberian Peninsula, and she gets Tiago instead, cold and guarded and considerably more dangerous than any football captain has a right to be.
He watches her with an intensity that reads far too much like recognition for someone she has never actually met. Camila does not know, walking into Clube Atlântico's training ground with five years of grief sharpened into a weapon, that Tiago Marques is not simply a footballer with something to hide. He is the Alpha of an old Lisbon pack operating in plain sight beneath the club's public face.
He is bound by an arranged mate pact to the daughter of a rival Alpha he has spent years quietly trying to escape, and the truth about Mateo's death is tangled so deeply into pack politics that exposing it risks a war neither the human world nor the wolf world currently sees coming.
Ler
Chapter: 8CAMILA-.-Sunlight woke me before anything else did, thin gold lines cutting through heavy linen curtains I did not recognize, falling across a bedroom I had never seen before in my life. Tasteful, spare, expensive in the understated way that screamed "multimillionaire bachelor who definitely pays a personal organizer to fluff his throw pillows." Not a hospital. Not my flat.I lay there for a full minute trying to reconstruct how I had gotten there, and came up mostly blank. A medical room beneath the stadium that smelled vaguely of disinfectant and regret. Tiago's hand calloused and impossibly warm around mine.A nurse's voice telling me to rest, which is code for we are keeping you heavily sedated so you don't panic. Then nothing, a long dark stretch of nothing, until this room and this sunlight and the distinct, highly distracting smell of him still clinging to the pillow beside my head: cedar, expensive sandalwood, and that subtle, skin-warmed musk I had spent five years pretendin
Última atualização: 2026-09-04
Chapter: 7 Camila'S POV CAM CAM-.- The first thing I understood was total, blaring chaos. My head felt like it had been stuffed into a blender with a bag of cheap ice cubes, my wrists were throbbing in a vicious, pulse that matched the panic in my chest, and my throat burned as if I had just spent an afternoon dry-swallowing a handful of gravel. The ceiling above me was low, unfamiliar, and painted a flat clinical white, save for a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like an insulting middle finger pointing straight down at my life choices. I did not move. I lay completely frozen, fighting the urge to thrash, and let the room come into focus around me piece by frantic piece, using the exact grounding trick Lucía always preached when a story went completely sideways in the field. Small, dim, with a single ugly lamp burning low in the corner throwing pathetic amber shadows. A folded hospital blanket sat at the foot of the bed that nobody had bothered to use, probably becau
Última atualização: 2026-09-03
Chapter: 6 CAMILA's POV Three weeks after the maintenance building—three weeks of careful, suffocating, guilty distance that neither Tiago nor I had managed to maintain completely despite our best intentions—I stood frozen in the high press box at the Iberian Cup final. My palms were slick and clammy against the cold metal railing, a thick stack of investigative evidence heavy enough to end at least one major executive career sat securely inside my leather bag, and a threatening, blackmailing text message from an unknown number still sat unread and unanswered on my phone screen. The stadium air was heavy with the artificial ozone smell of pre-match pyrotechnics and the collective, roaring breath of sixty thousand screaming fans packed tightly into the concrete bowls around us. "You're doing that thing again where you look like you're about to throw up on international television," Lucía said, sliding into the press seat beside me and carefully adjusting her long telephoto camera lens witho
Última atualização: 2026-08-17
Chapter: 5CAMILAI was three drawers deep into locked player archives in the stadium basement when the security protocols tripped.I had used a forged security pass to get past the graveyard-shift desk, hunting for anything on Tiago Marques’s five-year-old medical logs. But before I could pull a single file, the room flooded with harsh amber emergency lighting, and a heavy magnetic lock snapped shut over the steel door with a deafening, metallic clack.Trapped.I was still yanking uselessly at the unyielding handle, cursing under my breath, when the lock suddenly sheared open under violent force. The heavy door slammed back against the concrete wall, and Tiago stood in the threshold.His chest was heaving, his dark hair messy, and his eyes were completely, undeniably transformed. Liquid, blazing gold burned in his pupils, unearthly and predator-raw under the emergency glare. He looked terrifying, magnificent, and entirely out of control."What the hell are you doing down here?" he growled. His
Última atualização: 2026-08-17
Chapter: 4TIAGO MARQUES POVCHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE ALPHA CAN'T SAYI had spent five years perfecting the disciplined, necessary art of not thinking about Mateo Serrano, and Camila Serrano had completely undone that entire foundation in exactly nine days.I sat alone at my desk above the training facility, my back to the wall of tinted glass overlooking the main pitch. Down on the grass, the first-team squad was finishing a light recovery session that I should have been leading. Instead, I was staring at the sleek glass screen of my phone, re-reading a text message from Diego Osório that made my jaw lock so hard my molars groaned under the pressure.Handled the journalist. She'll back off.I didn't believe that for a single fraction of a second. I had watched Camila Serrano navigate a hostile press room with the sharp, terrifying precision of a woman who had built her entire adult life around exactly one objective. Women like Camila did not back off because a cowardly sporting director made a v
Última atualização: 2026-08-17
Chapter: 3Camila's pov"Okay, explain to me again why we're watching five-year-old match footage at eleven at night instead of sleeping like two functional human beings," Lucía said, setting two steaming mugs of black coffee down on the cluttered desk of my rented Lisbon flat before dropping heavily into the creaky office chair beside me."Because normal people didn't just get physically hauled off their feet by a football captain who moves faster than any biological creature on this planet has a right to move.""He caught you before you took a headfirst dive down a flight of concrete stairs, Cami. That's just elite athlete reflexes.""Lucía, he crossed an entire seventy-yard pitch, dodged security, and sprinted up three flights of VIP stairs in under four seconds flat. I timed it on the official broadcast replay." I pulled up the digitized match recording on my laptop, cueing the video to the exact frame where the stand panic erupted, and hit play. "Look at him. Watch the blur of his jersey. F
Última atualização: 2026-08-17
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