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.
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Chapter: 67CHAPTER 67The morning after the hunting lodge arrived gray and strangely quiet, the kind of silence that follows violence rather than precedes it, and I sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee I didn't particularly want, my whole body still aching from a night I was fairly sure I'd be feeling in my bones for weeks. Rafael was safe, resting upstairs under Lucía's fierce, unrelenting supervision, and the relief of that should have been enough to carry the entire morning. Instead, Isadora sat across from me with an expression that told me our relief was about to be short lived."I need to explain something to you," she said, setting her reading glasses down with the particular care of a woman choosing her next words very deliberately. "And I need you to listen carefully, because I don't believe either of you has fully understood what Henrique's real strategy has been from the beginning.""I thought his strategy was war," I said. "Poison, kidnapping, warehouse attacks. I thought
Last Updated: 2026-10-20
Chapter: 66CamilaThe courtyard of the farmhouse felt too small after the open dark of the border roads. People moved around us in tight, efficient patterns. Cam’s fighters checked weapons and reloaded magazines. Someone brought water and clean cloths for Rafael’s wrists. Lucía refused to leave his side for even a second.I stood with Tiago near the main door, still turning Rafael’s warning over in my head. The enforcers had pulled back in perfect order. That was not a defeated force. That was a force that had finished its job and walked away with exactly what it came for.“He wanted a headcount,” Tiago noted quietly. The understanding sat heavy on his face. “He wanted to see who still matters enough to you and to me that we would risk crossing the border for them.”I nodded. My throat felt tight. “And now he knows.”Isadora stepped closer. The night wind pulled at the ends of her hair. “The false ceasefire. The warehouse attack. Rafael’s kidnapping. All of it was reconnaissance. He has been map
Last Updated: 2026-10-18
Chapter: 65Camila's pov--I pressed the radio hard against my ear and waited. The convoy had gone quiet in a way that made my stomach twist into a tight knot. Everyone had heard my warning about the hunting lodge. Everyone knew it was probably a trap. The only question left was whether we would still walk into it.Tiago’s voice came back over the radio hard and immediate. “We don’t turn around.” His tone left no space for argument. “Rafael doesn’t have the luxury of us turning around.”I felt the shift inside the vehicle before anyone spoke again. The urgency turned colder. More focused. Every person recalculated the odds in the space of a few seconds and still chose to keep going.Cam’s voice crackled next. “If it’s a trap, then he built it assuming we wouldn’t have Isadora with us. Let’s make sure that assumption costs him.”I swallowed and glanced at Tiago. He kept his eyes on the dark road ahead, one hand steady on the wheel, the other resting near the radio. His jaw was tight, but he did n
Last Updated: 2026-10-17
Chapter: 64CHAPTER 64The group worked with desperate speed to plan a rescue operation using Beatriz's intelligence about the hunting lodge, Cam coordinating a small, fast-moving team while Isadora worked to ensure any pack council fallout from crossing into Spanish territory again could be justified as emergency rescue rather than renewed aggression, a distinction that felt increasingly thin given how fast events were moving. Maps were spread across the kitchen table once more, the same table where we'd planned the poison shipment interception weeks ago, now carrying an urgency that felt sharper, more personal than anything that had come before it."We move within the hour," Cam said, tracing a route across the map with one finger, his earlier banter entirely gone, replaced by the brisk, focused efficiency that always emerged in him during exactly this kind of crisis. "Every hour we wait is an hour Henrique has to decide Rafael's served his purpose.""Understood," Tiago said. "Walk us through t
Last Updated: 2026-10-16
Chapter: 63CHAPTER 63Camila-I watched Lucía's composure shatter completely at the sight of the photograph, months of careful, cautious feelings for Rafael finally breaking fully into the open under the worst possible circumstances, tears streaming down her face as she stared at the image of a man she'd never quite let herself admit she loved. I felt a fierce, protective fury rise in my own chest at the realization that Henrique had targeted someone whose only crime was helping us seek justice, someone who'd had nothing to do with pack politics beyond his own quiet conscience.Tiago had found us within moments, his own expression grim as he handed over his phone, apparently unable to find words gentle enough to soften what the screen showed. There were none to find, I understood almost instantly. Some things simply didn't allow for gentleness, however desperately you wanted to offer it."How long ago," I asked, my voice tight. "Do we know how long ago this was taken?""The message came through
Last Updated: 2026-10-15
Chapter: 62CHAPTER 62I watched the footage Cam pulled up, daylight security camera recordings showing Henrique's enforcers moving with brazen, almost theatrical confidence, clearly unconcerned about human witnesses this time in a way that chilled me more than any previous attack. Whatever restraint the ceasefire represented, Henrique had now abandoned it completely and publicly, and the calculated nature of the timing, right as we were beginning to let our guard down, told me everything about how deliberately this had been planned."They didn't even wear masks," Cam said grimly, pausing the footage on a clear shot of one enforcer's face. "That's not recklessness, Tiago. That's a message. He wants us to know exactly who did this.""He wants more than that," I said, studying the frozen frame, the enforcer's expression caught somewhere between pride and challenge. "He wants it documented. He wants human authorities to have no choice but to notice, which means he's no longer worried about exposure
Last Updated: 2026-10-14
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