1

CAMILA’s POV

Five years to the exact day since I watched my younger brother collapse on a rain-slicked football pitch in Lisbon, I was standing on that exact same pitch’s press balcony wearing a heavy laminated pass that claimed I belonged there.

Below me, sixty thousand seats were filling with a roaring ocean of red and white. The afternoon air smelled of roasted chestnuts, stale beer, and damp lawn turf. It was the kind of crisp, electrified atmosphere that used to make my pulse race with excitement back when I was just Mateo’s fiercely protective big sister, sitting in the family section with a thermos of lukewarm coffee and a heart full of terrifyingly huge dreams for him.

Now, five years of calculated grief had turned my blood into something sharp, cold, and meticulously patient.

"You okay?" Lucía asked, her heavy telephoto camera already glued to her face. She was scanning the lower bowl with the rapid, practiced efficiency of a woman who could spot a celebrity, a stray flashbulb, or a security breach in three seconds flat.

"I'm fine."

"You've said 'fine' four times since we cleared the media turnstiles, Cami. That’s not actually the same as being fine, you know. That’s the tone you use right before you set a room on fire."

"It's the closest thing to fine I've got in the budget today." I tightened my grip on the icy metal railing of the balcony, my knuckles turning stark white.

Down on the grass, the starting eleven for Clube Atlântico trotted out from the dark, cavernous mouth of the tunnel for their pre-match warmups. The stadium erupted into a deafening wall of noise. Massive, high-resolution screens hanging above the center circle flashed a black-and-white portrait of Mateo at eighteen years old, smiling his goofy, crooked smile. Banners bearing his jersey number were draped draped over the railings of three separate supporter sections.

It was a charity match. A memorial exhibition game to raise funds for sudden cardiac arrest screening in youth athletes. Technically, the whole thing had been my idea. I’d pitched it to Clube Atlântico’s media team six months ago through an intermediary. The club’s executive board had practically salivated over it. It made them look deeply human, infinitely generous, and impeccably noble.

It also made me feel physically sick to my stomach every time I looked up at my brother's face being used as a corporate PR band-aid.

"Five years, Lucía," I murmured, my voice barely carrying over the booming stadium speakers playing the club anthem. "Five years of shouting into a void, and I'm finally standing close enough to actually dig up the dirt."

"You've been close before," Lucía reminded me gently, not lowering her lens. "You chased those fake medical board leaks in Madrid. You almost got sued by that crooked regional scout in Porto."

"Not this close," I insisted, my gaze locking onto the pitch like a sniper choosing a target. "Not embedded inside the club. Not with full, unrestricted season access to training ground records, private entry logs, medical files, and a team captain who has to answer my questions on camera whether he wants to or not."

I found him easily. Even from eighty feet up in the press box, amid a squad composed entirely of elite, world-class athletes, Tiago Marques was impossible to miss.

He moved through the crowd of six-foot-two defenders with an unsettling, predatory fluid grace, as if the physical laws of gravity and momentum applied to him a little differently than they did to everyone else. Broad-shouldered, lean, and intensely imposing, he wore the captain’s armband like an ancient iron crown. He was thirty years old, built like a Greek marble statue carved for war, and commanded the pitch without uttering a single loud word.

"Look at him," I whispered, the hatred that had sustained me for half a decade flaring hot in my chest. "He's the last man who touched Mateo before he hit the grass. He was right there. He knelt over him. And then he vanished into a locker room, refused every single interview request for five years, and let the club legal team clamp a vice grip on the autopsy narrative. Five years of absolute, total silence, Lucía. That’s not grief. That’s a man guarding a corpse he helped put in the ground."

"Or," Lucía countered, her tone pragmatic as she snapped a quick burst of shots toward the bench, "it's a man who carries the deep, fucked-up psychological trauma of watching an eighteen-year-old kid die right in front of him. Some men don't do grief in front of microphoned press conferences, Cami. Some men just turn into granite."

"Granite doesn't have a medical report that magically changed its official cause of death twice in the first forty-eight hours," I snapped back softly. "First it was acute heatstroke. Then it was an undetected genetic heart flaw. Then the original toxicologist quietly resigned and moved to a private clinic in Marbella."

Lucía didn't have an answer for that. She knew the timeline of my paranoia by heart. She was the one who had stayed up with me until three in the morning three years ago, drinking cheap wine while we cross-referenced official coroner timestamps against club travel receipts.

Down on the field, the referee blew the ceremonial whistle to clear the pitch for kickoff. The match started exactly on schedule at four o'clock.

For eleven whole minutes, the world was deceptively, beautifully normal. It was just top-tier European football. The ball zipped across the damp, manicured grass with crisp, rhythmic snaps. The crowd chanted, clapped, and sang in unison. The afternoon sun broke through the gray Lisbon clouds, warming the back of my neck. For a brief, floating moment, I almost forgot that my entire presence here was a Trojan horse built on a lie.

Then, the world shattered.

It started in the lower tier of the North Stand, the section directly behind the visiting team's goal. A sudden, sharp scream punctured the stadium noise. It wasn't the collective gasp of a missed goal or the furious howl of a bad referee call. It was raw, unadulterated terror.

"What the hell?" Lucía muttered, her camera immediately swinging away from the ball.

I leaned over the brass press railing. "Fight in the ultras section? A flare?"

"No," Lucía breathed, her fingers twisting the focal ring of her massive lens. "They're not fighting each other. They're... they're jumping over the seats. They're trying to get out."

The panic spread with terrifying, unnatural speed. It didn't trickle this time around, it swept through three thousand spectators in a blind, violent wave. People were abandoning their beer cups, knocking over food trays, and shoving past one another to reach the narrow concourse arches.

And then, cutting straight through the echoing screams of thousands of terrified humans, came the sound.

It was low, resonant, and so deep it didn't just register in my ears—it vibrated straight through the concrete floor of the press box and rattled my teeth inside my skull. It was a guttural, roaring snarl, heavy with a dangerous, primal resonance that didn't belong to any animal I had ever heard in a zoo. It sounded like a starving lion amplified through a stadium subwoofer, threaded with an unnatural, metallic frequency that made the hair on my arms stand straight up.

"What in God's name is that?" Lucía gasped, her face draining of color as she stared through her viewfinder. "Cami, tell me the stadium audio system is glitching."

"I... I don't know," I stammered, my instinct as a journalist fighting against a sudden, icy knot of instinctual fear in my gut.

Down on the pitch, play had completely disintegrated. The referee stood froze in the center circle with his whistle dangling uselessly from his lips. The visiting players were backing away toward the technical areas in total confusion.

I locked my eyes on Tiago.

He hadn't flinched. He hadn't ducked. While every other player on the pitch was looking around in chaotic, bewildered panic, Tiago’s head had snapped toward the North Stand with a terrifying, mechanical speed. His body went impossibly rigid. His jaw was clenched so hard I could see the sharp, angular line of his muscle flexing from fifty yards away. His posture didn't read as fear, or shock, or even professional concern.

It read as immediate, lethal recognition.

"We need to move," Lucía said, her voice dropping all its easy warmth as she grabbed my jacket sleeve with a iron grip. "Camila. Now. That crowd is going to spill into the press corridors in ten seconds."