2

CAMILA's pov

She was right. The panic was covering upward.

We spun away from the railing and lunged toward the narrow double doors leading to the internal press stairwell. We didn't make it two steps into the dark corridor before the surge hit us. A flood of VIP ticket holders and stadium staff, blinded by hysterical panic, came pouring down from the upper tiers to reach the ground-floor exits.

Someone slammed into Lucía, knocking her camera sideways. I reached out to steady her, but my foot caught on the lip of a concrete step. My center of gravity evaporated.

I was going down hard, right into the path of a hundred frantic, rushing boots.

This is it, my brain screamed in a millisecond of blind horror. I'm going to get trampled on the fifth anniversary.

Before my knees could hit the hard stone, a massive hand clamped around my upper arm.

The grip was devastatingly powerful, totally unyielding, and so impossibly fast that my brain couldn't process the physics of it. With a single, explosive pull, I was hauled clean off my feet, dragged out of the churning stream of bodies, and slammed backward against the cool brick wall of the emergency alcove.

A broad, solid wall of muscle stepped directly in front of me, completely shielding my body from the rushing crowd with his own massive frame.

I blinked through a haze of dizzying shock, my breath hitching in my chest.

It was Tiago.

He was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling in deep, controlled rhythms. A light sheen of sweat coated his collarbones, smelling sharply of rain, crushed grass, and a strange, spicy scent that reminded me of cedarwood and iron. He was standing so ridiculously close that my chest was nearly brushing the damp navy jersey of his kit.

"Are you hurt?" he demanded.

His voice wasn't the smooth, polished tone he used in post-match TV soundbites. It was a low, rasping rumble that felt unnervingly heavy, vibrating through the small space between us. His eyes—a deep, piercing hazel that caught the harsh fluorescent light of the hallway—did a rapid, thorough sweep of my body. It didn't feel like a medical check. It felt like an instinctual, aggressive inventory.

"I'm... I'm fine," I choked out, pressing my back flat against the brick. "What was that? What was that noise in the stands?"

"Nothing," he said immediately, his tone dropping into a flat, rigid register. "A power surge in the main speaker array. Subwoofer malfunction. It sounded worse than it was."

"A speaker malfunction?" I echoed, my sharp investigative instincts fighting through the fog of my adrenaline. "Tiago, I've covered stadium events for half a decade. Speakers blow out. They pop, they screech, they hum. They don't... they don't growl like a rabid beast."

Something dark and dangerous flickered behind his eyes—a brief, controlled flash of cold steel that made my pulse jump. He didn't offer a single word of defense. Instead, his head twitched slightly toward the crowded stairwell over my shoulder, his ears straining as if he were listening to a conversation happening three floors down.

"You're bleeding," he noticed suddenly, his gaze dropping to my right elbow.

I looked down. My jacket sleeve had pulled up during the fall, and a ugly, jagged scrape was oozing bright red blood down my forearm where I'd clipped the door frame.

"It's fine," I said automatically. "Just a scratch."

"It's not fine. It's bleeding." He said it with a strangely sharp, almost personal irritation, as if the physical presence of my blood on his stadium floor was a direct, offensive inconvenience to him.

Before I could process what he was doing, his hand reached into the pocket of his warm-up trousers. He pulled out a clean, neatly folded white cotton handkerchief and pressed it firmly against my raw skin. His fingers touched mine for a split second.

His skin was burning hot. Not warm—literally scorching, like a man running a heavy fever.

"Hold it there," he ordered, his large hand lingering over mine for a beat longer than necessary to ensure I had a firm grip on the cloth. "Firm pressure."

"I know how to treat a minor scrape, Captain, thank you," I said, trying to inject my usual cool, sardonic razor edge into my voice despite the fact that my heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

"I'm sure you do." The ghost of an amused, cynical smirk pulled at the corner of his sculpted mouth, gone so fast I thought I might have imagined it. "You're the journalist. Serrano."

My whole body went instantly, rigid stillness.

"You know my name?" I asked slowly.

"Everyone in the club media office knows your name, Miss Serrano," he replied smoothly, his eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that felt entirely too heavy for a public corridor. "You're the stubborn independent reporter who spent three months harassing our PR director until she gave you a full-season embed pass."

That was a slick, carefully prepped response. It was not, however, an answer to how the star captain of a multi-million-euro football club recognized a freelance sports journalist by face in the middle of a chaotic stadium stampede.

Before I could push the knife in and demand a real answer, Lucía stumbled into the alcove, her hair wild and her heavy camera clutched to her chest like a shield.

"Cami! Jesus Christ, there you are!" she gasped, leaning against the wall to catch her breath. She glanced at Tiago, her eyes widening in absolute shock as she registered the towering figure standing six inches from me. "They... they're evacuating everyone to the west concourse. Security is claiming it's an electrical fault in the North Stand infrastructure."

She looked between Tiago and me, her sharp photographer's mind taking in his handkerchief pressed to my arm and the charged, suffocating proximity between us. "Nobody actually believes the electrical fault story, by the way. In case anyone was wondering."

"I wasn't wondering," I said, keeping my eyes locked straight onto Tiago’s unreadable face. "I was just busy watching three thousand grown adults run for their lives from a subwoofer that apparently speaks fluent predator."

I waited for the crack. I waited for the flinch, the subtle defensive twitch in his jaw, the telltale eye shift of a man caught in a cover-up.

Tiago gave me absolutely nothing. His face remained a masterclass in stoic, professional blankness, a brick wall built over a decade of high-stakes media training.

"You should get that arm cleaned by a paramedic," he said, taking a deliberate step backward. He put a clean two feet of distance between us, as if he had suddenly remembered where we were, who I was, and how many security cameras were mounted along the ceiling. "The medical staff have set up a triage point near the west gates."

"I told you, I'm fine."

"You keep saying that," he noted, his voice dropping into a dry, quiet cadence. "I'm starting to think 'I'm fine' means the exact opposite coming from you."

I let out a soft, sharp breath that was half a laugh and half a challenge. "Careful, Captain. If I didn't know better, I'd say you were actually paying attention to me."

A shadow crossed his features—something dark, heavy, and deeply ancient that lingered for a terrifying fraction of a second before he locked it back behind his eyes.

"I pay attention to everyone who joins my club's embed program, Miss Serrano," he said flatly, his voice stripped of every drop of the strange gentleness he'd shown moments ago. "It's part of my responsibility as captain."

"Is it also part of your captain's duties to sprint across an entire pitch, dodge a stadium security detail, and haul a stranger out of a stampede before she hits the floor?"

"Considering you are currently standing on my club's property, writing a feature that will be published across the continent, yes," he answered without a single second of hesitation. "Considering the alternative was watching a human woman get trampled to death under a doorframe, also yes. I would have done the exact same thing for anyone standing in that doorway."

"Would you?" I pressed, stepping forward to close the distance he had just created.

"Yes."

I didn't believe him. Not for a single, solitary second.

Five years of obsession, five years of staring at his face on my laptop screen, five years of analyzing his every movement on field had honed my instincts into a weapon. The man standing in front of me was not an altruistic hero who saved random strangers out of the goodness of his heart. He was a man playing a very specific, very dangerous game, and every move he made was calculated.

"Thank you," I said anyway, letting the sharp edge drop from my voice just enough to be sincere. "For catching me. I would have broken a wrist."

Something in his expression broke. It was small—a tiny, involuntary widening of his eyes, a subtle softening around his mouth—as if genuine gratitude was the absolute last thing he had expected to come out of my mouth. For one long, suspended second, the stadium noise, the blaring security alarms, and the distant screaming completely faded away. There was only the cold brick wall, the smell of rain on his skin, and the suffocating weight of his gaze.

"You're welcome," he murmured, his voice so low it was almost a whisper.

Then, before I could process the sudden shift in the air, Tiago’s head snapped toward the end of the corridor.

His body went instantly rigid again. That same terrifying, razor-sharp focus from the pitch returned in an instant. Down at the far end of the hallway, past the fire doors, I heard the faint, rapid slap of heavy athletic boots sprinting toward us, accompanied by a sharp, commanding whistle.

Whatever had softened in his face didn't just vanish—it was obliterated.

"I have to go," he said, his tone clipped and absolute. "Get that arm treated properly, Miss Serrano."

He didn't wait for my response. He turned on his heel and moved toward the tunnel entrance with that same unnatural, effortless speed, cutting through the lingering crowd like a phantom.

I stood there in the drafty, concrete alcove, pressing his stark-white handkerchief against my bleeding arm. I watched his tall, imposing figure vanish into the shadows of the player tunnel, the faint scent of cedarwood and iron still lingering in the air between us.

For five years, I had held a absolute, unbreakable truth in my heart: Tiago Marques was a cold, arrogant monster who had helped destroy my brother and helped cover up his murder.

Standing in that corridor, holding his blood-stained cloth, I felt the very first, terrifying crack form in the foundation of everything I believed.