3

Camila'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. Four seconds from the center circle to the press entrance stairs. That’s not fast reflexes. That’s not a well-trained sprint. That is physically impossible for human bone and muscle structure."

Lucía leaned closer, her eyes narrowing as she watched the high-definition replay three times in a row. The easy, teasing warmth on her face slowly evaporated, replaced by a genuine, unsettling flicker of unease. "Okay... that is actually deeply weird. I'll give you that." She took a slow sip of her coffee, her brow furrowing. "So what are we actually hunting for tonight?"

"Mateo's last match. The full, unedited sixty-minute master reel. I want to go through it frame by frame, now that I know to look for whatever the hell happened in that stadium today."

I closed the broadcast file and opened a dark, heavily password-protected folder labeled M_S_05. The video loaded instantly. It was five years old, slightly grainy in the specific, muted color gradient of older digital broadcasts. On the screen, my younger brother jogged out onto that exact same Lisbon pitch, looking impossibly young, full of vibrant life, and completely oblivious to the fact that he had less than an hour left on this earth.

It never got easier to look at him. I had watched this exact sixty-four-minute sequence probably two hundred times over the past half-decade, and every single time the file loaded, it felt like an invisible hand reaching straight into my ribs, wrapping around my heart, and squeezing until I couldn't breathe.

"There," I whispered, freezing the frame at the sixty-third minute. "Right there. Look at Tiago's positioning."

Lucía squinted at the monitor. "He's just standing on the edge of the eighteen-yard box, waiting for a corner kick. He's not even involved in the play."

"He's not watching the ball, Lucía. Look at his face." I zoomed in on Tiago's profile, the pixels stretching slightly. "His eyes aren't tracking the cross. He's staring directly into the North Stand. The exact same section where that terrifying growling sound broke out today."

"Camila, he could be looking at a fan holding a banner. He could be checking the stadium clock. It could mean literally anything."

"Or it means he knew something dangerous was coming from that exact direction five years ago," I countered, rewinding the clip ten seconds and playing it back at quarter-speed. "And watch this. Sixty-four minutes and twelve seconds. Mateo drops. Look at Tiago. He's the closest player. He reaches him first. Right there—that's the only clear angle the sideline cameras ever caught of what Tiago actually did before the medical team sprinted onto the pitch."

The footage was blurry, shot from a distant telephoto camera high in the gantry, but it showed Tiago dropping to his knees over my brother's motionless body. He stayed crouched there for exactly four seconds, waving frantically with one hand to signal the team doctors, while his other hand hovered low over Mateo's chest and neck.

Something about the specific, hyper-controlled way his fingers had moved near Mateo's throat had bothered me for five solid years without my ever being able to put a name to it.

"You think he did something to him," Lucía said softly, the weight of the accusation hanging heavy in the quiet room.

"I think the official autopsy report listed cause of death as an undetected genetic heart defect, and then it quietly changed to sudden cardiac arrest, and then forty-eight hours later it was amended again to 'undetermined natural causes,'" I said, my voice razor-sharp with five years of accumulated fury. "All while the club board slammed a wall of silence over the entire facility. And I think a man who can cross an entire stadium in four seconds was the only person close enough to know what really happened to my brother."

Lucía fell silent for a long moment, staring at the frozen image of Tiago kneeling over Mateo. "Okay. Even if every single piece of your theory is true... what's the actual endgame here, Cami? You can't walk into an editor's office or a legal court and publish an investigative piece claiming a celebrity football captain possesses supernatural abilities without getting laughed straight out of every newsroom in Europe."

"I know that."

"So what's the plan?"

"The plan is I use this season embed to get close enough to find hard, undeniable proof. Medical archives. Private club entry logs. Locker room telemetry records. Anything that isn't just me sitting in a dark room at midnight building a conspiracy theory out of four seconds of grainy video."

"Close to him, you mean."

Something loaded in her tone made my head snap up. "Close to the investigation, Lucía."

"Right." She held up both hands in a dramatic gesture of mock surrender, her eyes sparkling with unbothered skepticism. "I'm just saying, you spent twenty minutes after we got back to the flat describing the exact temperature of his hands, how fast he moved, and how his shoulders felt when he pinned you against that brick wall. None of those details are strictly necessary for a wrongful death report."

"I was establishing physical and behavioral context."

"You were establishing that you think the man is ridiculously attractive," Lucía grinned, completely ignoring the death glare I shot her across the desk. "Which, let's be honest, he objectively is. The man looks like a dark romance novel cover came to life. But that's a completely separate issue from a cold-case investigation."

"It's not a cold-case murder investigation. It's an inquiry into gross club negligence and cover-ups."

"Whatever label you want to slap on it, you're allowed to notice a man is stunning while simultaneously suspecting him of hiding deep, dark secrets. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, Cami. Human emotion is messy like that."

"I don't have emotions about Tiago Marques," I stated, laying every word out flat and cold like cold steel on a table. "I have professional suspicions about Tiago Marques."

"Sure you do, babe." Lucía smirked, unzipping her heavy leather camera bag. "Speaking of weird physical anomalies... I captured something on the pitch today that you need to see. Training ground warmups, about twenty minutes before the match started. I was testing a new high-speed shutter lens and caught this by accident."

She pulled out her camera's memory card, slotted it into my laptop, and opened a RAW image file. It was a crisp, beautifully framed candid shot of Tiago standing near the corner flag, a light spray of mist falling through the stadium floodlights behind him.

At first glance, it looked like a standard sports feature photo. But then Lucía dragged her fingers across the trackpad, zooming straight in on Tiago's face.

My breath caught in my throat.

His eyes, caught at a sharp angle by the harsh overhead stadium lights, were not reflecting light the way a human eye reflects a flash. His pupils were flaring with a bright, terrifying, brilliant golden luminescence—an unearthly, liquid-gold shine that looked like a wild predator caught in a high-beam headlight.

"That's... that's not a normal lens reflection," I whispered, leaning so close to the screen my nose nearly touched the glass.

"That's exactly what I thought," Lucía said, her voice dropping all its playful humor. "I almost deleted the frame because I thought it was a digital artifact or a weird stadium lens flare. But look at the rest of the image. The stadium lights, the grass, the players in the background—none of them have that distortion. It's coming directly from inside his eyes."

I stared at that photograph for a long, breathless time. Five years of absolute, rock-solid certainty about who and what Tiago Marques was began to shift, twisting into a far stranger, far more terrifying shape.

"He isn't just hiding a secret about Mateo's death," I said slowly, my fingers tracing the glowing gold pixels of his eyes on the screen. "He's hiding something about himself. Something massive."

"Massive how?"

"I don't know yet," I said, saving the high-resolution file into an encrypted folder, my hands trembling slightly against the keyboard. "But I am going to tear this club apart until I find out."

Before Lucía could reply, my mobile phone buzzed sharply against the wooden desk between us.

An unknown number flashed on the screen.

I picked it up, pressing the speaker button out of habit rather than caution, my mind still completely consumed by the strange golden glow in the photograph. "Camila Serrano."

"Miss Serrano," a smooth, cultured voice purred through the speaker. It was deeply refined, cold, and entirely unfamiliar. "My name is Diego Osório. I am the Sporting Director at Clube Atlântico. I understand you've been asking some remarkably specific questions around our media office today concerning our team captain."

An icy wave of dread washed down my spine. I sat up straight, locking eyes with Lucía, whose smile completely vanished.

"I'm embedded with the team for a season-long feature, Mr. Osório," I said, keeping my voice perfectly steady and professional. "Standard background research on team leadership."

"Of course. Standard research." The way he drawled the words made them sound like a veiled threat wrapped in silk. "I am simply calling to offer a bit of friendly professional guidance, Miss Serrano. One media professional to another. Some stories are considerably better left unwritten. Especially stories concerning sensitive events from five years ago that this club has already, quite thoroughly, laid to rest."

"Mr. Osório, if there are inconsistencies in—"

"Have a pleasant evening, Miss Serrano. I do hope you enjoy your time with us in Lisbon."

The line went completely dead before I could fire back a single word.

I sat there in the quiet flat, staring at the dark screen of my phone, while Lucía's pale, worried face swam back into focus across the desk. A cold, heavy certainty settled over me: whoever was protecting Tiago Marques's secrets inside Clube Atlântico already knew I was coming for them—and they were already watching my every move.