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 because whoever dragged me down here assumed I was already circling the drain.

 

Somewhere beyond the reinforced metal door, voices were colliding in a low, urgent, overlapping disaster—none of them speaking Portuguese I could easily follow, and at least one of them not sounding entirely like language at all, more like a Rottweiler with a personal grudge and a severe throat infection.

The deafening stadium roar that had been vibrating inside my skull for what felt like centuries was gone completely. That sudden, suffocating silence frightened me a hell of a lot more than the screaming had, mostly because it meant I was now locked in a basement with a bunch of hyper-aggressive pack animals who turned into literal dogs when they got stressed out.

My brain kicked into overdrive, frantically rewinding through the wreckage of the evening. I remembered the tunnel. I remembered too many heavy hands grabbing my arms, the specific, cold animal terror of being dragged into a blind spot, and then Tiago's voice cutting through the panic like a buzzsaw, low and furious, followed by something that felt an awful lot like rolling thunder shaking the concrete beneath my sneakers.

After that? Total blackout.

Which, quite frankly, felt deeply offensive to my hard-earned investigative journalist sensibilities, because fainting like a Victorian damsel was an entirely unprofessional reaction to getting kidnapped.

A plastic chair suddenly creaked.

I turned my head an inch to the left, moving slow and careful so I wouldn't snap my own neck, and found him.

Tiago stood near the far wall, still shirtless, looking like a Greek statue that had somehow survived a brutal encounter with a garbage disposal unit. His knuckles were bone-white where he was gripping the back of a cheap plastic chair like it was the only thing keeping him upright, or perhaps the only thing keeping him from tearing the entire medical wing down to the studs.

 

Shallow claw marks tracked down his ribs in four parallel lines, angry and red, and even in the dim light of the lamp I could watch them actually closing, the skin knitting itself back together in real-time with terrifying speed. If he kept healing that fast, he was going to run out of scars to look broodingly attractive with, which felt like a missed marketing opportunity.

He hadn't noticed I was conscious. He wasn't even looking at me. His gaze was glued to the floor, locked onto a random spot just past his own bare feet, his jaw working furiously like he was chewing on a piece of old shoe leather he couldn't quite swallow.

I kept my eyes at half-mast, breathing slow and even, and let him think I was still dead to the world, mostly because interrupting a terrifying pack Alpha while he was having a full-blown existential crisis on a piece of patio furniture felt like a great way to get myself unalived.

"I don't know what I would have done," he muttered, his voice so quiet I almost lost it under the chaotic murmur of voices bleeding through the corridor. "If they'd gotten you out of that tunnel."

He wasn't talking to me. Or he was, and he was just too damn stubborn to check if my eyelids were twitching.

"I have never moved that fast in my life. Not in a match, not in a fight, not once." His hand tightened on the chair until the plastic groaned loudly, threatening to snap and completely ruin his dramatic ambiance. "I felt something in me come apart when I lost sight of you. Something I didn't even know was still in one piece to break."

I lay there with my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, certain he could hear the frantic rhythm, or at least diagnose me with an impending cardiac event.

"If anything had happened to you," he went on, his tone turning rougher as he began pacing the three feet of available floor space like a caged animal who had skipped his morning coffee, "I don't know what kind of Alpha I would have become. I don't know what kind of man." He dragged a heavy hand down his face, smearing a lovely mix of soot and sweat across his sharp cheekbone.

 

"I have spent five years telling myself you were just a complication. A problem to be managed. A journalist with a massive grudge who happened to be dangerous to my club, and I could handle both those things separately if I just kept my damn head."

He let out a short, humorless laugh that sounded like loose gravel sliding down a metal chute.

"I do not have my head anymore, Camila. I think you took it from me somewhere in that damn tunnel, and I am not entirely sure I want it back."

Something inside my chest—something I had built brick by heavy brick over five years of grief, absolute certainty, and pure, unfiltered hatred aimed squarely at this exact man—cracked right down the middle. Which was wildly inconvenient, considering how much time I had spent on that emotional architecture.

I couldn't stay playing possum after that.

I shifted, just a fraction of an inch, my fingers curling against the coarse blanket. His head snapped up instantly, gold bleeding violently back into the brown of his eyes the way it always did when whatever monster lived under his skin got too close to the surface, looking like a terrifyingly expensive mood ring with fangs.

"You heard that," he stated. It wasn't a question. It was a death sentence delivered with profound regret.

I held his gaze, my heart hammering so hard now it felt like it might actually crack a rib, which would at least save him the trouble of doing it later. "Say it again," I whispered.

He went completely rigid, staring at me like I had just offered to juggle a pair of running chainsaws.

"Say it again," I pressed, narrowing my eyes at him through the gloom, "so I know I didn't imagine it, because I take medication for stress and sometimes my hallucinations have a remarkably high production budget."

He crossed the room in two long, impossible strides. This time, when he spoke, it wasn't to the floor and it wasn't to himself; he dropped right beside the bed, kneeling on the cold concrete so his eyes were level with mine, completely tossing out any standard personal space protocols.

"I don't know what kind of man I would have become," he said, his voice dropping into something raw and entirely unguarded, "if anything had happened to you."

"That's not what I meant," I managed, my voice cracking like a cheap ceramic mug dropped on a kitchen tile.

"I know what you meant." His hand hovered near my cheek, not quite touching, like he thought I might shatter into a million jagged pieces of investigative reporting. "You want the other part."

"Yes."

"I have never moved that fast in my life," he repeated, quieter now, each word deliberate, stripping away every ounce of his usual arrogant captain swagger. "Because there was nothing left in me that could have let them take you. Nothing rational. Nothing careful. Just five years of pretending you were an enemy, breaking apart in about four seconds flat."

My throat worked overtime, desperately searching for a witty comeback that wouldn't make me sound like a teenager reading a diary. "You're supposed to be my enemy."

"I know."

"Your pack might have killed my brother."

"I know that too." His hand finally landed, warm and impossibly gentle against my jaw, his thumb tracing the line of my skin like he was memorizing an artifact he was terrified of losing, or perhaps checking to see if I was made of cake. "I have known it every single day since the funeral, and it has not stopped me wanting you for a single hour of it."

I should have pulled away. Every survival instinct I had built since Mateo died, every carefully constructed wall, every valid reason I had for hating this man and everything he stood for—including his genuinely terrible taste in underground tactical gear—screwed up their courage and told me to get away.

I didn't pull away. Mostly because my neck hurt like hell, but also because hating him was starting to feel like a full-time job I was severely underqualified for.

"Tiago."

"I'm here."

"Don't lie to me about this. Not about this. I can survive almost anything except being lied to again, or finding out you have a secret family hiding out in Lisbon."

Something in his expression shifted, turning darker and infinitely more determined all at once. "I have lied to you about a great many things, Camila. I told you I didn't care about your articles. I told you I stayed away from your apartment for your own safety. But what I feel for you has never once been a lie."

A nurse abruptly shoved through the door then, brisk and efficient, holding a clipboard like it was a riot shield, and the intense moment folded itself shut. But not before I caught it, plain and undisguised on his face for the first time since I had met him: not the practiced Alpha composure, not the smug captain charm that usually made reporters want to throw heavy objects at his head, but something raw, frightened, and completely, helplessly sincere.

The nurse checked my pulse, my pupils, and fired off rapid-fire questions in Portuguese that I answered on absolute autopilot. Meanwhile, Tiago stood at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed over his bare, half-healed chest, his eyes never once leaving my face. He was glaring at the nurse with enough lethal, protective intensity to cure a localized infection on sight. He genuinely looked like a very expensive guard dog standing over a prime rib.

"She needs rest," the nurse finally announced, gathering her papers with a sharp, annoying click of her pen. "Observation overnight. No unnecessary stress."

Tiago's mouth twitched, something dangerously close to a smirk breaking through the wreckage of the last hour. "I'll do my best," he muttered, which was rich coming from a man who was currently acting as a walking, talking stress factory.

The nurse turned on her heel and left. The heavy door clicked shut with a soft, final thud. The corridor noise dimmed back down to a dull murmur, and it was just the two of us, the ugly lamp, and the middle-finger water stain on the ceiling keeping watch over our collective poor life choices.

"They're moving you tonight," Tiago said, sitting carefully on the edge of the mattress like he expected me to object or punch him in the throat—both of which were entirely fair hypotheses. "Somewhere a hell of a lot more secure than a hospital basement. I won't let anyone else near you until I figure out exactly how they got that close to you in the first place."

"Tiago."

"Yes."

"What you said. Before I moved."

His jaw tightened, a sharp muscle ticking in his cheek. "I meant every word of it."

"I know," I whispered, staring down at the blanket where my fingers were hopelessly tangled in the cheap fabric. "That's the problem. You're supposed to be a menace, not a walking poetry anthology."

He reached out and wrapped his hand around mine, careful of the purple bruises circling my wrist, and for a long moment neither of us said another word. The silence between us wasn't empty the way silences used to be when we were just glaring at each other across conference tables. It was heavy, humming with something neither of us had a name for yet—something dangerous, inevitable, and about five years overdue.

Outside the door, the low murmur of urgent voices continued, and somewhere far above us, the stadium sat dark and quiet, holding its collective breath right along with us, waiting to see if we were actually going to deal with our massive emotional baggage or just keep standing right in the middle of the blast zone.