9

 

The first thing I understood when I opened my eyes was that my head felt like it had been run over by a high-speed tram, my ribs felt like they were individually acquainted with a steel pipe, and the morning sunlight cutting through the heavy linen curtains was aggressively bright.

 

This was not a hospital, and it certainly wasn't my cramped, paper-strewn flat with its three-year-old IKEA sofa. This was expensive, minimalist, and smelled faintly of cedar and the kind of high-end laundry detergent that only men who don't know how to operate a washing machine can afford.

I lay there for a full minute, playing forensic detective with my own memory. A medical room beneath the stadium. Tiago's hand calloused and impossibly hot around mine, looking at me like I had personally hung the moon.

 

A nurse's voice telling me to rest, which is clinical speak for we are keeping you heavily sedated so you don't panic and try to solve a murder while leaking from three different places. Then nothing—a long, black void of nothing—until this room, this bed, and the distinct impression of his body heat still lingering on the mattress beside me.

He had carried me here.

The realization hit me with the subtlety of a freight train. He had hauled my unconscious, slightly concussed body through half the city himself rather than risk a public hospital, his own packhouse, or my flat where my underwear drawer was currently exposed to the elements. Which meant he had fireman-lifted me like a stubborn sack of potatoes, and the brutal fact that he possessed enough upper-body strength to do that without breaking a sweat was doing things to my nervous system that no self-respecting investigative journalist should ever admit to.

I was still lying there debating whether I wanted to swoon or commit arson when the front door of the apartment banged open with enough force to rattle the antique windowpanes.

"Camila Duarte, if you are not dying somewhere in this ridiculously aesthetic compound I am going to murder you myself!"

Lucía.

I was vertical and moving before I had even processed her rage, bolting down the hallway like I was fleeing a crime scene. The next several seconds dissolved into a fierce, suffocating hug that squeezed the remaining oxygen straight out of my already battered ribs.

"I'm fine," I wheezed into her shoulder, clutching blindly at her jacket. "Lucía, I swear to God I'm fine."

"You are not fine." She shoved me back to arm's length, her eyes sweeping over my pale face, my rumpled hair, and the men's designer t-shirt that definitely wasn't mine with the predatory intensity of a mother hawk. "You were kidnapped, Cami. In a concrete tunnel. During a Cup Final. On live television! Half the country watched it happen, and I found out from a stranger who called an unknown number and gave me an address like he was ordering takeaway."

"Who called you?"

"I don't know! Some man with a voice so deep it rattled my fillings. Very polite. Very unsettling. Sounded like a corporate hitman who takes his dental hygiene extremely seriously." She grabbed my elbow, steering me toward a small, sunlit kitchen table and shoving me into a chair. "Someone connected to the club, obviously. Which brings me to my actual question before I call an exorcist."

I already knew what was coming. My stomach did a slow drop straight to my ankles.

"What is going on between you and Tiago Marques?"

"Nothing."

"Camila."

"It's complicated."

"It has been complicated for five years," Lucía snapped, sitting across from me, her voice dropping into that terrifying, razor-sharp register. "This isn't your usual corporate corruption probe. This is you disappearing into a literal hellmouth and reappearing in an exclusive bachelor pad wearing a man's shirt that smells like an upscale forest, and I want a full breakdown of every single life choice that led you here before I decide how furious I'm allowed to be."

I opened my mouth to give her the safe, sanitized version—the one where Tiago had simply done his mandatory duty as club captain, where I was just an inconvenient journalist he was legally obligated to protect.

What came out instead, courtesy of my sleep-deprived brain and a nervous system that had completely mutinied, was, "I don't know if I still think he killed Mateo."

The kitchen went completely, deafeningly silent.

Lucía stared at me like I had suddenly sprouted a second head, grown a pair of ram horns, and started speaking ancient Aramaic. "You've spent five years telling everyone who would listen—including our poor local barista and three different editors—that Tiago Marques is a soul-sucking monster directly responsible for your brother's death. It is the entire reason you woke up this morning."

"I know."

"And now you've just decided that's not true because he carried you out of a basement?"

"I don't know what I think!" My hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat against the cold wood of the table to force them to stop. "I know what I believed for five years. I know I built my entire existence around avenging Mateo, around proving Tiago's guilt. And I know that somewhere in the last two weeks—mostly while he was looking at me like he wanted to punch someone or kiss me until I forgot my own name—that entire narrative started cracking down the middle. And I don't know how to hold both truths at once: that I might have been wrong about him, and that my brother is still dead either way."

Lucía reached across the table and caught my hand, her fierce anger instantly dissolving into something infinitely softer. "Cami."

"I nearly told him last night," I whispered, the admission costing me more than I wanted to admit, my throat tightening. "In that medical room under the stadium, while he was standing there looking like a heartbroken Greek god with half-healed claw marks crisscrossing his chest, I nearly told him I don't hate him anymore. And I don't know what that makes me. A traitor to Mateo's memory? Absolutely. A massive, lovesick fool? Without a doubt."

"It doesn't make you a traitor to want to stop sleeping in a war zone," Lucía said quietly, squeezing my fingers.

"Doesn't it?"

Before she could answer, a soft, deliberate knock rapped against the open doorframe, and we both snapped our heads around.

Tiago stood there. He had clearly just stepped out of a hot shower; his dark hair was still damp, curling softly at the nape of his neck, and he was dressed down in a plain grey t-shirt that clung to his broad chest and shoulders in a way that should have been classified as a weapon. He looked less like the untouchable club captain and more like a very dangerous domestic hazard who had wandered out of a romance novel.

"We need to talk," he said, his dark eyes finding mine immediately before flicking toward Lucía. "Alone, if that's alright."

Lucía looked between the two of us, back and forth, her gaze lingering on the state of my hair and the fact that I was wearing his clothes. Something in her expression shifted from protective suspicion into something dangerously close to enthusiastic approval.

"I'll be right outside," she said, gathering her bag with theatrical slowness. She paused right beside Tiago, leaned in, and delivered a stage-whisper loud enough to rattle the tiles: "Try not to break any more furniture before I get back, Captain."

Tiago didn't even blink, though a muscle ticked sharply in his jaw. He waited until the front door clicked shut before he moved, crossing the small kitchen with that lazy, predatory grace that made my palms itch. He pulled out the chair Lucía had vacated, dragging it close enough that our knees practically brushed under the table, trapping me in a perimeter of pure, suffocating heat.

"How much did you tell her?" he asked, his voice dropping into that low, rough rumble that hummed straight down my spine.

"Not enough to get either of us killed, though she's strongly considering doing it to you herself."

A ghost of a smile crossed his face, there and gone, leaving his eyes burning too brightly in the morning light. "That's something, at least."

He held my hand across the table for a long moment, his thumb rhythmically tracing my knuckles like he was trying to memorize the layout of my bones before letting go. When he withdrew his hand, something in his posture instantly snapped taut—shoulders squaring, jaw locking, bracing himself like a man voluntarily stepping into a gladiatorial arena.

"Ask me," he said.

"Ask you what?" I blinked, genuinely thrown.

"Anything. Everything." He let out a harsh breath, running a hand over his face. "I have spent two weeks giving you careful answers and calculated silences, and after last night, I do not have it in me to keep doing that." His dark eyes burned into mine. "You deserve the truth, Camila, even the parts of it that are going to make you hate me all over again."

I studied him for a long beat, weighing five years of relentless journalism against the fragile thing sitting between us. "What are you," I finally asked, keeping my voice deadpan. "Really. Not the corporate club captain version. All of it."

"Alpha," he said simply, the word carrying an ancient, heavy weight that made the small kitchen feel suddenly microscopic. "Of the Marques pack. Third generation to hold Lisbon territory, though our presence here goes back considerably further than that, woven into this city and this club longer than most people would believe."

"So the football club is a front. Are you running a local mafia or just a very aggressive sports league?"

"The football club is real," he corrected, a dry smirk touching his mouth. "The trophies are real, the sponsorships are real, and the brutal training schedules are very real. But yes, it has also always been useful cover, and convenient proximity to certain kinds of influence a pack like mine finds valuable to maintain. People love men who can kick a ball into a net; they rarely suspect them of managing supernatural territorial politics."

"How long has your pack been involved with ..with this club?"

"Since before either of our grandfathers were born." He said it plainly, watching my face for any sign of revulsion. "It is not a secret from within the pack. It has simply never needed to be a secret from the outside world either, because no one outside ever thought to look."

"Until me."

"Until you," he agreed, something dangerously close to reluctant admiration flashing in his eyes. "You were like a terrier with a particularly expensive pair of shoes. You just refused to let go."

I pressed my palms flat against the cold wood of the table, steadying myself before diving off the cliff. "Mateo. What actually happened to him."

His entire body went rigid. For a second, I thought he was going to retreat behind his glass wall again, pulling on that frosty Alpha mask.

He didn't budge.

"It was pack business," he said, his voice dropping into a register so rough it felt physical. "Gone catastrophically wrong. Not an accident, Camila. I won't insult your intelligence by calling it a simple accident. But not, directly, my doing either, though I have spent five years questioning how much of the blame still belongs to me regardless."

"What does that mean," I snapped, the defensive spike of adrenaline hitting my bloodstream. "Did your people kill my brother or not!!?"

"It means there is a shape to what happened that day that I can give you, and a name I cannot give you yet," he said, leaning forward until the air between us felt charged. "Not because I am protecting myself, but because giving you that name before you understand the danger it carries would be signing your death warrant."

"Oh, spare me the cinematic bodyguard routine," I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. "That's not your decision to make."

"I know it isn't," he said, and the sheer anguish in his voice made me flinch. "I know exactly how arrogant that sounds, coming from me, and I know every reason you have to distrust it. But I am asking you to trust me a little longer, not because I want to control your investigation, Camila, but because I have already almost lost you once this week, and I do not think I would survive doing so again."

"You don't get to use my near-death experiences as a tactical advantage to keep secrets from me!"

"I'm not using it as an argument, I'm telling you the brutal truth of why it terrifies me to give you a name I know you'll chase the second you have it." He dragged a hand through his damp hair, looking thoroughly wrecked. "Give me time. Not forever. Just enough time to make sure that when I do tell you, you're standing somewhere a pack executioner can't reach you."

I wanted to argue. Every journalistic instinct told me to push, to scream, to refuse to accept another evasion dressed up as chivalry.

Instead, watching the raw, naked fear behind his eyes, I found myself giving a slow, reluctant nod. "A little longer," I whispered, hating how soft I sounded. "Not forever."

"Thank you," he breathed, like I had just handed him a lifeline.

We sat in silence for a moment, the morning sunlight shifting across the table, until my brain decided to sabotage my peace of mind by wandering into entirely different territory.

"There's a woman," I said, pitching my voice into a tone of carefully feigned casualness that fooled absolutely no one. "The tabloids have been linking you to her for years. Beatriz Cabral."

His expression shuttered so completely and so fast it was almost violent, the warmth draining out of his face leaving behind carved stone.

"Beatriz," he repeated flatly.

"You don't have to talk about her," I added quickly, feeling a sudden, burning spike of irritation at the mention of a woman who probably owned silk pajamas and never got mud on her designer shoes.

"No," he said, his jaw working. "I think I do, actually, if we're going to stop lying to each other." He exhaled slowly, staring down at his hands. "I am bound to her by an old political pact between our packs. My grandfather and hers negotiated the arrangement before either of us was old enough to spell our own names. A strategic marriage, meant to bind Marques and Cabral territory together, to end a century of bloody border disputes."

"So you.. hmmm you're engaged," I said, my voice dropping an octave as a cold weight settled in my stomach.

"Promised," he corrected, though the distinction seemed to cost him physical effort. "The wedding date has never been formally set because I have spent the last six years finding creative excuses to delay it. I cite club commitments, pack audits, municipal zoning disputes—anything I can reasonably use to buy another month."

"Why delay it at all, if it's meant to secure your territory and keep the elders happy?"

He looked at me then, and whatever careful armor he had left finally, completely shattered. "Because I have never wanted her. Not once, not for a single day of the eleven years we have been tied to each other on paper. It was never real between us, only useful, and I have spent over a decade telling myself that usefulness was reason enough to see it through eventually."

"And now?" I asked, my voice barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator.

He reached across the table, his fingers brushing mine, pulling me in until I had nowhere left to hide. "Now," he said quietly, "I don't know how I'm supposed to marry her when everything in me has already chosen someone else."

 

Oh?

I did not move, honestly I just couldn't. I barely breathed.

 

The morning light sat still across the table, and the silence stretched out, heavy and absolute, hanging in the small kitchen like something too large, too dangerous, and entirely, terrifyingly true.