All Chapters of Until the Final Whistle: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

The morning briefing started at eight o'clock sharp.Evelyn had barely slept. She had spent the night in her new flat, a sleek apartment three miles from the training ground that her father had arranged without asking her. The fridge was stocked. The furniture was neutral. It felt like a hotel room someone else had paid for. Which was exactly what it was.She arrived at the media department before anyone else. The screens were still dark. The desks were empty. She stood in the silence for a moment, coffee in hand, staring at the content calendar on the wall. Match days. Press conferences. Player birthdays. A hundred pieces of content waiting to be created.You can do this, she told herself. This is what you're good at.By eight fifteen, the room was alive. Sarah stood at the front, tablet in hand, walking the team through the week's priorities. Evelyn sat near the back, taking notes, trying to ignore the fact that every screen in the room was cycling through images of the players. His

The stairwell door clicked shut.Evelyn stood in the silence. Her father's voice still pressed against her skull. Not the words. The tone. Calm. Absolute. Like a blade wrapped in velvet.Keep your relationship with Captain Moretti strictly professional.She didn't cry. She'd stopped crying over Damien Ashford when she was fifteen and he'd missed her mother's anniversary dinner for a board meeting. But her hands were shaking. She looked down at them. Pale fingers. White knuckles. The hands of a woman who'd spent five years building a life on the other side of the ocean just to walk back into a cage she thought she'd escaped.Her phone buzzed.Then buzzed again.She pulled it from her bag. Two messages. The first from Sarah.Hey! Footage from this morning looks great. The captain actually smiled in one take. Barely. I'll take it.The second message made her stomach drop.Unknown number. No name. Just four words.He knows about you.Evelyn stared at the screen. The fluorescent light abov

Evelyn checked the locks three times before she let herself sit down.The flat was silent. Too silent. The kind of silence that made every creak sound like a footstep and every shadow look like a man standing in the corner. She'd left the lights off when she came in, moving through the rooms by memory, her phone clutched in her hand like a weapon. Now she sat on the edge of her sofa, still in her damp coat, staring at the dark window.The rain had stopped. The city glowed beyond the glass, wet streets reflecting orange streetlights. She could see the training ground in the distance, the floodlights still burning, cutting through the low clouds. Somewhere in that building, Luca was probably still awake. Probably staring at the same sky. Probably thinking about the same photograph.Her phone buzzed.She flinched. The sound was too loud in the quiet room. She looked down at the screen, her chest already tight.Unknown number.The message was shorter this time. Three words.Stop digging,

EVELYN---She woke to the sound of rain and the smell of coffee that wasn't hers.For a long moment she didn't move, just lay there with the blanket twisted around her legs, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling and trying to piece together how she'd ended up here. Her flat. Her sofa. Luca's jacket still draped over the back of her chair. The memory of his mouth on hers.It came back in fragments. The fight. The tears. The way he'd kissed her like he was drowning and she was the only air left in the room. Then the quiet. The blanket. Him telling her to sleep.And she had. Like an idiot. Like a woman who hadn't spent five years building walls that crumbled the moment he touched her.She sat up. Her head ached. Her eyes were swollen. She probably looked like hell. Good. She felt like hell.Luca was standing in her kitchen, drinking from one of her mugs like he owned the place. His back was to her. Wet hair curling at the collar of a hoodie that had definitely seen better days. The hoodie w