All Chapters of The Captain I Blame For My Brother’s death, Hides his Jersey: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

CAMILA's povShe 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, expl

TIAGO MARQUES POVCHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE ALPHA CAN'T SAYI had spent five years perfecting the disciplined, necessary art of not thinking about Mateo Serrano, and Camila Serrano had completely undone that entire foundation in exactly nine days.I sat alone at my desk above the training facility, my back to the wall of tinted glass overlooking the main pitch. Down on the grass, the first-team squad was finishing a light recovery session that I should have been leading. Instead, I was staring at the sleek glass screen of my phone, re-reading a text message from Diego Osório that made my jaw lock so hard my molars groaned under the pressure.Handled the journalist. She'll back off.I didn't believe that for a single fraction of a second. I had watched Camila Serrano navigate a hostile press room with the sharp, terrifying precision of a woman who had built her entire adult life around exactly one objective. Women like Camila did not back off because a cowardly sporting director made a v

CAMILA's POV Three weeks after the maintenance building—three weeks of careful, suffocating, guilty distance that neither Tiago nor I had managed to maintain completely despite our best intentions—I stood frozen in the high press box at the Iberian Cup final. My palms were slick and clammy against the cold metal railing, a thick stack of investigative evidence heavy enough to end at least one major executive career sat securely inside my leather bag, and a threatening, blackmailing text message from an unknown number still sat unread and unanswered on my phone screen. The stadium air was heavy with the artificial ozone smell of pre-match pyrotechnics and the collective, roaring breath of sixty thousand screaming fans packed tightly into the concrete bowls around us. "You're doing that thing again where you look like you're about to throw up on international television," Lucía said, sliding into the press seat beside me and carefully adjusting her long telephoto camera lens witho

CAMILA-.-Sunlight woke me before anything else did, thin gold lines cutting through heavy linen curtains I did not recognize, falling across a bedroom I had never seen before in my life. Tasteful, spare, expensive in the understated way that screamed "multimillionaire bachelor who definitely pays a personal organizer to fluff his throw pillows." Not a hospital. Not my flat.I lay there for a full minute trying to reconstruct how I had gotten there, and came up mostly blank. A medical room beneath the stadium that smelled vaguely of disinfectant and regret. Tiago's hand calloused and impossibly warm around mine.A nurse's voice telling me to rest, which is code for we are keeping you heavily sedated so you don't panic. Then nothing, a long dark stretch of nothing, until this room and this sunlight and the distinct, highly distracting smell of him still clinging to the pillow beside my head: cedar, expensive sandalwood, and that subtle, skin-warmed musk I had spent five years pretendin

TIAGO'S POV I left Camila back at the safehouse with Cam posted rigidly outside her door like a granite gargoyle, my hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather groaned under my palms. The taste of my own unfinished sentence still sat bitter on the back of my tongue—everything in me has already chosen someone else. Brilliant. Just magnificent. I hadn't meant to say it that plainly. I had planned to give her a measured, professional, entirely unromantic warning, and had somehow, in the span of one unguarded morning, confessed more to an investigative human journalist than I had voluntarily muttered to anyone in eleven years. If I kept this up at this rate, I would be picking out matching throw pillows and a golden retriever by next Tuesday, followed swiftly by signing up for couples pottery classes. My phone hummed in the console, but I ignored it, my jaw locked so tight my back teeth ached. The council chamber sat in a deliberately unmarked building