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I grabbed Felix’s arm and pulled him past the giant, toward the locker room. His skin was hot under my fingers, still pulsing with the same high-octane energy that had driven us down the field, and he looked up at me, breathless and wide-eyed.

“You lied,” Felix whispered as we hit the steam of the showers. “You don’t have the screws.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

I pushed him against the lockers, steadying him there, and stared into his blue eyes.

“You aren’t fighting him alone anymore, Felix. You belong to me. And nobody touches my things.”

CHAPTER 23

FELIX

Adrenaline was a drug, and I was overdosing. My skin hummed. The air in my lungs felt thinner, charged with the static electricity of the brilliance we just unleashed.

We walked out of the shower row together, our cleats clicking a cadence against the concrete with my pulse keeping its own faster count underneath.

I could feel him at my shoulder the whole way, a gravitational weight I had stopped fighting. Out on the field we had been a single terrifying organism. I moved, and he was there. He cut, and the ball was already waiting. Telepathy forged in sweat.

The noise of the squad died the moment we came around the lockers. Usually the post-training room was a chaotic mix of shouting, slamming lockers, and the wet slap of towels. Today it was a cathedral. The defenders we had just dismantled sat on their benches with their heads down, stripping off their tape in sullen silence, and their eyes tracked us from the corners, the wary respect prey gives a predator that has just finished eating and might, conceivably, still be hungry.

Sylla moved his bag off the bench before I reached it. He didn’t say a word. He just cleared the space, acknowledging the hierarchy shift. Yesterday I had been a Captain losing his grip. Today I had just gutted the entire defensive line.

I sat down, my legs felt loose, liquid with the afterglow of the flow state. Leander dropped his gym bag next to mine. He didn’t ask permission, claiming the space like the cocky bastard that he was.

He sat heavily, the metal bench groaning under his density, leaned back against the lockers, and spread his legs wide, occupying as much of the room as physics allowed. Sweat dripped from his nose, tracking through the grime on his neck. He looked filthy, exhausted, but magnificent.

“Water,” he grunted, his eyes closed.

I took a bottle from my cooler and threw it hard, aiming for his face.

His hand snapped up and caught it an inch from his nose, without flinching, without opening his eyes. Then one eye cracked open, and the smirk arrived.

“Nice try, Princess.”

He drained half the bottle in one long pull, the muscles of his throat working, then lowered it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His dark eyes were heavy-lidded, dilated with the same high I was riding.

“Ninety-nine percent,” he murmured, smiling at me.

“We missed a pass in the third quadrant,” I said. “Your spacing was off by six inches.”

“And you still put it in the net.”

“I always put it in the net.”

He laughed, a rough sound that vibrated in the metal locker behind him. “Arrogant prick.”

“Sewer rat.”

The insults had no teeth left. They felt like inside jokes, a secret language spoken only by the two of us.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, and the goal played on a loop behind the lids. The chip. The way he had grabbed my neck in front of the entire Colosseum and forced my chin up. Good boy.

The shame should have been burning me alive. Instead heat sat coiled low in my gut, because I had liked it, all of it, the weight of his hand, the absolute certainty that he had me.

I opened my eyes and Anatol Getha was watching us from across the room.

His neon-green jersey was stained with mud and rubber pellets from the three times I had put him on the ground, and the baring of teeth that passed for his smile was gone, replaced by a brooding scowl. He held his goalie gloves in his hands and twisted the fabric until the seams popped.