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CONTACT: PLAY ON.

Helier was on me before I could push off the boards, driving a knee into my thigh, a dead-leg strike built to cripple the muscle.

“Is that all you got, puppy?” he hissed. “You think you can brawl with the big boys?”

I headbutted him.

It was a short, vicious motion. My forehead met the bridge of his nose and the cartilage crunched, a flat sound I felt through my own skull, and Helier stumbled back with blood sheeting over his mouth and chin.

“I’m nobody’s dog,” I spat, tasting iron.

I shoved him off and turned back to the play.

The game had dissolved into anarchy. The Reserves were good, terrifyingly good, moving with a synchronization born of desperation, cutting the passing lanes and isolating our players one man at a time. Varo was on the ground clutching his knee. Sylla was limping. We were losing the war, and through all of it, every time I moved into space, the wall found me. Three black shirts, the same three, arriving before the ball did, building themselves across whatever line I was about to run.

I clocked it, and I filed it, and I kept playing, because they had forgotten about the King.

I looked downfield. Felix had the ball.

He was surrounded, three Reserve defenders closing in a triangle built to crush him, and usually Felix glided. He avoided contact. He used technique to ghost past defenders like they weren’t there.

Not tonight.

The lead defender lunged, a high shoe aimed at Felix’s chest, and Felix didn’t flinch and didn’t spin away. He dropped his shoulder, stepped into the man, drove a stiff forearm into his ribs while his cleats hooked the ankle, and the defender went down face-first into the turf.

Felix stepped over the body, gathered the ball with a touch of silk, and accelerated into the space he had just carved out of another man’s balance.

Want dragged at me from below my navel, heavier than the ache in my ribs. I had seen him perfect. I had seen him wrecked and begging on a mattress. But watching him play dirty, watching the Ice Prince throw an elbow and leave a man gasping in the dirt, ruined me. It woke a hunger that had nothing to do with the game. I wanted to grab him. I wanted to drag him into the tunnel and lick the sweat off his neck. I wanted to assist his goal and then watch him destroy the world.

“Regillen!” Felix shouted.

He cut inside, dragging the remaining two defenders with him, the gravity of the match pulling the chaos toward his feet, and I was open on the wing. The pass came the instant I knew it would come, slashed through traffic, spinning across the turf, curving around a sliding tackle and landing in my stride like it had been sewn there.

I took it.

A giant with a shaved head was sprinting the angle, and he slid studs up to take my legs out of the game, and I jumped, hurdling him with the wind of his cleats passing under my soles. I landed running on the rebuilt ankle. It took the impact without a word. It had been silent all night.

I drove the ball to the byline, forced their back line to turn and chase, ripped the structure of their defense apart with nothing but the threat of my own legs. Felix was sprinting down the middle, calling for it, his face a mask of focus, eyes locked on the net.

I crossed it, a low hard drive that skidded across the face of the goal, past the desperate lunge of a defender, past the chaos, and found him.

Felix met the ball at the penalty spot. He didn’t look for a corner, didn’t try to finesse it or chip it or make it pretty for the cameras. He put his laces through it, pure venom, straight at the center of the goal. Straight at the keeper’s face.

The keeper flinched. It was a human reflex, a missile arriving at his head. He ducked, and the ball tore past him and hit the back of the net with a sound like a whip crack, so hard it rebounded out of the goal and rolled back to the penalty spot as if it wanted to be struck again.

GOAL

ACADEMY: 1 - RESERVES: 1.

The noise of the stadium was a physical pressure wave against my eardrums, sixty thousand throats discharging at once, and Felix stood there with his chest heaving, the white uniform stained with grass and blood. He looked at the keeper, still down on his knees, and he smiled. He just discovered he enjoyed the taste of violence.

He turned to me and pointed at the ground in front of him. Here. Now.

I ran to him.

That was the mistake, nothing hidden in it. I had spent months learning to sleep with one eye open in a room the Academy paid to watch, and a childhood before that learning the first law of the cages, that the match is never over while the other man can still move, and I gave all of it away in three strides because Felix Cento pointed at a patch of turf and my body was already there. The ball was dead. My back was square to the field. My eyes were full of him.

Shadows moved at the edge of my vision. He came from my blind side, one of the three, the wall’s last man. He slid studs first, his full weight riding the front leg, and he drove his cleats down onto my rebuilt ankle.