Chapter 7 Ghosts and Strategy

The phone screen went dark in my palm.

Inside my chest, something violent fractured. Heat surged through my veins, hot and metallic, threatening to break out of my skin. Lorenzo. And Elena—my own sister, taking money to track my movements like a dog. The sheer, suffocating betrayal hit harder than any physical impact I’d ever taken on the court.

My phone buzzed again in my hand. A second text from Rodriguez.

"Don't fly off the handle, capitana. I see the read receipts. Finish your session with Marco. Do not give him or anyone else a reason to think you're spiraling. Meet me at the studio after practice. We handle this together."

I forced a deep, ragged breath through my nose, forcing the volcano back down into my gut, locking it behind a wall of cold stone. I shoved the phone deep into my duffel bag, zipped it shut, and walked back out onto the court.

Marco was standing by the net, adjusting a laser level mounted on the post. The moment I stepped over the line, his head turned. His dark eyes didn't miss a thing. He looked at my shoulders, tight as drawn bowstrings, and the rigid line of my jaw.

"Five minutes are up," Marco said, his voice quiet, watchful. He tossed a ball toward me with a sharp backspin. "Catch."

I snatched the ball out of the air, my hands locking around the leather with too much force.

"Take the approach," Marco ordered, pointing to the chalk lines. "Same drill."

I didn't answer. I backed up to the baseline, bounced the ball once, and launched into the four-step approach. I didn't feel the floor beneath my feet. I didn't feel the ache in my quad. All I felt was a blinding, murderous impulse to hit something until it shattered.

I planted hard—too hard. My left foot struck the wooden floor like a hammer. I launched into the air, my arm cocked back, my muscles strain-tight, and drove my palm through an imaginary ball with violent, uncontrolled force.

Thud.

I hit the floor landing wide, my left knee stiffening as I absorbed the weight. The force-plates underneath clattered under the uneven impact.

Behind Marco, the wall monitor flashed a jagged crimson. Forty-sixty distribution.

"Stop," Marco snapped, stepping directly into my path before I could reset my footing.

"I can go again," I said, my voice strained, my breath coming in shallow, heavy hitches.

"You aren't going anywhere like that," Marco said, his tone dropping into a low, dangerous frequency. He didn't look angry; he looked unnerved. His sharp eyes scanned my posture, tracking the unnatural rigidity in my neck and the tremor running down my forearms. "Five minutes ago, your mechanics were clean. Now you're jumping like a soldier stepping on a landmine. What changed, Chiara?"

"Nothing changed."

"Don't lie to me," Marco stepped closer, his shadow falling over me. Up close, his dark eyes held a razor-like intensity that seemed to peel back every layer of defense I had left. "You're holding tension in your upper body that has nothing to do with your knee. You're fighting an enemy that isn't on this court. If you hit the ball with that much blind rage, you'll tear your shoulder out before you ever fix your leg."

I clamped my mouth shut, staring at the middle button of his dark compression shirt, refusing to meet his eyes.

Marco stood there for a long, silent moment, reading the tension in the air between us. He let out a slow, measured breath, turning back toward his clipboard on the bench.

"We're done for today," he said flatly.

I blinked. "Done? I have another forty minutes on the schedule."

"You're useless to me in this state," Marco replied, picking up his tablet and shutting off the high-speed camera rig. "Go home. Ice the joint, clear whatever garbage is polluting your mind, and get eight hours of sleep."

He paused, looking over his shoulder at me, his face unreadable in the dim LED light of the gym.

"Because tomorrow morning at six, we start two-a-day full-impact training," Marco said, his voice dropping like an anvil. "You have three days to get your head right. On Thursday, you're stepping onto a live court for an unannounced scrimmage against the Varese Junior High Academy team."

My heart halted in my chest. "The Junior Academy?"

"They're hungry, they're reckless, and they don't care about your past titles," Marco said, locking his tablet screen. "It's where you started when you were fourteen, isn't it? Time to see if you can survive where it all began. Don't be late tomorrow."

Ten minutes later, I slammed the heavy door of my new studio apartment, throwing my duffel bag onto the bare concrete floor.

Rodriguez was sitting on an unpainted wooden stool near the small kitchen counter, drinking black coffee from a paper cup. He looked up, his dark eyes taking in my flushed face and white knuckles.

"You look like you want to kill someone," Rodriguez said quietly.

"I want to tear her head off," I spat, pacing the narrow length of the room. The apartment smelled of fresh paint and cold plaster. "My own sister, Rodriguez. Sitting in my house, taking money from Lorenzo’s office to report my every move."

"We don't know it's Lorenzo directly," Rodriguez said, setting his cup down. "It could be his assistants. It could be..."

"It is Lorenzo!" I swung around, my voice echoing off the bare walls. "Do you remember what he said to me in the recovery ward after the second surgery? My leg was wrapped in drainage tubes and bags of ice. I couldn't even sit up without vomiting from the morphine."

I took a sharp breath, the memory burning like acid in my throat.

"He walked into the room wearing his tailored three-piece suit, looked at the monitors, and didn't even touch my hand," I said, my voice shaking with cold rage. "He told me he couldn't cancel his dinner with Bianca’s father because 'appearances matter when a franchise is restructuring.' Then he told me to stop having emotional panic attacks because it made his investors uncomfortable. He abandoned me the second my body stopped generating value for him!"

Rodriguez didn't interrupt. He listened, his jaw tight, his hands resting on his knees.

"He thinks I'm broken," I said, leaning against the cold wall, my chest heaving. "He thinks he can buy my sister for a few hundred euros and keep tabs on me like an old asset he retired. I am going to destroy him on the court, Rodriguez. I am going to make him watch."

"Then don't waste your energy on Elena right now," Rodriguez said firmly, standing up. "She thinks she tricked you. Let her keep thinking it. Every piece of fake information you feed her is a weapon in our hands. Focus on Marco’s drills. The Junior Academy scrimmage is in three days. If you fail there, none of this revenge matters."

Thirty miles away, in the top-floor executive suite of a glass tower in Milan, Lorenzo stood by his desk, watching the city traffic crawl forty floors below.

The heavy glass door opened, and Paulo stepped inside, holding a thin leather file.

"Well?" Lorenzo asked, without turning around.

"She wasn't there, Signor Lorenzo," Paulo said nervously. "I waited outside Clinica San Siro until eleven-fifteen. No sign of her car, no sign of her agent. I checked the desk there was no appointment scheduled."

Lorenzo didn't move for a long moment. Then, slowly, he turned around, a faint, bitter smile touching his lips.

"She didn't miss it," Lorenzo said softly. "She never planned to go. She left that paper note where her sister would see it."

Paulo blinked. "You think... she knew?"

"Chiara was captain of the national team at twenty-two for a reason, Paulo," Lorenzo said, his eyes narrowing. "She doesn't make sloppy mistakes. She set a trap, and we walked right into it."

He reached for his coat hanging on the back of his chair, pulling it on and adjusting his cuffs.

"Is the driver downstairs?" Lorenzo asked.

"Yes, sir. You have dinner reservations at eight with Signorina Bianca at Il Salumaio."

"Good," Lorenzo said, picking up his car keys. "Call the restaurant and tell them we’ll need a quiet table in the back."

Paulo looked confused. "Are we dropping the search for Chiara?"

"No," Lorenzo said, stopping at the doorway, his voice dropping into a cold, dangerous register. "Chiara doesn't have the money to rent private facilities or hire top-tier specialists on her own. Someone is backing her. Someone powerful is hiding her and building her back up. I'm taking Bianca out to dinner tonight, and over wine, we are going to figureout who is helping my ex-fiancée get back on her feet."