“I know.” Scarlett’s stubborn resilience was one of her most admirable and most worrying traits. “She’s feeling better. Still lethargic and in pain sometimes, but she’s taking the week off work to fully recover.” It’d been her idea, which gave me a measure of relief. She wasn’t pushing herself to jump straight back into work. “She has a call with Lavinia today to discuss the tabloid and showcase situations.”
The paps were staked out at RAB again, but Scarlett was most nervous about the showcase. She worried that Lavinia would pull her as the lead.
I had conflicted feelings about the issue. I wanted Scarlett to get the chance to shine, but the thought of her enduring two more months of rehearsals made me break out in a cold sweat.
There was only so much the human body could take.
“Good. I’m glad she really is feeling better.” Vincent sounded relieved. We turned the corner toward the final set of exit doors. “What about the pap situation? They’ve been hounding me too, but not as much as you two.”
“I hired a team. They’re securing our houses.” My place already had a high-tech security system, but it wouldn’t hurt to shore up its defenses. “Once they’re done, we’ll move back home.”
We couldn’t stay at a hotel forever, and Scarlett was getting antsy.
“It’ll blow over.” Vincent seemed like he was trying to convince himself more than me. “The paps have short attention spans. They’ll find a new target soon and move on. But I swear…” His face clouded. “If any of them hurts Scarlett in any way, I will fuck them up.”
“I’ll be right there with you.”
Despite our history of differences, the only thing we’d always agreed on was protecting Scarlett.
He gave a short nod of acknowledgment. “You mind if I drop by the hotel later to see her? I’ll be careful.”
Sloane wouldn’t like it. She was so serious about our lockdown she came up with a convoluted strategy to make sure the paps didn’t follow me from training to the hotel. I had to go home first, wait an hour, then sneak out back to meet Earl—who would, of course, be driving a different decoy car every time.
I could stay at my house, but that would mean leaving Scarlett alone in the hotel since her flat wasn’t as secure as mine. There was no way in hell I’d do that, so Plan Decoy it was.
“Yeah,” I said. Sloane would rip me a new one later, but Vincent was Scarlett’s brother. I wasn’t going to keep him from her. “Just make sure not to drive your bloody Lambo.”
“I won’t—what the hell?” Vincent stopped halfway through the car park. The club’s security must’ve kicked the paps out because there was no press in sight, but the players who’d left before us were gathered in a half circle around one of the parking spaces. “What are you guys looking at?”
The group’s unintelligible mutters ceased. They glanced back at us, their expressions colored with varying shades of surprise, nerves, and pity.
A few shifted uncomfortably, but no one answered. Instead, they parted, creating a clear path between us and the hunter green convertible parked in the space.
That was my car.
A mounting sense of dread hooked into my stomach.
I walked past my teammates and stopped next to the driver’s side door, where I immediately saw what they’d been gawking at.
My dread solidified into cold, hard ice because there was one word—one name—scratched into the side of my favorite vintage Jaguar.
Judas.
CHAPTER 45ASHER
Nothing brought a team together like an attack from another team.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the keyed car was Holchester’s handiwork. People might think professional footballers were above such juvenile antics, but they weren’t. The Judas scratched into the hunter green paint was proof of that.
They were the only ones with the means and motive. If the incident happened in Holchester, I would’ve been more circumspect, but in London? It couldn’t have been anyone else.
They called me Judas consistently, and they’d played Chelsea over the weekend, so they were in the city through Monday. I didn’t know how they did it without anyone noticing—unfortunately, my car had been parked in one of the CCTV cameras’ blind spots—but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they did it.
Even though it was my car, the rest of the club took it as a personal affront. Even Coach was angry, and I wasn’t his favorite person at the moment.
The fact that Holchester came to our training grounds and vandalized our property was an act of war, so we waited. We waited until they were back in town two weeks later to play against Arsenal before we confronted them.
That night, Vincent, Noah, Adil, and several other players joined me at the Angry Boar, where the Holchester team always hung out after a London match.
Mac had banned Lyle after he shoved me, so he was nowhere in sight. However, Bocci was playing billiards with another player when we arrived. The other player saw us first and nudged his captain, who straightened and turned.
A slow grin spread over Bocci’s face. “Look who it is. Donovan finally shows his face. I thought I’d have to track you down after you ran away from our last match like a coward.”
I let his taunt roll off me. Everyone in the UK—hell, everyone in the world—knew the real reason behind my absence from the Holchester match.
My relationship with Scarlett had been prime tabloid fodder for the past two weeks. Every news website, every magazine, every bloody celebrity podcast was talking about us. Scarlett could barely enter RAB without getting accosted by the paps. People were stopping her on the streets for photos, and she’d had to private her social media after it got inundated with follows and comments (not all of them pleasant). She handled the onslaught of attention as well as she could given the circumstances, but it was taking a toll on both of us.
All that to say, Bocci was full of shit when he insinuated that I was too scared to play against him. He was trying to get a rise out of me, and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“I’m not having this discussion with you here,” I said icily. I flicked my gaze at Mac, who looked like he was seconds away from kicking us out, fight or not. “Meet me outside unless you want to join Lyle in…hmm, where is he? Eating pizza alone in his hotel room, I imagine.”
Bocci narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t want to suffer Lyle’s exiled fate any more than I did. He followed me into the alley behind the pub, our teams trailing after us.
The other patrons tried and failed to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping, but I heard them buzz with excitement before we fully exited the establishment.
The minute the door shut, I grabbed Bocci by the front of his shirt and slammed him up against the wall. The other Holchester players immediately bristled and moved toward us, but my teammates blocked them.
