I had no reason to look at Luca Moretti.

I knew that much.

I also couldn't stop.

The chaotic din of ninety thousand screaming supporters had compressed into a persistent, mechanical hum through my hearing aids—a muffled background frequency I no longer had to process.

Italy 2–2 England (90')

The second Italy had realised they needed to isolate me, our offensive throughput had plummeted by sixty-seven percent. We could try to drag the match into a penalty shootout; however, historical data showed Ashby, our keeper, performed with at least thirty-three percent less efficiency under high-stress penalty conditions.

We had to close this in the next thirty minutes.

I broke into a light jog, scanning their defensive line to locate a structural break. Their central defender was standing roughly 2.4 metres wide of his designated position, but it wasn't enough to open a clear angle into the box. I glanced toward the fourth official's board at the touchline.

+5'

Three hundred and sixty seconds of stoppage time to finish it before Extra Time.

"Adams," I said, catching our captain's sleeve as he passed.

He turned, raising his eyebrows.

"Run Option C."

He nodded once, absorbing the call instantly.

I drifted away from their central defenders, acutely aware of Moretti's gaze tracking me. It created a heavy, physical weight behind my sternum, but I forced myself to ignore it. If we lost today, we would be forced into the gruelling UEFA play-off bracket in May just to earn our World Cup ticket.

At 4:45 into injury time, Adams slotted a crisp, diagonal through-ball directly into the open channel ahead of me.

I accelerated, timing my run to meet the ball perfectly in stride. But just as my boot was about to make contact, Italy's back line synchronised as if driven by a single code, stepping forward in unison a fraction of a second before the ball left Adams' foot.

The linesman's sharp whistle cut through the air. The yellow flag went straight up.

An offside trap. Calculated, precise, and completely effective.

My momentum carried me forward two useless steps before I pulled up, the opportunity evaporating in an instant.

My teammates were yelling and screaming as they strode over to hound the referee, who simply shook his head. I didn't join them.

My eyes drifted toward Luca, who was kneeling on the damp turf twenty-eight metres away, re-tying his left boot.

The instant I looked at him, his gaze snapped up. He had been tracking me since I came on. I logged it as marking. The frequency suggested otherwise.

The world stalled on a single frame.

His eyes were the exact shade of Pantone 175 I had catalogued during close proximity years ago. His hair was slightly longer, unruly curls clinging damply to his forehead. His jawline had sharpened by another twenty-three degrees, tracing a harsher angle down to the slight, familiar asymmetry of his nose- missing two degrees of alignment at the bridge. His eyelashes cast dark, downward crescents over his cheekbones even under the blinding stadium floodlights.

Even crouched, re-tying his boot, he'd angled his face up to find mine.

His shoulder-to-waist ratio had widened by roughly four percent, the royal blue Italy shirt clinging tightly to the broadened tapers of his upper back.

And then my calculation stalled.

The numbers usually stacked neatly behind my retinas, precise and predictable. But staring across the pitch, the processing loop began to lag. My internal heart rate metric flickered—162, 171, 178 bpm—completely out of sequence with my physical exertion.

The distance between us was distorting the data.

The 2.4 seconds I spent tracking him weren't tactical. They were a glitched loop, a failure to re-index. My mind was stubbornly processing a single face when it should have been reading the pitch.

He stood up, his eyes never leaving mine.

It left me breathless—a sensation I could attribute to ninety minutes of relentless sprinting, or the sharp knot in my stomach. The latter was anxiety, though I was no longer certain of its primary source: the high-stakes match, or the man standing a few metres away.

Extra Time began shortly after.

I gestured to Adams to tighten our midfield, and he nodded.

By the 116th minute, my body was logging severe lactic acid accumulation. My recovery efficiency had dropped by forty percent. But my brain kept running the algorithms, tracking every moving variable on the pitch with hyper-fixated focus.

Especially Luca.

I matched him stride for stride as Italy pressed deep into our half. I knew his mechanics better than anyone else alive. I knew the micro-shifts in his hips before he cut left. I knew the three-millisecond hesitation before he attempted a long-range pass.

When the ball was played into his feet near the edge of our penalty arc, I closed the gap instantly, positioning my frame to block his forward angle.

He was trapped.

The data insisted he had only two viable choices: reset to his backline or attempt a low-probability turn into my primary tackling radius.

Instead, Luca shifted his body weight heavily to the right, feinting a drive toward the box. I committed to the block—exactly as I had mapped his physical tendencies.

Then he executed a blind, heel-flick backward pass across his body—the exact high-risk, unscripted manoeuvre he had attempted a year ago against Italia FC at the summer friendly match- the one I had watched late at night with Po tucked under my arm.

It was an anomaly.

An irrational, uncalculable decision.

My processing stalled for half a second as the ball cut straight through the narrow space where my feet had just unanchored. The pass sliced cleanly past our central midfield, catching our entire backline flat-footed. Ricci surged into the open space Luca had cleared, collecting the ball in stride and launching a low strike into the bottom-left corner of the net.

117' Italy 3–2 England

The stadium detonated.

The digital clock ticked over in cruel, glowing red.

I stood frozen near the arc, my lungs burning with cold air, staring at the empty grass where Luca's pass had shattered my logic.

The algorithm hadn't failed because of incomplete data.

It had failed because Luca was still completely unpredictable to me.

Five minutes later, three short blasts of the referee's whistle echoed through the stadium.

Half the Italian team collapsed onto the turf in exhaustion and ecstasy. The noise vibrated straight through the soles of my boots—so loud I could feel it buzzing against the micro-receivers behind my ears.

Italy had qualified directly for the World Cup after twelve years.

Orchestrated by the one variable that still sent all my systems into total failure.

Someone on my team patted my back, another ruffling my hair in silent consolation.

I kept my gaze trained on Luca, who was currently buried under a mountain of blue shirts.

I swallowed the bitter, ashy taste of defeat.

It was my fault.

Even after scoring twice, even after mapping his movements so meticulously, I hadn't been able to stop him. Now, we would have to fight through the European play-off bracket in May to secure our spot.

As the Italian players finally untangled themselves and began wandering over to exchange polite nods and handshakes, Luca broke away from the group and walked straight toward me.

His lips were moving, saying words I failed to read over the blur of my own pulse.

He stretched out a hand.

Suddenly, I was thirteen again, sprawled on the cold grass after a brutal tackle. And he was fourteen, towering over me, saying something I couldn't read through my sweat-blurred vision.

I took his outstretched hand, giving a single, rigid nod.

His grip was firm, scalding warm. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, our hands remaining entwined a second longer than necessary. My internal temperature spiked, defying all thermodynamic logic for a body at rest.

He wasn't smiling anymore.

His gaze darkened, his tongue flicking out to wet his lower lip before he looked away, muttering something I couldn't focus on.

The air between us crackled with an intense, suffocating charge, almost making me look up to check for storm clouds.

The sky above Wembley was completely clear.

Only my judgment was clouded.

I forced myself to read his lips, but my focus drifted to the dark ink peeking out from the collar of his undersleeve and wrapping around his wrist. I forced my eyes back up to meet his as his victorious posture faltered. My stomach churned with a sudden, chaotic flutter that had nothing to do with physical exhaustion.

He took a step closer, looming over me in what might have been an intimidating gesture. The heat radiating from his body seemed to disrupt my respiration in a way I couldn't explain, making my own breathing come out in rapid, shallow gasps.

At his towering 193 centimetres, I had to crane my neck to meet his dark gaze.

"Well played," I muttered, my voice tight.

Luca took a slow step back, his hand slipping from mine in a way that left my palm feeling strangely cold. His eyes dropped to my mouth for a fleeting fraction of a second—as if he, too, were trying to read something unsaid—before he met my eyes again.

"You too," he said, his chest rising and falling in a heavy, ragged exhale.