Read Chapter 8: Home Game

The roar of the ground hit Elena before she even reached the top of the press box stairs. Forty thousand voices compressed into one animal sound, shaking the concrete under her feet. She’d covered football for eight years and still felt it in her chest every time—that chemical surge of a crowd that believed.

Tonight, West London FC needed them to believe harder than ever.

She slid into her seat between a Spanish wire reporter who smelled of garlic and an old hand from the *Mirror* who grunted in recognition. Below, the pitch glowed electric green under the floodlights. The players emerged from the tunnel, and she spotted Jack immediately—not because he was tallest, though he was, but because of the way he moved. Chin up, jaw set, scanning the stands like he was reading the temperature of the crowd before kickoff.

Their eyes never met. The distance was too great. But Elena felt the weight of the truce between them anyway, a string pulled taut across the stadium.

“Must-win, then,” the *Mirror* man said, not looking up from his phone.

“Every game’s must-win when you’re trying not to sell your best striker,” Elena replied.

He finally looked at her. “You think Foster’s going?”

“I think someone wants everyone to think he is.”

The *Mirror* man raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Elena’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She glanced down—Frank.

*I’m in the east stand, row 12. You’ll see me after. Wearing my lucky coat.*

She pocketed the phone without replying. Frank being here, at a live match, made her stomach tighten. He’d said the evidence would make her sick. He’d also said the shadowy figure from Manchester was still active. And someone had followed her home last night. She’d doubled back twice, taken three different routes, and still spotted the same dark hatchback lingering near her block.

She hadn’t told Jack about that yet. One crisis at a time.

The whistle blew. West London FC kicked off, and for ninety minutes—plus stoppage, plus the agonizing four minutes the fourth official held up—Elena forgot about money laundering and missing meetings and shadowy figures in hatchbacks. She watched the game the way she’d watched it as a girl, sitting at her father’s feet with a packet of crisps, hanging on every pass.

But it wasn’t a girl’s game tonight. It was a cage fight.

West London pressed high, and Jack was everywhere—dropping deep to collect the ball, surging forward to lead the line, screaming at his midfielders when they lost shape. Adam Foster, the prized asset everyone wanted to sell, looked distracted. Twice he lost the ball in dangerous areas. Twice Jack bailed him out with last-ditch tackles that sent the home crowd into hysterics.

Their opponents, a mid-table side with nothing to lose, grew brave. On the thirty-seventh minute, they carved West London open down the left. Their winger cut inside, and for a moment Elena saw the geometry of disaster—two defenders pulled wide, the goalie stranded, a striker unmarked at the back post.

Then Jack materialized from nowhere. A sliding tackle that took man and ball, timed so perfectly it shouldn’t have been legal. The winger went down, but the referee waved play on, and Jack was back on his feet before the crowd finished screaming, already pointing to his midfield, already reshaping the lines.

Elena wrote notes without looking at her pad. *Leadership. Everything.* She underlined it twice.

The deadlock broke in the sixty-eighth minute. A corner, swung in deep. West London’s center-back rose highest but only flicked it on—a glance, a touch, a prayer. Jack was waiting at the back post, unmarked for one full second, and that was all he needed.

He didn’t blast it. He cushioned it on his chest, let it drop, and volleyed it home with the outside of his right boot. The net rippled. The stadium exploded.

Elena was on her feet before she realized, applauding with the press box, catching herself, sitting back down with heat in her cheeks. The *Mirror* man smirked. She ignored him and watched Jack sprint toward the corner flag, slide on his knees, and punch the air three times before his teammates buried him.

The goal held. The final whistle came with West London FC up 1-0, three points banked, the wolves held at bay for one more week.

Elena filed her match copy from her phone in the corridor—game report, quotes from the manager, the requisite line about Jack Reid proving doubters wrong. By the time she finished, the press box had emptied and the stadium was humming with the post-match ritual of lights dimming and staff clearing.

Her phone buzzed.

*Mr. Ashcroft would like a word. Room 14, executive level.* It was from a number she didn’t recognize. No signature.

Elena stood still for a long moment. Ashcroft. The man Frank had showed her documents on. The man laundering money through the club while manufacturing a crisis to sell Adam Foster and blame Jack. And he wanted a word.

She should tell Jack. She’d promised him the evidence. But the summons had come directly, privately, and Elena had learned years ago in Manchester that sometimes the best place to find answers was inside the lion’s den, with the door still open.

She texted Jack: *After your presser, I need to show you something. Meet me in the players’ tunnel. Twenty minutes.* Then she walked toward the executive elevator.

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Room 14 was less a room than a glass box overlooking the pitch. Ashcroft stood at the window, back to her, watching ground staff roll the pitch after the battle. He was smaller than she’d expected—compact, silver-haired, dressed in a suit that cost more than her monthly rent but somehow still looked off-the-rack.

“Miss Marsh,” he said without turning. “Thank you for coming.”

“Your invitation was hard to refuse.”

He turned then, and his smile was perfectly calibrated—warm, self-deprecating, absolutely untrustworthy. “I imagine you have questions about my club.”

“I have questions about a lot of things.”

Ashcroft gestured to a leather chair. Elena didn’t sit. He shrugged and remained standing himself, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Jack Reid is a remarkable player,” Ashcroft said, as if commenting on the weather. “Remarkable. But difficult to manage. Do you find that at all familiar, Miss Marsh? Difficult men who are worth the trouble?”

Elena kept her face neutral. “I find that most journalists have more experience with difficult men than managers do.”

Ashcroft laughed—actually laughed, a warm, disarming sound that made Elena’s skin crawl. “I like you. I liked your work in Manchester too, before everything went sideways there. The industry did you a disservice.”

“The industry didn’t frame me,” Elena said.

A beat of silence. Ashcroft’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind his eyes sharpened. “No one believes that story anymore, Miss Marsh. Least of all me.”

“Then maybe you can tell me who does.”

The executive door opened behind them. A club staffer in a black suit leaned in, murmured something in Ashcroft’s ear. The owner nodded, then turned back to Elena with an apologetic shrug.

“Duty calls. But I want you to know—this club is going through a transition. Some of it painful. Some of it necessary. When the dust settles, I’d like you to think about who you want to be writing about. The man everyone blames but no one questions, or the man who saved the club from him.”

He walked past her toward the door, then paused. “One more thing. I know you’ve been talking to some of my staff. Be careful, Miss Marsh. Loyalty in football is a fragile thing. It breaks when you least expect it.”

The door clicked behind him.

Elena stood alone in the glass box above the empty pitch. Her phone buzzed again. Frank.

She opened the message and read it twice before the meaning fully landed.

*Found it. The money trail doesn’t stop at Ashcroft. It goes up. I’m sending you the file now. The name at the top—I was wrong about who’s running this. He’s just the front. The real one is closer to Jack than either of us guessed. Check Dr. Okafor’s employment record.*

The file attached was massive. Elena didn’t open it. She stared at the green pitch below, at the ground staff rolling the turf, at the empty seats where forty thousand people had screamed Jack Reid’s name.

Frank’s last line echoed in her skull.

*Closer to Jack than either of us guessed.*

She walked toward the players’ tunnel, where Jack would be waiting, and felt the game she thought she was playing shift beneath her feet like a pitch that had turned to mud.