The Football King’s Secret Heir

Giving Up

Riley’s POV

Westbrook, a city built of cold stone, grey skies, and endless rain.

When the long-distance coach finally hisses to a stop at the station, the damp chill of the air seeps straight through the soles of my worn sneakers.

I step off the bus, my fingers locked in a white-knuckled grip around the handle of my single battered suitcase. Cooperswellis entirely behind me. In my hands, I carry nothing but my grandmother’s ashes in a small, cold ceramic urn, and a heavy, dark secret locked inside my womb.

The first few weeks are a brutal, grinding lesson in survival.

Because I have no landlord references, no credit history, and no proof of steady income, finding a decent place to live is a dead end. I am forced to bounce between grimy, transient motels on the industrial edges of the city.

These are places where the floorboards creak underfoot, where the walls are paper-thin, and where the air smells perpetually of damp carpet, stale cigarettes, and cheap bleach.

Every single morning, that awful, musty smell triggers my nausea. I wake up with my throat tight, sprinting to the rust-stained bathroom to heave until my stomach muscles burn and there is nothing left to spit out but bitter yellow bile. I collapse against the cold tile floor, shivering, sweating, and entirely alone.

But the physical sickness is nothing compared to the mental torture.

No matter how far I run, and no matter which alleyway I turn down in Westbrook, I cannot escape him.

I walk past a local sports pub, and the flat-screen TVs mounted in the windows show high-definition highlights of his legendary World Cup winning goal. I stand in line at a corner shop to buy a bottle of water, and his handsome, symmetrical face stares back at me from the front page of every sports magazine on the rack. Even the radio in the cheap diners where I buy my breadcrumbs plays interviews of pundits singing his praises.

"Mateo Moretti isn't just a generational talent," the radio hosts gush, their voices booming through the static. "He’s a class act. A true gentleman of the sport who stays out of trouble, contributes millions to youth foundations, and represents the absolute best of us. He’s never done a foot wrong."

Every time those words reach my ears, a violent, suffocating wave of bitterness and physical pain slams into my chest.

A class act. A gentleman.

These people don't see him towering over a terrified, weeping girl in a penthouse suite. They don't know about the bruising grip on my wrists, or how he threw a stack of blood money at my bare shoulders before calling me a pathetic, scheming leech. They don't know the cruel, arrogant monster behind the golden boy facade.

I hate him with a ferocity that makes my blood run hot. And even worse, I hate myself. I hate that every single night, in the dark of my miserable motel room, I am forced to look at the thick envelope of cash hidden in the lining of my suitcase.

It is the only reason I have a roof over my head. It is the only reason I can buy food. His utter contempt is literally keeping me alive, and that realization makes me want to claw my own skin off.

Desperate to stop relying on his money, I spend my afternoons searching the grey streets for work. But my growing fatigue and constant morning sickness make it incredibly obvious that I can't handle a demanding job.

I eventually manage to land a few cash-in-hand shifts at a small, cluttered bakery on a quiet corner of the district. The owner, a busy older woman named Mrs. Gable, who doesn't care about paper trails as long as the heavy flour sacks are stacked, lets me sweep the floors, wash the giant metal mixing bowls, and wipe down the counters.

But by the end of the first week, my body is screaming.

My back aches constantly, my hands are raw and red from the scalding dishwater, and my head spins every time I bend over to pick up a dropped broom. I sit on the edge of the sagging motel bed, staring blankly at the stained wallpaper, a cold, harsh reality finally breaking through my denial.

I am twenty years old. I have no mother—she abandoned me the second I was born, leaving me like a piece of unwanted baggage. I have no father—he packed his bags and walked out on us when I was just three years old, leaving my grandmother and me to drown in bills.

I barely managed to finish high school because I was working grueling night shifts at a grocery store just to keep the lights on in our apartment. I never had friends. I never had a prom. I never had a life.

And now, the only person who ever loved me is a pile of ashes sitting in a ceramic jar on a cheap motel vanity.

Suddenly, the math of my existence hits me like a physical blow to the sternum.

I look down at my flat belly, my hand trembling as I press it against my shirt. The realization is a sickening, suffocating horror. The day I got pregnant—the night Mateo Moretti took my innocence and shattered my pride in that penthouse—was the exact same day my grandmother's heart gave out.

The womb that is supposed to hold new life is carrying a child conceived in the very shadow of my grandmother’s death.

The two moments are forever fused together in my mind. The night I lost my only anchor is the night I was cursed with the blood of the man who ruined me.

It feels like a sick joke played by a cruel universe. It is a twisted, overlapping timeline of tragedy, and it makes the child growing inside me feel less like a miracle and more like a permanent extension of my worst nightmare.

I sit on the edge of the motel bed staring at the peeling wallpaper. Minutes pass. Maybe hours. I don't know.

The room feels strangely quiet. I keep waiting for myself to cry.

Nothing happens.

How can I bring a baby into this bleak, miserable existence? How can I raise a child when I can barely afford to feed myself? If I keep this baby, I will be tethered to Mateo Moretti for the rest of my life. Even if he never knows, his ghost will stand in every room I occupy. I might see his dark eyes, his stubborn jaw, and his arrogant shadow in the features of my own child.

I think about the river at the edge of Westbrook. I think about the dark, rushing water beneath the suspension bridge, and how incredibly easy it would be to just step off the ledge. If I jump, the pain stops. If I jump, I can finally be with my grandmother. I wouldn't have to fight anymore. I wouldn't have to scrub floors, or smell stale bleach, or carry the weight of a billionaire's unwanted child.

A strange, hollow peace washes over me.

I stand up from the bed and walk over to the mirror, staring at my hollow cheeks and swollen eyes. If I am going to end this, I need to clean the slate first.

I am going to walk down to the community women's clinic. I am going to terminate the pregnancy, erase the last remaining link to Mateo, and if the procedure goes wrong... if I bleed out on that table... then so be it. It would be an easier escape than jumping off a bridge. I don't care about the risks. I don't care about my future. I don't care about anything anymore.

With numb, steady fingers, I grab my worn coat and pull it over my shoulders. I don't look back at the room. I don't look at my grandmother's urn.

I step out of the motel door and straight into the pouring rain.

The icy deluge hits me instantly, soaking through my thin, worn coat and plastering my dark hair to my face. I don’t have an umbrella. I don't even have a hood to pull over my head. The cold water runs down my neck, shivering violently through my bones, but I barely feel it. I am too numb. My boots splash heavily against the flooded asphalt as I walk down the empty, grey street.

Halfway down the block, the biting cold triggers a memory so sharp it makes my chest ache.

I remember the rainy winter days in Cooperswell, when I would come home from school completely drenched. Gran would always be waiting at the door with a thick, warm towel and a hot mug of cheap tea. She would scold me gently, her eyes full of nothing but love, wrapping a dry scarf around my neck and telling me that as long as we had each other, the storm outside couldn't touch us.

“You are my strong girl, Riley,” her voice echoes in my head, so clear it feels like she’s walking right beside me in the downpour. “You can weather anything.”

I stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk, my vision blurring with a mixture of heavy rain and hot, stinging tears. I look up at the dark, weeping sky, my shoulders trembling as I clutch my stomach through my soaked jacket.

Gran, I don’t know how to keep going anymore.

No voice answers me. Only the heavy, rhythmic drumming of the rain against the concrete.

With a hollow, breaking heart, I lower my head, tuck my chin into my wet collar, and force my frozen feet to keep moving toward the clinic.