The Striker's Forbidden Love

Chapter Six: What the Camera Caught

Daniel closed the office door behind them, and the click of the latch sounded louder than it had any right to.

"You're scaring me." Mia said, only half joking now, dropping her bag by the chair she didn't sit in.

"Just say it."

"Someone sent me a photo." Daniel said, no preamble, no easing into it. "From Monday's practice. You and I, during the crossing drill."

Mia's stomach dropped clean through the floor.

"Let me guess." She said, voice flat, already reaching for her own phone like it might somehow prove something. "Grainy. Zoomed in too far. Caption asking if this is normal."

Daniel's eyebrows went up. "You've seen it."

"I've seen one like it. Mine came with different words attached." Mia said, and pulled up the message on her screen, turning it toward him without letting herself think too hard about what she was doing. "Two accounts now. Both blocked. Both apparently unbothered by being blocked."

Daniel took the phone, read it, jaw tightening in a way Mia hadn't seen from him before, not the controlled irritation of a coach correcting a mistake, something sharper, more personal.

"When did this start?" He asked, handing the phone back like it had burned him a little.

"The night of the tie. The first one came right after I left here." Mia said. "I thought it was nothing. A weird coincidence. Some troll is bored enough to zoom in on a random practice."

"It's not a coincidence." Daniel said, voice low.

"Whoever sent mine used the club's internal staff directory to find my email. That's not random.

That's someone who has access to things a random troll wouldn't have."

Mia felt the floor tilt slightly, the way it did right before a bad tackle, that half-second of knowing something was about to hurt before it actually did.

"How many messages have you gotten?" Mia asked.

"Two. One with the photo, one just now, ten minutes before I texted you." Daniel said, pulling out his own phone and turning the screen toward her. "Same handle both times, apparently. No name, no followers, made specifically for this."

"Mine keeps making new accounts every time I block one." Mia said, scrolling back through the mess of blocked and reappeared usernames on her own phone, feeling faintly sick at how organized it all looked laid out like that. "Whoever this is, they're not giving up easily."

"Someone on staff?" She asked. "Or someone on the team?"

"I don't know yet." Daniel said. "I intend to find out."

"How?"

"Carefully." He said, and something about the flatness of the word made it land harder than if he'd shouted it. "Because if I go asking the wrong questions to the wrong people, all I do is confirm there's something worth asking about. Right now this is undeniable. The second I start acting like it's not, I hand them exactly what they're fishing for."

"So we just... wait?" Mia asked, arms crossed now, unable to sit still with the idea of doing nothing.

"We wait smart." Daniel said. "Which isn't the same thing as doing nothing. I'm already thinking about who had access to that practice footage angle, who was even at the ground Monday morning. It's a shorter list than you'd think."

Mia sat down finally, legs suddenly unwilling to hold her up through the rest of this conversation.

"So what do we do?"

We. The word left her mouth before she'd fully decided to use it, and she watched Daniel notice it too a small flicker crossing his face, there and gone so fast she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it.

"We stop giving them anything to photograph." Daniel said, sitting on the edge of his desk, putting professional distance between them that felt, for the first time, deliberate rather than natural. "No more late film sessions, just the two of us. No more one-on-one corrections where I stand closer than I would with anyone else on the roster."

"You don't stand closer to me." Mia said, too fast, too defensive.

Daniel gave her a look. "Torres."

"Okay. Maybe a little." Mia admitted, heat crawling up her neck. "But that's because I need more corrections than everyone else, apparently. According to you."

"That's not why." Daniel said, quiet, and then seemed to catch himself, like the words had gotten out ahead of the rest of him. "I mean it's part of why. That's not the whole reason."

The office went very quiet.

"What's the rest of the reason?" Mia asked, because apparently she'd lost every ounce of self-preservation she used to have, apparently she needed to know the answer more than she needed to protect herself from it.

Daniel didn't answer right away. He looked at her for a long moment, long enough that Mia's pulse climbed somewhere it had no business climbing, long enough that the careful professional distance between them stopped feeling like distance at all.

"You're the best player on this roster." He said finally, choosing each word like it cost him something. "And I find myself paying more attention to you than that alone should require. That's the honest answer, Torres. I don't have a cleaner one."

Mia's breath caught somewhere in her chest and refused to move.

"Oh." She said, which was, admittedly, not her best material.

"Yeah." Daniel said, dry, almost rueful. "Oh."

"That's a problem." Mia said, because someone needed to say it, because the whole conversation was teetering on the edge of something neither of them could afford, and one of them needed to be the adult about it even if neither of them particularly wanted the job.

"It's an enormous problem." Daniel agreed.

"Which is exactly why we're going to be smart about it. No exceptions. No late sessions.

Professional distance, starting now."

"Starting now." Mia repeated, and hated how much she didn't want to agree to it.

"Starting now." Daniel said again, firmer, like saying it twice might make it stick better than saying it once.

Mia stood, grabbed her bag, headed for the door because staying in that room one more second felt like standing too close to a ledge she genuinely didn't trust herself around. She had her hand on the handle when Daniel spoke again, quieter now.

"Torres."

She turned. "Yeah?"

"For what it's worth you didn't do anything wrong. Whoever's sending these, whatever they think they saw. You didn't do anything wrong." He said, and it landed somewhere unexpectedly tender in her chest, gentler than anything he'd said to her all week.

"Neither did you." Mia said, and meant it, and left before either of them could say anything else that made professional distance feel like an even worse idea than it already did.

She made it exactly to the parking lot before her phone buzzed again.

Same account. New message. This one didn't come with a photo.

Careful. I'm not the only one watching.

Mia read it twice, three times, the words refusing to arrange themselves into anything that made sense. Not the only one watching. Meaning what meaning someone else knew. Meaning someone else was close enough, connected enough, invested enough to be counted among whoever was doing this.

She stood there in the empty lot, phone gripped tight, the evening gone fully dark around her, streetlight flickering overhead the way it always did like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to work tonight. Her hands had gone cold, and it wasn't from the temperature.

She thought about Sofia's face at the water table, the flicker of something unreadable right before she'd looked away. She thought about the other players she'd shared a locker room with for two years, running through each of them in her head like a lineup card, trying to find one face that made sense as the person behind all this, and coming up with nothing solid enough to trust.

Her phone buzzed one more time before she could finish the thought, and this message came with an attachment not a photo this time.

A video.