Page 178 of The Striker (Gods of the Game 1)
“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. “Ifanyof 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.
Icouldstay 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—onename—scratched into the side of my favorite vintage Jaguar.
Judas.
CHAPTER 45
ASHER
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. TheJudasscratched 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 meJudasconsistently, 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 toourtraining grounds and vandalizedourproperty 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 theworld—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.