The ceiling was white. Aggressively white. The kind of white that hospitals use to remind you that the building itself has no opinion about whether you live or die.
Luca kept his eyes on it for a long moment before he remembered where he was.
Turin. Private ward. The smell was antiseptic and recycled air and, faintly, espresso from somewhere down the corridor. His right quad was wrapped from mid-thigh to just above the knee, a compression bandage tight enough that he could feel his pulse in the muscle belly every time his heart beat. Which was often. The pain was not sharp — it was the dull, architectural kind, the kind that lived inside the tissue and reminded you it was there every time you shifted your weight.
He shifted his weight.
It reminded him.
Antonio was in the chair by the door. His father slept the way exhausted men sleep — mouth slightly open, jacket still on, one shoe half off his foot as though he'd sat down meaning to take it off and simply ceased to exist before he could finish the task. There was a coffee cup on the floor beside him. Cold. Probably been there since three in the morning.
Luca looked at his father for a moment. Fifteen years old, and the man had aged five years in one night.
He looked away.
Rossi was at the window.
The manager stood with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him, watching the Turin morning do whatever Turin mornings did. Grey light. A crane on the skyline. The distant sound of a delivery truck reversing. He hadn't heard Luca wake up, or if he had, he was giving him the professional courtesy of pretending otherwise.
Luca pushed himself upright. The quad screamed. Not metaphorically — there was an actual hot, tearing sensation that ran from the centre of the muscle all the way up to the hip flexor, and he had to clamp his jaw shut to keep the noise inside his chest where it belonged.
The bed creaked.
Rossi turned.
He was a compact man, Rossi. Sixty-one years old, built like someone who had played defensive midfield in the lower leagues for a decade and never quite lost the posture. He had the kind of face that had seen enough football to be permanently unimpressed by almost everything. Almost.
He looked at Luca now with something that was not quite either of those things. It was closer to the expression a structural engineer might wear when he walks across a bridge he didn't design and realises, halfway across, that he doesn't fully understand why it's still standing.
"You're awake," Rossi said.
"Apparently."
"You should—" He stopped. Gestured vaguely at the pillow. "The doctor said you should keep it elevated."
"The doctor can come tell me that himself." Luca got the second pillow behind his back and settled against the headboard. The quad pulsed. He breathed through it. "What's the actual diagnosis?"
Rossi crossed to the foot of the bed. He didn't sit. Men like Rossi didn't sit in rooms where they were uncertain of their authority. "Grade One tear. Rectus femoris, right quad. The volley — the mechanics of it, the way you planted and rotated through the hip — the muscle wasn't fully recovered from the Napoli match. The physio thinks there was existing micro-damage."
"He's right. I could feel it in the warm-up."
A beat of silence.
"You could feel it," Rossi repeated.
"It was tight. Not wrong, just — tight." Luca pressed two fingers into the bandage, finding the exact centre of the ache. "I knew what it was."
"And you took the shot anyway."
"We were level in the eighty-ninth minute against Juventus with Champions League qualification on the line." He looked up at Rossi. "What would you have done?"
Rossi's jaw moved. He didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.
"Your season is over," the manager said instead. "Officially. The club doctors will file the report today. Six weeks minimum before you're cleared for any load-bearing activity, and that's if the tissue responds well to the initial phase. You won't see a training pitch before August."
"I know."
"You're fifteen."
"I'm aware."
"Luca." Rossi put both hands on the footboard of the bed and leaned in slightly. The engineer on the bridge again. "You broke your own body just to prove a point to Pirlo, didn't you."
It wasn't really a question. It had the grammar of one, but it landed like a statement that had been sitting in his chest since the final whistle.
Luca almost smiled.
"Pirlo is yesterday's problem, Mister."
"He's—"
"He's gone. He's going to Juventus or he's going to New York or he's going somewhere that isn't our problem anymore." He reached for the water glass on the bedside table. His hand was steady. He made sure of that. "We need to talk about tomorrow."
Rossi straightened. "You've been awake for approximately four minutes."
"Three. And we have a Champions League campaign to build." Luca drank half the glass. Set it down. "Sit down, Mister. This is going to take a while."
In the chair by the door, Antonio stirred but didn't wake. His shoe was still half off his foot.
Rossi pulled the visitor's chair from the corner of the room. He sat. Slowly, like a man who knew he was about to lose an argument he hadn't started yet.
"The window opens in three weeks," Luca said. "We have money. Not City money, not Madrid money, but we have money, and more importantly, we have something better than money."
"Which is?"
"We know exactly where to spend it."