Chapter 213: [213] "Ah! Fuck! The injury!"

The roar inside Stade Valois was concussive, a shockwave of pure jubilation that rattled the thick glass of the executive suite.

Down on the pitch, Dário Ferrão was being swallowed by a mob of his teammates, the 1-1 equalizer having successfully broken the tension that had gripped the stadium for many minutes.

Up in the box, the corporate facade of the owner had finally cracked.

Valérie Laurent, a woman who had built an entire reputation on maintaining an icy, impenetrable distance from the emotional volatility of professional sports, surrendered to the moment.

As the ball slammed into the back of the net, Valérie spun away from the view. Her eyes were filled with excitement as a genuine, unpolished smile broke unprompted across her beautiful face. Without thinking, she closed the distance between herself and the leather armchair, leaned down, and threw her arms around Luc Beaumont in a tight, celebratory embrace.

The sudden movement caught Luc off guard.

He had been leaning forward, his muscles tensed from tracking the buildup. As Valérie’s weight pressed into him, his torso shifted awkwardly against the leather cushions. To compensate for the sudden change in balance, his body instinctively sought an anchor...his right foot planted firmly against the carpet.

The grade-two bone contusion on his tibial tuberosity, which had been resting peacefully in an uninterrupted state, suddenly absorbed a large percentage of his body mass at an awkward angle.

A sharp spike of heat lanced upward from his knee.

"Ah! fuck!" Luc hissed, his hands immediately dropping to grip the armrests of the chair to push the weight back off his leg.

The curse instantly shattered the euphoria.

Valérie recoiled as if she had touched a live electrical wire. She stepped backward rapidly, her designer heels catching slightly on the carpet. The broad smile vanished from her lips, immediately replaced by a look of panicked realization at what she had jost done. She looked at her hands, then down at Luc’s braced knee, and finally up to his face.

The silence inside the executive suite returned with a deafening weight.

Valérie cleared her throat, her hands instantly moving to smooth the lapels of her charcoal blazer. She adjusted her cuffs, pulling the silk blouse straight, desperately reassembling the armor of the club owner.

"I... apologize, Beaumont," Valérie said, her voice tight, completely stripped of the raw joy from seconds prior. The awkwardness in the room was palpable. She refused to meet his eyes, staring instead at a spot on the wall just above his left shoulder. "That was entirely unprofessional. I lost my composure. Did I regress the injury?"

Luc let out a slow breath, shifting his hips back into the depths of the armchair and carefully extending his leg outward again. The sharp spike of pain was already beginning to recede, settling back into the familiar, dull throb that he could easily ignore.

"It’s fine, Valérie," Luc said, keeping his tone carefully neutral to diffuse the embarrassment hanging between them. "Just a twinge. You didn’t break anything."

"I am aware of the medical mandate for zero impact," she continued, her posture rigid, clearly mortified by her own lapse in discipline. "It will not happen again."

"It’s football," Luc replied simply, turning his attention back toward the glass overlooking the pitch. "Sometimes you celebrate. It’s allowed."

Valérie took a sip to calm herself then set her water glass down with precision, the soft click of crystal against the table was the only sound in the room that no doubt still lingered with awkwardness. She straightened her blazer one final time. Luc did not look at her.

He was already watching the Nantaise players regroup around the center circle, reading the shape they were assembling, calculating what was coming before the referee had even signalled for the restart.

His analytical mind had slid back into place for both of them, but the ghost of the moment still hovered at the edges of the room, uninvited and unavoidable.

Valérie walked back to her chair, sitting down with careful, measured movements. The dynamic had shifted back to its usual cold professionalism, but the lingering memory of the embrace remained suspended in the conditioned air of the suite.

Down on the green grass of Stade Valois, the referee blew his whistle to signal the restart.

Olympique Nantaise took the kickoff.

The away side had just watched their gritty, desperate 1-0 lead evaporate thanks to a blistering transition from a winger masquerading as a fullback. Hovering dangerously close to the relegation zone, dropping points was death. A single point away from home against the second-placed team in Ligue Alpha was a lifeline they could not afford to throw away.

They did not attempt to push the ball forward.

The Nantaise striker tapped the ball backward to his midfield, and immediately, the entire opposing squad retreated.

They didn’t just park the bus, they parked it and slashed the tires.

Nantaise dropped into a 5-4-1 formation, but the lone striker did not hover near the halfway line to offer an outlet. He retreated deep into his own half, operating just ten yards ahead of his central midfielders. The distance between the Nantaise center-backs and their most advanced player was barely twenty yards. They compressed the pitch into a tight grid, abandoning any ambition of attacking the Valois net for the remainder of the evening.

"They are locking the gates," Luc noted, leaning his elbows on his knees.

Cillian Doyle and Jose Mallorca, operating as the high double pivot for Valois, immediately recognized the shift. The two enforcers pushed aggressively into the Nantaise half, essentially operating as attacking midfielders because the opposition simply refused to contest the middle third of the pitch.

Minute sixty-two.

Hugo Blanc received a pass from Mallorca just thirty yards from the Nantaise goal. The seventeen year old looked up, his eyes scanning the penalty area.

It was a fortress of white and green shirts.

There were no open passing lanes. Every time Hugo shifted his hips to thread a ball toward Max Caster operating in the false nine space, a Nantaise midfielder stepped into the trajectory.