Chapter 15: Silence and Screens
The door clicked shut behind him, muffling the city’s nighttime hum to a dull whisper.Demien shrugged off his jacket without ceremony, tossing it across the back of the nearest chair. The knot of his tie loosened with a sharp tug, though he left it hanging limp around his neck, forgotten. A breath left him slow and thin, the kind drawn from someone running on the last fumes of adrenaline.
The room felt heavy, quiet in a way the streets outside refused to be. Dim light from a single standing lamp threw long shadows across the bed, the desk, the half-unpacked suitcase still drooping open near the wall. Curtains swayed faintly, teasing in the cool coastal air.
Demien dropped onto the edge of the bed without thinking, hand groping for the remote buried among a scatter of match notes and empty water bottles.
The television blinked to life, volume muted, screen casting a pale glow that made the silence somehow thicker rather than lighter.
Local channel.Monaco sports coverage.Old footage from last season, looping endlessly like an afterthought.
He leaned back on his palms, half-watching without really seeing.Highlights rolled by: Morientes caught mid-laugh, signing autographs for a crowd of children near Stade Louis II’s north stand.Cut to Giuly, stiff in front of a cluster of microphones, voice clipped, defensive even as the subtitles summarized banal answers.A drone-shot sweep over the stadium, workers welding the last bits of scaffolding as the renovations neared completion months ago.
Background noise.Nothing more.
Demien’s muscles slackened, his mind floating somewhere between tactical revisions and pure blankness.For once, no mental overlay of formations ran behind his eyes.No player rotations clicked into place.No media countermeasures drafted themselves instinctively.
Just stillness.
Until a different voice cut across the static.
Sharper.Quicker.Alive.