He retreated to his desk, ostensibly to study, but found himself staring at a blank page. He thought of the simple joy of his disguised days in Barcelona, of walking through the Gothic Quarter with his siblings, of being just another face in the crowd.
That version of himself, the anonymous phantom, felt like a distant memory, a ghost from another life. He was now a spectacle, a commodity, a living embodiment of someone else's colossal mistake. The exhaustion was profound, a soul-deep weariness that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
He had to channel it somewhere. The next day, he was the first on the training pitch and the last to leave. He ran harder, tackled with more ferocity, and struck the ball with a venom that surprised even himself.
