The smell hit him first.
Garlic softening in olive oil, the low bubble of tomato, his mother's Tuesday sauce that meant she'd had a difficult day at school and needed the ritual of it. Gianna Ferrara cooked when she was anxious. The thicker the sauce, the worse the day.
Luca stood at the top of the stairs and listened.
Three voices. His father's, low and careful, the way Antonio spoke when he was in a room with someone whose suit cost more than his monthly wage. His mother's, quieter than usual, interjecting in small affirmations that meant she was frightened of saying the wrong thing. And the third voice — the one that didn't belong — smooth and rounded at the edges, a voice that had been professionally sanded down to inspire trust.
*Moretti.*
Luca had seen the man twice. Once outside the academy gates after a match, chatting up the Russo boy's father. Once in the car park of the sports complex in Scandicci, leaning against a German car that was slightly too new for the neighborhood. He wore suits that pulled across the shoulders. He wore a gold watch he touched too often.
He was the kind of man Marco Delgado had spent fifteen years writing warning pieces about — the local intermediary, the bridge between a confused working-class family and a system that would eat them alive if someone didn't explain the rules.
The problem was that nobody ever explained the rules.
Luca came down the stairs quietly. Not sneaking. Just not announcing himself yet.
Through the half-open kitchen door, he could see the table. His mother had put out the good cups — the white ones with the blue rim she kept in the back of the cupboard — and there was a plate of biscuits that hadn't been touched. Moretti had a leather briefcase open on the table, a single document fanned out across the wood, and a pen already uncapped. Antonio was leaning forward, elbows on the table, reading the page with the focused, slightly pained expression of a man encountering legal language for the first time.
His hand was moving toward the pen.
Luca pushed the door open and walked to the sink.
He ran the tap cold, let it run for three full seconds before filling a glass, and turned around. Moretti glanced at him — a brief, dismissive flicker, the look adults give children who've wandered into the wrong room.
"Papà," Luca said. "Put the pen down."
Antonio looked up. Something crossed his face — surprise, then a flash of embarrassment at being told what to do by his fourteen-year-old son in front of a guest. He didn't put the pen down.
Luca pulled out the empty chair at the end of the table and sat.
Moretti smiled. It was a good smile. Practiced. He'd used it a thousand times in a thousand kitchens exactly like this one, and it had worked a thousand times, and he saw no reason tonight would be different.
"Luca, yes? I've heard great things." He spread his hands slightly, inclusive, welcoming. "Why don't you let your parents and I finish our conversation, and then—"
"What is your proposed percentage of my image rights?"
Silence.
Not dramatic silence. Just the specific, functional silence of a room recalibrating.
Moretti's smile didn't drop. He was too experienced for that. But something behind it shifted, a slight recalculation, the way a card player's eyes move when the hand isn't what they expected. He looked at Antonio, then back at Luca.
"Image rights are a long way down the road, son. Right now we're just—"
"It's a standard clause in representation agreements." Luca set his water glass on the table. "You've drafted one. It's in there. I'd like to know the percentage before my father signs anything."
Gianna had stopped stirring the sauce. The kitchen was very still except for the low tick of the burner.
Moretti leaned back in his chair. He touched the watch — a reflex, a comfort gesture — and his voice shifted into something slightly harder, the patience of a man who has decided to wait out a child's interruption.
"Let the adults talk, Luca. This is a complicated—"
"Are you pushing for a four-year deal because your commission is front-loaded?"
Antonio put the pen down.
It wasn't a conscious decision, Luca could see that. His father's hand simply stopped moving, the pen resting against the document, because the question had introduced a variable Antonio hadn't known existed and the body responds to uncertainty before the mind catches up.
Moretti's jaw tightened. Just slightly. The suit jacket shifted across his shoulders as he straightened.
"That is not how representation agreements—"
"It is exactly how they work." Luca kept his voice flat. Not aggressive. Not a child trying to sound tough. Just factual, the way you'd explain the offside rule to someone who'd never watched football. "A four-year agreement on a youth stipend deal means your commission is calculated against the full contract value, paid upfront or within the first six months. You get paid once. The length of the deal is irrelevant to us. It's very relevant to you."
The biscuits sat untouched between them.
Moretti looked at him for a long moment — not the dismissive glance from before, something different now, a look with actual weight in it — and when he spoke again the smoothness was still there but it was working harder than it had been.
"Your son reads too much internet, Antonio." He laughed, easy and short. "This is what happens. They find one article, one forum post—"
"Roma's chief scout requested my medicals three weeks ago." Luca picked up his water glass. "That information is apparently not on the internet, but it is accurate. Which means my market value inside the next eighteen months is not what it is today." He set the glass down. "So why would I sign a four-year deal with Fiorentina right now? Why would I lock my value at November 2010 prices when the market hasn't finished moving?"
The sauce was bubbling. A small, steady sound.
Moretti opened his mouth. Closed it. His hand moved toward the briefcase and stopped.
"You're fourteen," he said. And for the first time the sentence wasn't a dismissal — it was almost a question, something uncertain in it, like a man who has walked into a room and found the furniture arranged in a way that doesn't make sense.
"I'm aware," Luca said.
Gianna was standing at the stove with the wooden spoon held slightly away from the pot, not stirring, not moving, watching her son the way you watch something you don't have a category for yet.
Antonio's face had gone through several things and settled on a careful blankness, the expression of a man who has decided to stop performing certainty until he understands what is happening.
Moretti began collecting the document. He did it with the controlled, deliberate movements of a man who will not be seen to rush, folding the paper along its crease, sliding it back into the briefcase, clicking the clasps with two clean, final sounds. He capped the pen. He stood.
"I think," he said, to Antonio specifically, bypassing Luca entirely now, "that your family needs some time to discuss this. My number is on the card." He touched the watch one last time. "When you're ready to have a real conversation—"
"We won't be calling," Luca said.
Moretti looked at him. Just looked. Then he picked up his briefcase, said a quiet goodnight to Gianna, who said nothing back, and walked out of the kitchen. The front door opened and closed. His footsteps crossed the gravel outside, then the German car started, and then there was nothing.
The kitchen held the three of them.
The sauce ticked. The refrigerator hummed its low, constant note.
Antonio was staring at the table where the document had been, at the small indentation the pen had left in the wood. Gianna had turned back to the stove but she wasn't cooking. She was standing there with both hands on the edge of the counter.
"Luca."
His father's voice. Quiet. Not angry. Something more unsettled than anger.
"Where did you learn those words?"
Luca had been ready for this. He'd been ready for it since the top of the stairs.
"Player biographies," he said. "Online. Totti's autobiography. Buffon's. There are forums — ex-players talking about deals they took when they were young, what they'd do differently." He shrugged, and the shrug was the most important part, making it small, making it the kind of thing a curious kid does on a laptop at night. "I had a lot of questions after Vestri came to the house."
Antonio looked at him. Gianna turned from the stove.
Neither of them said anything, and in the silence Luca could feel the thing they weren't saying — the recognition that this explanation was plausible, that it almost fit, but that it didn't quite cover the way he'd sat down at that table, the flatness in his voice, the specific and clinical precision of the three questions, the dead-eyed patience while Moretti tried to reclaim the room.
He let the silence sit. Don't oversell it. Every journalist knew that. The witness who explains too much is the witness who is lying.
"The Fiorentina offer," he said. "Fifteen hundred a month sounds like a lot. It isn't. Not if it locks us until I'm eighteen." He kept his voice level, the same tone he'd used with Moretti, because the message was the same even if the audience was different. "We counter-offer. Two years. Eight hundred a month. A written clause — not a verbal promise, a written clause — guaranteeing a pathway to the Primavera by the time I'm sixteen." He stood, picked up his water glass. "We keep the leverage. That's the only thing that matters right now. Leverage."
His father's hands were flat on the table.
His mother was looking at him with an expression he didn't have a name for. Not pride. Not fear. Something in between, the look of a person standing at the edge of something large and trying to judge the distance to the bottom.
Luca took his water and walked out of the kitchen.
The stairs were cold under his socks. In his room, he opened his laptop, pulled up the footage file he'd been building — forty minutes of Pirlo at Juventus, clipped and annotated, the geometry of his positioning in the second phase of a press, the exact angle at which he received the ball with his back foot already opening to the next pass. The weight of the kitchen was still in his chest, the specific weight of his parents' silence.
He pressed play.
The footage ran. He watched the geometry unfold, the precise, deliberate manipulation of space and time by a man who understood that the ball was always faster than the defender. He watched the weight transfers and the blind-side scanning until the tension in his chest finally dissolved, replaced by the cold, familiar comfort of tactical analysis.
He had the leverage. The contract would be signed on his terms. Now, he just had to make sure his physical body could survive whatever Fiorentina threw at him next.