Prologue

— The Booster Kings Bet on Her Ruin

PALOMA

Crown State University’s athletic recovery center smells like industrial bleach, peppermint muscle rub, and the metallic tang of billions of dollars at stake.

I adjust the velcro strap of the biometric monitor on Marcus’s right knee, my fingers steady despite the deafening bass thumping through the reinforced walls of the hydrotherapy room. The entire facility is a temple built of glass, steel, and Texas oil money, designed to keep twenty-one-year-old gladiators on the field until their bodies are fully depreciated assets.

"The lateral loading is completely asymmetrical, Marcus," I say, my voice clipped, trying to cut through the hum of the plunge pools. I tap the screen of my tablet, bringing up the stress heat-map I’ve been running for the last three weeks. "Your torque efficiency is down fourteen percent since the Baylor game. The micro-tears in the meniscus aren’t healing. If you take another blindside hit on Friday, the algorithmic probability of a catastrophic tear is sitting at eighty-two percent."

Marcus, a two-hundred-and-forty-pound defensive end who looks like he could snap me like a twig, just stares at the floor. He’s twenty-two, same as me, but right now he looks like a frightened kid facing a firing squad. He wipes a hand over his sweat-drenched face. "Paloma, I can’t sit. The scouts from Philadelphia are coming to the championship. If I sit, I drop to the fifth round. If I drop to the fifth, my family loses the house."

"If your knee detonates on the turf, you drop off the draft board entirely," I counter, my tone devoid of the sympathy that is currently tearing at my ribs. Empathy doesn’t fix ligaments. Math does. Data does.

I know the crushing weight of medical debt. I know what happens when a broken body is left to rot by a system that promised to take care of it. My father was a roofer who fell three stories while working on one of the mega-churches funded by the same boosters who pay for this very recovery room. The settlement was a joke. The surgeries were not. I am here, scrubbing biomechanical data in the bowels of this stadium on a half-shredded academic scholarship, solely to build a predictive model that stops what happened to my dad from happening to people like Marcus.

"I’m flagging your profile in the system," I tell him, tapping the red override button on the interface. "I’m recommending an immediate surgical consultation. No clearance for full-contact practice."

Marcus reaches out, grabbing my wrist. His grip is desperate, slick with hydro-sweat. "Don’t. Please. Knox said he’d handle the boosters. Knox said I’m fine."

The name makes the air in my lungs turn to ice. Knox Whitaker. The twenty-three-year-old golden boy of Texas football. Starting quarterback, team captain, scion of a Dallas oil dynasty, and a man who treats the Crown State campus like his personal fiefdom.

"Knox isn’t a doctor," I pull my wrist free, keeping my expression entirely blank. "He’s a quarterback whose NIL deals are larger than the GDP of a small island nation. He needs his blindside protected, Marcus. He doesn’t care if you have to walk with a cane by the time you’re thirty."

I hit submit on the tablet. The red flag attaches to Marcus’s digital file, syncing directly to the head coach’s office and the athletic director’s dashboard.

"You shouldn’t have done that, Reyes," Marcus whispers, looking past me toward the glass doors of the lab. "You really shouldn’t have done that."

I don’t turn around. I just grab my backpack, ignoring the sudden, heavy silence that has fallen over the weight room outside. I am a twenty-two-year-old Mexican-American woman in a kingdom of giants who think they are gods. If I blink, if I show fear, they will crush me.

I shoulder my bag and walk out.

KNOX

The synthetic turf of Memorial Stadium feels perfect under my cleats. It’s Friday night, the stadium is empty of fans, but the Texas heat still radiates from the ninety thousand aluminum bleachers.

I stand on the fifty-yard line, tossing a custom-stitched pigskin between my hands. The leather is perfectly worn. Everything in my life is perfectly worn, perfectly curated, perfectly bought.

In the luxury box towering high above the fifty-yard line, the lights are on. Senator Sterling and the rest of the Booster Kings are up there, drinking scotch that costs more than a semester’s tuition, looking down at me like I’m their prized racehorse. They don’t see a twenty-three-year-old man. They see a return on investment. They see the draft stock. They see the championship ring that will funnel another hundred million in alumni donations into their slush funds.

My phone vibrates in the compression pocket of my shorts. A text from the head athletic trainer.

Reyes just flagged Marcus. Red-coded his knee. She’s locked him out of practice.

A cold, heavy rage settles in the center of my chest. Paloma Reyes. The feral, hyper-focused analytics girl who walks around my facility like she owns the place, typing on her little tablet, pretending her algorithms can save people.

She doesn’t understand the ecosystem. She thinks data is power. She doesn’t realize that in Texas, money is power, and the boosters own both. Marcus needs to play. If Marcus doesn’t play, our defensive line crumbles. If the line crumbles, we lose the championship. If we lose the championship, the boosters will cut the shadow-funding that keeps half this team—including Marcus’s destitute family—afloat.

More importantly, if we lose, Senator Sterling will start asking questions about my own medical records. Questions I cannot afford him to ask.

I look up toward the massive, eighty-foot jumbotron dominating the south end zone. The tech guys from the Sigma Chi fraternity are in the control booth, running the Friday night diagnostics.

I pull out my phone and dial a number. "Turn it on," I say when the line connects.

"You sure, Cap?" the frat president asks, his voice laced with nervous excitement. "This is gonna nuke her."

"I said, turn it on."

I cut the call and wait. Above me, the massive screen flickers. The Crown State logo vanishes, replaced by a high-definition graphic designed to look exactly like a Las Vegas sportsbook interface. The neon green and red numbers glow against the darkening Texas sky, bright enough to illuminate the entire stadium.