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The winter break settled over Barcelona with the particular quiet of a city that has been running at full pace for five months and has finally been given permission to stop. The training ground closed. The league paused. The Champions League fixtures were drawn up and filed away for February. For two weeks, the urgency that had defined every week since August simply lifted.
Lorenzo noticed it as texture rather than event. The mornings were slower. The city moved differently. He had spent the last five months in the compressed rhythm of professional football — training, match, travel, recovery, training and had not quite registered how narrow that rhythm was until it opened into something wider.
Cecilia had arrived two days after the Chelsea second leg, ostensibly to spend the Christmas period in Barcelona with a school friend. She and Lucia had met before — awkwardly, briefly, at the Golden Boy ceremony. By the time Christmas Eve arrived they had apparently resolved whatever the initial awkwardness had been, because they were sitting across the restaurant table finishing each other's sentences.
"The thing is," Cecilia said, cutting into her steak, "if I'm in Barcelona three days a week I need a base. And my father has a villa sitting empty in Pedralbes that he uses twice a year."
"Your father would never allow that," Lucia said.
"My father doesn't need to know every single detail of my schedule," Cecilia countered, popping a piece of steak into her mouth.
"Cecilia, he's the Mayor of Madrid," Lucia said, dropping her voice slightly. "The man makes it his business to know everything."
"He knows the important things. A vacant villa is not important." Cecilia dismissed the warning with a wave of her fork, turning her attention to Lorenzo as he slid back into his chair, setting a fresh basket of warm bread between them. "Look, we're just solving a logistics problem here. Now, you have to decide who you're actually taking to the FIFA Gala next week."
Lorenzo set the bread down. "I'm not choosing."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have." He looked at Lucia. "I'm going to be asked about it by twelve reporters before I reach the door."
Lucia smiled, the particular smile of someone who finds the situation genuinely funny. "He'll want both of you," she said to Cecilia. "He always does."
Lorenzo gave her a look. She held it with complete composure.
"She's not wrong," Cecilia said, feeding him a piece of steak from her fork without asking. He ate it because arguing would have taken longer.
The restaurant was warm and the winter light outside was low and amber through the windows. He thought about the second half of the season laid out ahead — Copa del Rey, Champions League knockouts, the final push of La Liga, the World Cup. He had known since August that the calendar would be unrelenting. What he hadn't known was that it would feel manageable. Not easy. Manageable.
He ruffled both their hair at the same time, which produced two identical expressions of protest.
"Don't," Lucia said.
"Absolutely not," Cecilia agreed.
He put his hands back on the table.
The following morning, the air along the Seine in Paris was crisp and grey. In his office at the Parc des Princes, Leonardo sat with a file open that he had read three times already.
The Barcelona board had rejected the latest PSG offer. One hundred and fifty million euros plus a salary that no teenager in the history of the sport had been paid. Rejected — politely, formally, completely.
He stood and walked to the window.
"Mansour is offering two hundred million," the official beside him said. "If City gets there first the window closes for us."
"City is the wrong environment for what he needs at this stage of his career," Leonardo said. "Ligue 1 gives him dominance. La Liga gives him friction. He needs friction now — he's seventeen and he needs to be tested every week, not given a comfortable stage."
"He seems fairly tested in La Liga."
"He's passing every test they give him. That's the problem." Leonardo turned from the window. "The winter window is closed for this. We move in the summer. I'll speak with him in Zurich at the gala next week. Private conversation, no agents in the room. At that level a relationship matters more than a salary figure."
The official nodded, scribbling a note.
Leonardo glanced back down at the file. The pages were a blur of numbers — goals, assists, appearances, age. It was the kind of dizzying stat line that moved too fast to even process.
"He's winning the Puskás next week," Leonardo said, talking more to himself than anyone else. "And he's on the Ballon d'Or shortlist. At seventeen." He snapped the folder shut. "When he takes home his first one, just remember: PSG tried to sign him back in January 2014, and Barcelona told us no."
In the ESPN Sur studios, Inés was preparing the year-end special.
"It is the most prestigious individual ceremony in football," she told the camera. "The Ballon d'Or, the Puskás, the FIFPro XI, all decided in Zurich on the same evening. The voting panel has been filing results for weeks." She checked her notes. "Lorenzo has topped the mid-season MVP poll over Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo combined. The voting margin has no precedent in the poll's history. The narrative has shifted, the dual kings of the previous decade are watching a new sovereign ascend, and the ascent has happened in five months."
The digital feeds were already running.
[He's going to Zurich. This is the moment it becomes official.]
[The Puskás is settled. The Stamford Bridge run alone wins it. The lob is just insurance.]
[At seventeen. Everyone else in that building has had a decade to get here.]
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.