Rico threw a look around the room to make sure no one had their cameras out. This was the Hold, Vegas’s most elite and secret club, and the lighting used a special wavelength that made taking photographs impossible. Even so, for every technology invented to protect privacy, there was a countertechnology invented to violate it. It was the world they lived in. You didn’t have to be a Premier League football player to know this, but if you were, you knew it well. Not that any of these knobs remembered their names right now, let alone the lessons they had learned. Most were young enough to still believe themselves invincible after enough whiskey recklessly mixed with every other kind of alcohol.

Del was on top of the bar and about to grab a rope dangling from the ceiling to take a Tarzan-style swing across the room. Fortunately, the season was over and they didn’t have to get back on the pitch for training for a few more weeks.

Well, not them, exactly. Rico was never getting back on the pitch. The torn iliotibial band and shattered kneecap had made sure his career was good and over. Not that he could complain. At eighteen he’d moved Sunderland from the relegation zone back up to the Premier League, kicking off the kind of career he could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. He’d won the World Cup and the Champions League, and been purchased by Manchester United for a record sum. At thirty, he’d had a run he was more than a little proud of.

The part he wasn’t proud of was how badly he was handling the pain. His knee hurt as though the screws and plates substituting for bones and tissue were made of solidified acid. As always, the pain sharpened when he thought about it.

He had read somewhere that human nerves blocked out chronic pain after a while, but the sensation of pain returned when you were reminded of it, like when you heard someone else talk about theirs. It was as though the knowledge of another person’s pain reminded the nerves of what they were trying to forget.

Rico was here to tell all skeptics that the theory was indeed accurate. He adjusted his leg on the booth couch. The body-armor-style brace itched like the depths of hell and he couldn’t wait to get it off in a few days.

“What’s got you all grumpy?” Zia, his best mate and the groom—which made him the man of the hour—slid into the booth Rico was hogging all to himself. Not that the other guys had any interest in leaving the dance floor, or the mud pit, or the bar with the Tarzan vines hanging over it.