37. Dakota
DAKOTA
The heavy bag doesn’t know my body still remembers Wednesday night.
Every time I pivot, my hips send up a small ache, a souvenir from Dante’s apartment, and I catch myself smiling into my combinations like an idiot.
Four days since the dinner at Bellucci’s.
Four days since we stood under a streetlight and talked about houses and dogs and forever like people who get to have those things.
Four days since I took all four of my men at the same time.
Jab, cross, hook. Sweat runs down my spine and pools at the waistband of my shorts.
I feel loved. I feel safe.
The front door opens. I don’t look up at first—people come and go all day, fighters and trainers and the occasional journalist—but an old instinct lifts my chin anyway. The one that never sleeps. The one that scanned every room I entered from age fourteen on.
A man stands at the front desk talking to Marco. Khakis. Polo shirt. Gray-streaked hair combed neat, posture loose with the confidence of someone who has spent a lifetime being believed.
The floor tilts under me.
Gerald.
My hands stop. The bag swings back and clips my shoulder and I don’t feel it.
The gym keeps moving around me—weights clanking, Cruz’s laugh rolling across the room, somebody’s timer beeping—and none of it reaches me.
Sound funnels down to a thin whine. I’m fourteen again, standing in a kitchen in Florida, learning that the man my mother married wears two faces.
He’s gesturing now, brow furrowed, mouth shaping words that make Marco’s face soften from professional to sympathetic.
Whatever story he’s selling, Marco is buying.
Of course he is. Gerald has always been good at stories.
Good at being the concerned one, the reasonable one, the wounded one. Good at making me the problem.
Marco picks up the desk phone.
Run.
The word screams through every muscle and none of them obey. The only exit is past the front desk. Past him. My legs won’t carry me toward that man because they remember what happens when you get too close.
Cruz notices first. He’s holding pads for one of the new guys across the floor, and his head turns like he felt my stillness. His expression drops. He says a word to the kid and starts toward me, pace easy, eyes anything but.
Eli comes out of the back hallway, answering whatever Marco said into the phone, and he passes close enough to the desk that Gerald extends a hand.
They shake. Firm grip, warm smile, nothing to hide.
Eli’s face stays polite and guarded, the face he gives strangers, and I want to scream across the gym that this isn’t a stranger, this is the reason
Cruz reaches me, grabbing my arm gently. “Hey. Sweetheart. What’s wrong?”
One word. That’s all I have. “Gerald.”
His whole body turns to stone. He knows the name. They all know the name. His hand tightens, not hurting, just anchoring, and he shifts his shoulders until his body blocks the sightline between me and the front desk. His free hand pulls out his phone and his thumb moves fast.
Across the gym, Brady checks his screen and his face drains white. Dante does the same by the water fountain. They both start moving—casual, unhurried, nothing to see here—but I read the coil in their shoulders.
Victor comes out of his office, crosses to the desk, shakes Gerald’s hand.
Whatever Gerald tells him puts a complicated look on Victor’s face.
Concern. Confusion. And under it, a thread of suspicion that gives me one flicker of hope.
Victor is good at reading people. Maybe he’ll see it. Maybe someone will finally see it.
Then Victor gestures toward his office. Gerald nods and follows. Eli trails them both, jaw tight.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Cruz says, low. “We handle this together. He doesn’t get to walk in here and flip our world.” His eyes say the rest. Gerald being here means questions. Attention. Everything we’ve worked to keep buried.
Brady reaches us and his hand finds mine, squeezing hard enough to hurt. The pain helps. It puts me back in my body. I’m not fourteen. I’m not helpless. I spent twelve years cultivating the woman I am, someone no one could make feel small or defenseless again.
Dante arrives on my other side, steady as bedrock. He doesn’t ask questions. He just plants himself, a wall between me and the front of the building. The three of them arrange around me in a formation that probably looks like teammates shooting the breeze. From inside it, it feels like a fortress.
Marco appears at the edge of our circle, troubled. “Dakota. Victor wants you in his office. There’s a man saying he’s your stepfather. Says he’s worried about you. Victor wants your side.”
Stepfather.
The word lands like a knee to the ribs. He’s playing the family card, the legitimate-concern card, and it’s working the way it always works. People believe men in polo shirts with firm handshakes. They don’t believe girls who fight back and run.
“You don’t have to go in there,” Cruz says. “Victor can come out here. There’s no reason you should be in the same room as—”
“I’m going,” I announce.
He stops.
“He spent fifteen years making me small.” My voice is steady. “Making me think my only options were to take it or run. I’m done running. If he wants to lie about me, he does it to my face.”
The walk to the office feels surreal. My men move with me, not touching or obvious, just a steady anchor for me.
Victor’s door stands open. Gerald sits in a chair across the desk, posture relaxed, radiating fatherly concern so convincingly that for one nauseating second I doubt my own memories.
Eli leans against the wall, arms crossed.
I step inside. Gerald turns, and for a fraction of a second the mask slips. There it is. The ownership. The rage that I dared to leave. Then it’s gone, and he’s on his feet, arms spreading.
“Dakota. Sweetheart. I’ve been so worried about you.”
My stomach rolls. Sweetheart. The same word from Cruz’s mouth means safe. From Gerald’s mouth it means the hallway, the hand on my lower back, the doorknob at 2:17 AM.
I don’t move toward him, staying in the doorway where I can feel the exit at my back.
Victor gestures at the empty chair. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand.”
Gerald launches into it. He’s been worried sick since I disappeared.
Rebecca’s death hit us both hard, and I wasn’t handling it well.
One night I just vanished, no note, no call.
He hired a private investigator. Followed leads through three states.
He’s not here to drag me home—I’m a grown woman, he knows that—he just needs to see with his own eyes that I’m safe, needs to know I’m getting whatever support I need.
The lies pour out of him smooth as motor oil. I watch Victor’s face. Sympathy, yes. But something skeptical underneath it.
Victor turns to me when Gerald finishes. “Is any of that true?”
“No.”
And then I tell him. Not the sanitized version.
Not the vague bad-home-situation summary that lets people feel sorry for me without having to picture anything.
The real thing. The comments that started when I was fourteen.
The way he looked at me across the dinner table.
The touches that began as accidents, though, were far from it.
The nights he came into my room—how I froze and stared at the ceiling.
The way I learned to leave my own body until the nightmare was over.
The day I was seventeen and no longer froze in fear when he grabbed my wrist and I made him let go.
And the night this summer, two months after Mom died, when he tried my door one last time and I broke his nose, dislocated his shoulder and left him bleeding on my carpet.
The way my mother chose him anyway. Every single time.
Gerald’s mask cracks as I talk. Not all the way—he’s too practiced—but Victor sees it. The flash of fury at the broken nose. The jaw tightens when I describe him constantly coming to my bedroom.
“I don’t know why she says these things.
” He shakes his head, wounded, bewildered.
“She’s always had an imagination. Always been difficult.
She resented me for not being her real father.
I never touched that girl. I loved her mother and I tried my best to love her too, and she made it impossible. She invents stories to punish me.”
Same script. Same tone. Fifteen years of the same performance, and it almost doesn’t hurt anymore.
Almost.
Victor looks between us for a long moment. Then his expression closes like a fist, and his voice drops ten degrees.
“I’ve heard enough. Dakota came here on her own.
She’s trained here for months without a single problem.
I can’t figure out what happened in Florida and I’m not going to pretend I can.
Frankly, it’s not my business or concern.
But I know what I’m looking at right now.
A young woman who’s afraid of you. And a man whose concern smells a lot more like ownership than love. ”
Gerald's mask slides further. “You’re making a mistake. She’s manipulative—she’ll say anything to dodge responsibility.
Are you forgetting what she did to me this summer?
Broke my nose. Tore my shoulder out of the socket.
There’s a hospital record with my name on it, and I haven’t filed the police report out of respect for her mother’s memory.
" He straightens his cuffs, reasonable, rehearsed. “She hasn't been stable since Rebecca died. Delusions. Violence. Vanishing overnight. My lawyer tells me there are options for family when someone is a danger to herself. I’d rather it not come to that. But I’m not going to walk away and pretend she doesn’t exist.”
Victor stands. He fills a room when he wants to.
“File it, then.” Victor’s voice stays level, which is worse than shouting.
“Press those charges and hand her a courtroom. Let her explain, under oath, why a woman half your size broke your nose in the house she grew up in—and let a lawyer pull on every loose thread in that story of yours. You didn’t sit on that report out of respect.
You sat on it because you can’t afford anyone asking her questions.
Same goes for whatever you think a judge will sign for you.
She has a gym full of people who see her every day.
You have a performance.” He jerks his chin at the door.
“This conversation is over. She’s part of this gym.
She doesn’t want contact with you. That’s enough for me. Now get out of my building.”
Gerald rises. He looks at me on his way past, and the mask is gone entirely. Fifteen years of nightmares stare out of that respectable face.
“This isn’t over, Dakota. Run as far as you want. Hide behind whoever you want. You’re still mine. You’ll always be mine. Your mother understood that in the end. You will too.”
He walks out.
I’ve been holding my breath for minutes. When it finally leaves me, it comes out half gasp, half sob.
“Dakota.” Victor is beside me, hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
I can’t answer. Eli has pushed off the wall and his expression is murderous. Through the office glass I see Cruz and Dante and Brady clustered in the hall, all three tracking Gerald’s exit with expressions that promise a burial if he ever comes back.
Victor sees them too. How Eli is looking at me. I watch the question form behind his eyes, watch dots start drifting toward each other.
I can’t care right now. Gerald knows where I train. Probably knows my address, given the investigator. He never gives up. He said it himself, in front of witnesses, with the mask off.
You’re still mine.
Eli’s hand settles at the small of my back, steering me out. The others close around us the second we clear the door, but their bodies make a moving wall. Cruz’s jaw works like he’s chewing glass. Dante’s gaze keeps snapping to the front entrance. Brady looks ready to cry or swing, maybe both.
We make it to the back hallway, out of sight of the floor, and then I’m in Cruz’s arms with no memory of crossing the space between us.
The shaking starts. All the adrenaline that carried me through that office drains out at once and leaves nothing behind but the fourteen-year-old listening for footsteps.
“I’ve got you,” Cruz says into my hair. “I’ve got you, sweetheart.”
Brady’s hand spreads warm across my back. Dante’s fingers circle my wrist, thumb tracing slow shapes over the pulse point. Eli stands at the mouth of the hallway like a sentry.
He found me. Not because he loves me. Because I got away when I wasn’t supposed to, and Gerald doesn’t tolerate things that get away.
I think about Bellucci’s. The streetlight. Houses and dogs and forever. How safe I felt. How stupid.
And then, under the fear, under the shame crawling up my throat, a different heat starts to build. The one I learned to use in the cage. The one that turns terror into fuel.
He wants the timid girl in the bedroom, waiting for him.
That girl is dead. I killed her one punch at a time over twelve years, and standing in her place is a professional fighter surrounded by four people who would go to war for her.
If Gerald thinks he can walk into my gym and take that from me, he’s about to get an education.
“Dakota.” Eli’s voice cuts through the spiralling thoughts. “We need to talk. All of us. Not here. Somewhere private. He changed things today, and we need to be smart about what comes next.”
I nod against Cruz’s chest. Brady squeezes my shoulder. Dante’s thumb keeps moving on my wrist.
Over Cruz’s shoulder, at the far end of the hallway, Victor stands watching all of us. His arms hang loose at his sides and his face gives away nothing.
He saw. The way four men moved when I was threatened. The way they’re touching me now. Every careful wall we built, and he saw through the gaps in a single afternoon.
I don’t know what he’ll do with it.
Right now I can’t make room for that fear. Right now there’s only one truth with any weight—Gerald is out there. Watching. Planning.
And when he makes his move, we’ll be ready.