38. Eli
ELI
I read it four times, lying in a bed that still smells like Dakota’s shampoo even though I slept alone last night.
The apartment is too quiet. No Cruz snoring, no Brady’s restless shifting, no Dante’s slow breath in the dark.
Just me and a phone screen glowing in the gray morning, and the specific weight of a summons written by a man who has already decided what he’s going to say.
Victor doesn’t text like that. Victor texts in full sentences with too many exclamation points about protein orders and fight cards. This is formal.
I stare at the ceiling and run through the safe explanations. Budget. Scheduling. The commission paperwork for Brady’s next bout. A problem with the plumbing in the women’s locker room.
None of it sticks. Dread sits in my stomach like a swallowed stone, and underneath all the rationalizing, a quieter voice says the thing I don’t want to hear.
He knows.
The drive takes longer than it should because I let it.
Back roads. A route that adds twelve minutes and buys me nothing but more time to grip the wheel.
The sky is flat and colorless, the kind of overcast that drains the world of edges.
Twice I pick up my phone at a red light to text Dakota, and twice I put it down.
What would I even say?
Something might be wrong. I don’t know what’s waiting for me, and scaring her with half a warning helps no one.
The gym is nearly empty when I pull in. A couple of the early crowd working the bags, the slap of leather and the whir of a jump rope, sounds that have anchored me every morning for six months.
Today they slide off me like water. Marco is at the front desk with a clipboard, and when he looks up, his expression is careful and neutral.
He nods at me once and goes back to his clipboard, and that tells me everything a warning would have.
Victor’s door is closed, so I knock.
“Come in.”
He’s behind the desk with his hands folded with a manila envelope, thick, sitting square in the center of his desk.
He doesn’t look angry. I’ve seen Victor angry.
Angry Victor paces, fills the room, uses his hands.
This Victor is still. He looks like a man sitting with a dead animal on his desk, deciding how it got there.
“Close the door. Sit down.”
I do both. My body handles the mechanics while my mind spins through possibilities.
Victor looks at the envelope for a long moment before he speaks.
“This was delivered to my house yesterday. Not here. My house.” His jaw works. “Someone wanted me to know they know where I live.”
He slides the envelope across the desk. It takes everything I have to keep my hands steady when I pick it up.
Photographs. Glossy, professional, shot from a distance with a long lens.
The night of Dante’s dinner.
The first one shows the five of us on that small-town main street. Dakota’s hand in mine. Cruz’s arm slung over Brady’s shoulders. All of us lit warm under the streetlights, and God, we look happy. We look exactly like what we are.
The second is Cruz kissing Brady under the streetlight. Both faces are clear. Unmistakable.
The third is me. My arms wrapped around Dakota from behind, her body leaned back into my chest, both of us watching Cruz and Brady with expressions I can’t pretend are anything other than what they are.
There are more. A dozen, maybe. Our whole walk is documented frame by frame like surveillance. The last one shows us splitting off to separate cars in the restaurant lot, which proves the whole evening was coordinated.
Beneath the photos, a typed note. Unsigned.
Fifty thousand dollars to an account number, or the images go to the athletic commission, every MMA outlet, and every sponsor. Seventy-two hours.
The words blur. I read the note again.
“I’m not paying for it,” Victor says. “You pay a blackmailer once, you’re paying them forever. They’ll come back at seventy-five, then a hundred, and every time I’ll be right back in this chair with a new envelope.”
“Victor—”
“I need you to answer me straight, Eli.” His voice doesn’t rise. “Are the photos real? Are you with Dakota? Are the other three part of it? Have you been lying to me since I sat you in that chair and asked you point-blank about my fighters?”
The lie is right there, sitting on my tongue and I look at Victor’s face, this man who hired me when my name was tarnished, who never once asked me to prove I wasn’t what Jessica claimed I was, and the lie dies in my mouth.
“Yes.” The word scrapes coming out. “The photos are real. I’m with Dakota. Cruz, Dante, and Brady are part of it. All five of us. It’s been months.” I make myself hold his eyes. “And yes. I’ve been lying to you.”
Victor sits back, and what crosses his face isn’t rage. It’s grief. It’s a man looking at someone he trusted and recalculating everything.
“Months,” he says.
“A few weeks after she got here.”
He drags a hand across his face. “I sat you in that chair. I asked you if anything was happening that could put licenses at risk. You looked me in the eye.”
“I know,” I reply.
“I defended you, Eli. When I hired you, I had people telling me I was insane to bring in a coach with your history. I told them I know men, and this one is solid.” He exhales through his nose.
“I want you to hear what I’m not saying.
I’m not saying you’re a predator. I don’t believe that.
I’ve watched Dakota for months. Nobody’s making that woman do anything she doesn’t want to do.
” An almost laugh moves through him and dies.
“Hell, if the world were different, I’d be pouring us a drink right now.
Five people who found each other. I know what that’s worth. I know better than most what it costs.”
“Then why can’t you understand?”
“But the world isn’t different.” He taps the envelope.
“The commission won’t care. A coach in a relationship with his fighters is an ethics violation, period.
How it started doesn’t factor. They pull your license first, and then they keep digging, because that’s what they do.
Cruz, Dante, Brady. Training partners who corner each other, who have financial interest in each other’s outcomes, who are sleeping together.
They’ll call it compromised competition.
They’ll reopen every bout any of them have fought since joining Oath. ”
“Their records are clean. Every fight—”
“It won’t matter. You know what I lost when I came out.
Sponsors gone overnight. Fighters walking.
Two years of eating the backlash but building stronger than ever, receiving more support and sponsors than before.
First inclusive gym, high standards, no scandals.
This.” he nods at the photos “This is a scandal that writes its own headlines. Coach beds four fighters. That’s the version that prints. Not the truth.”
“It’s real, Victor.” My voice comes out rough. “I love her. I love all of them. We kept it out of training. Dakota earned every result on her record, you’ve seen her tape, you’ve seen how good she is.”
“I have.” He doesn’t interrupt so much as absorb.
“And I believe you. I want that on the record between us. I believe every word.” He leans forward, forearms on the desk.
“Answer me one thing. You knew what was at stake. My gym. Their licenses. Every kid who trains here becaue it’s the only room in this sport where they can breathe. You knew. Why do it anyway?”
I open my mouth and nothing comes. What’s the honest answer?
Years of walls built so high I forgot I was behind them.
Dakota walked through them like smoke. Cruz’s laugh.
Dante’s steadiness. Brady looked at me like I’d handed him permission to exist. I tried to stay away.
I made rules and broke every one of them, and by the time I understood what was happening, it had already happened.
“I don’t have an answer that isn’t an excuse,” I say finally.
Victor nods slowly, like that’s the first thing I’ve said that he fully respects.
“Here’s where we are.” He counts it off on thick fingers.
“Option one, I pay. Off the table. Option two, I refuse and the photos drop, and everything burns. Option three, I get ahead of it. I fire you publicly, report the violation myself, cooperate with the commission, show them Oath polices. It’s damage control instead of prevention, but it might keep the doors open. ”
“And the others?” I ask.
“Investigated either way. But if there’s no coach-fighter relationship left to point at, if you’re gone and it’s over, the commission has less to bite down on.
” He holds my eyes. “So I’m giving you a choice I wish to God I didn’t have to give you.
Twenty-four hours. End it quietly and resign, and I’ll give you a neutral reference and keep the specifics between us.
The investigation still comes, but slower.
Softer. Or you refuse, and I go to the commission myself and burn you first before someone burns all of us. ”
“Victor. Please. Is there any other way? Anything.”
He’s quiet for a long time, and the grief on his face is harder to look at than anger ever was.
“I wish there was. You think I don’t understand?
I spent thirty-six years denying who I was.
I know what one night of being visible feels like.
I know why you took that walk.” He shakes his head.
“But when I came out, it was my choice. My risk, my name, my consequences. You made that choice for every fighter on this floor whose career lives or dies with this gym’s reputation.
You hid, and you put all of them in the blast radius without asking.
And now somebody with a camera has taken the choice away from you. ”
He stands. Conversation over. But at the door, his hand lands on my shoulder, heavy, and squeezes once. “For what it’s worth,” he says quietly, “I hope it’s the real thing. I hope it survives this. I just can’t let it take Oath down with it.”
Then his hand is gone.
I walk across the floor, past the bags, past the ropes. Marco says my name and I don’t answer, can’t answer, just keep moving until I’m in my truck with my hands shaking on the wheel.
Someone followed us. An hour out of town, the one night we let ourselves be seen, and someone was there with a lens the whole time.
And the part that keeps looping as I sit in the parking lot, engine off, breath loud in the cab: we did this. We built the whole architecture, the staggered arrivals, the group chat, the eight-hour rule, and then we wanted one normal evening. One walk. One streetlight.
One night, and now everything is on fire.
Twenty minutes pass before I can move. I pick up my phone and my thumb hovers, and I start composing the words in my head because I can’t type them yet.
Emergency meeting. Cruz’s. 7 PM. Everyone.
The last gathering, maybe, of something that might not survive the week.
I start the truck.