39. Cruz
CRUZ
The text comes through, and I know before I open it that the world tilted off its axis.
Eli doesn’t text the group chat during training hours.
Eli built those rules with his own two hands, laid them out at Rocco’s like commandments carved in stone.
He doesn’t break them. Not unless the rules stopped mattering, and the only reason rules stop mattering is if everything they were protecting is already gone.
Six words. My chest goes tight in a way it hasn’t since a holding cell in Nashville, since Victor’s face through the bars at four in the morning telling me I had one decision left to make.
The heavy bag swings in front of me, forgotten. Across the gym, Dakota looks up from the speed bag with her phone in her hand, and the color drains out of her face. Brady freezes mid-rep on the bench, the barbell hovering above his chest. Dante sets his water bottle down without drinking from it.
None of us responds in the chat.
The next two hours are the longest of my life.
I move through bag work and cooldown on autopilot while my brain cycles through disasters.
Did someone see us? Did Victor find out?
Is this Gerald? Every possibility breeds three more, and by the time I get home at 6:30 PM, my hands won’t stay still.
I wipe down counters that are already clean.
Straighten cushions that don’t need straightening.
Pace my apartment like it’s a cage with no door.
Dakota lets herself in with the key I gave her weeks ago. She doesn’t say a word. Just walks straight into my arms, and I fold around her and bury my face in her hair, breathing her in.
Brady arrives next. Then Dante. We sit in my living room in a silence so heavy it has texture, four people waiting for a fifth to walk in and tell us exactly how bad this is.
Eli comes through my door at seven on the dot, and one look at his face confirms everything. He’s hollowed out. A man already grieving a thing that hasn’t died yet.
He stands in the middle of my living room with his hands loose at his sides.
The envelope delivered to Victor’s home.
Professional photographs from our walk through that little town an hour away, the one night we thought we were safe.
Me kissing Brady under the streetlight. Eli’s arms around Dakota.
All five of us holding hands down a public street like people who don’t have to hide.
Fifty thousand dollars in seventy-two hours or the photos go to the commission, the media, the sponsors. Victor won’t pay. And Victor’s ultimatum: twenty-four hours for Eli to end the relationship and resign, or Victor reports it himself.
Every sentence lands like a hammer. Someone followed us. Someone stood in the dark with a camera while we had the one evening we’d ever let ourselves have, and now they’re using it as a blade.
Brady’s on his feet before Eli finishes.
“No. No, I can’t—that’s my whole life. My family already threw me away. If I lose fighting, I’m nothing. I’m exactly what my father said I’d be.” His voice cracks down the middle. “I gave up everything to be here. Everything.”
“We all knew.” Dante’s steadiness fractures at the edges, and hearing it scares me more than Brady’s shouting. “We knew we were on borrowed time from the first night. The world doesn’t make room for us. It was always going to come collecting.”
“Bullshit.” The word comes out of me loud, rough, my voice filling the apartment the way it used to fill bars right before things got ugly.
“We find another gym. We relocate. Start over where nobody knows us. There’s a way through this that isn’t giving up, because I have lost too much in my life and I am not losing you too. ”
Even as I say it, I hear how it sounds. You can’t outrun photographs. You can’t relocate away from a file that can be emailed anywhere on earth. If the commission pulls our licenses here, we’re done everywhere.
Dakota hasn’t spoken. She’s on my couch with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at a spot on the wall none of us can see. When her voice finally comes, it’s barely there. “It’s me.”
“Dakota—”
“Gerald came to Oath because of me. He put eyes on the gym. On all of you.” Her shoulders curl inward. “I’d bet his investigator was behind the photos. If I’d never gotten on that bus. If I’d never let myself want—” She stops, swallows. “You’d all be safe if it wasn’t for me.”
I’m across the room before I decide to move, on my knees in front of her, her face in my hands.
“Look at me, sweetheart. Look at me.” Her eyes are somewhere years away, in a house in Florida with a drunk mother and a man who taught her she poisons everything she touches.
“You didn’t do this. The only people responsible are whoever held that camera and whoever decided to weaponize it. That’s it. That’s the whole list.”
She doesn’t hear me. I can see months of progress unspooling in real time, and I don’t know how to catch the thread.
Eli tries to drag us back to logistics. He walks us through the options again, methodical even while his voice keeps breaking.
He resigns and we end it, and the commission has less to dig into.
Or we refuse and Victor reports it and everyone goes down together.
Or someone pays the blackmail, which buys nothing but a leash.
Brady says the thing none of us will. “Maybe we end it. Not just Eli stepping back. The five of us. We go back to being teammates and nothing else. We take away the target by becoming what we should be.”
The silence after is the worst sound I’ve ever heard. I feel it in my own chest, the ghost of the man I was before them. Alone. Angry. Drinking too much and swinging at strangers and cruising toward a wall I’d made peace with hitting.
“I can’t.” My voice splinters. “I burned down every good thing I ever touched before this. I finally found the thing that makes me want to be better, and I’m not handing it over because some coward with a zoom lens decided to play God.”
Eli looks at me, and what’s in his eyes breaks whatever was still whole in my chest. “Sometimes love isn’t enough, Cruz.” Quiet. Defeated. “Sometimes the world wins.”
Brady storms out first, shoulders shaking, and I can’t tell if it’s rage or tears; either way, it doesn’t matter, we’re all shattered.
Dante follows soon after, his hand heavy on my shoulder as he passes, his eyes saying everything his mouth can’t.
Eli stays longest, standing in my living room like he’s memorizing it.
Before he goes, he kneels in front of Dakota and takes her hands.
“Whatever happens, princess. This was real.”
She doesn’t answer, just stares at the wall like she’s already left through a door the rest of us can’t see.
Then it’s the two of us and the wreckage.
I don’t know how long we sit. Long enough for the light to change, for the shadows to crawl across my walls, for the building to go quiet around us. I keep waiting for her to move. She doesn’t. So I sit with her while the weight of tomorrow presses down like a hand on the back of my neck.
Then someone knocks.
Brady stands in my hallway with tear tracks shining on his face and his hands trembling at his sides.
“I got halfway home.” His breath hitches. “Had to pull over cause I couldn’t see the road. And all I could think was—I can’t be alone tonight, Cruz. I can’t sit in my apartment and wait for it to end by myself. I can’t.”
I pull him in and he collapses against me, his whole body shaking, and I hold him.
Dante shows up ten minutes later. No explanation. Doesn’t need one. He walks in, sees Brady in my arms and Dakota curled on the couch, and he settles on the couch next to her.
And then Eli. Eli, who was supposed to go home and draft a resignation. Eli, standing in my doorway with his composure in ruins, looking at the four of us like a man who tried to walk away and found his heart had other plans.
“I sat in my truck for twenty minutes.” His voice barely holds. “Couldn’t turn the key. Because driving away means it’s over, and I’m not ready. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”
Dakota moves. Finally. She lifts her head from wherever she’s been hiding inside herself, and when she sees all four of us gathered in my apartment, drawn back like iron filings to a magnet.
It starts like a spark hitting dry grass.
One second we’re standing in my living room drowning in everything we’re about to lose.
The next, Brady has Dakota’s face in his hands and he’s kissing her hard, desperate and graceless, and she’s kissing him back with a sound like a sob breaking loose.
Dante presses against my back, his mouth finding my neck, his hands sliding up under my shirt, and Eli watches us all.
“We shouldn’t,” Eli says.
“We should,” Dakota answers against Brady’s mouth. “If tomorrow takes it, then tonight we take everything.”
We shed clothes down the hallway. My shirt hits the floor by the couch.
Dakota’s leggings land on the doorframe.
Brady’s jeans, Dante’s belt, Eli’s watch clattering on the dresser—a trail of breadcrumbs marking the path of our beautiful destruction.
By the time we hit my bed, we’re bare and reaching for each other with hands that shake from so much more than want.
This isn’t the tender thing from the night after Bellucci’s. This is teeth and salt and tear-streaked skin, grief and hunger braided so tight I can’t find the seam. Brady ends up underneath Dante, both of them crying while they move together, Dante whispering against his ear,
“Good boy, that’s it. I’ve got you.”
Dakota climbs into Eli’s lap and wraps her legs around him and buries her face in his neck while he rocks into her with a rhythm that’s more prayer than sex.
I watch them and my chest cracks wide open, and the want that rises up out of the crack isn’t like anything I’ve felt before.