40. Brady
brADY
Ileave Cruz’s apartment before sunrise, before anyone else stirs.
Dante’s arm slides off my chest when I ease out from between him and the headboard, and he mumbles a sound that isn’t a word. Dakota’s curled against Cruz on the other side of the bed, her face peaceful in a way it hasn’t been since Gerald showed up. Eli sleeps on the edge.
I stand in the doorway longer than I should, memorizing them.
Then I go, because if I stay I’ll start crying, and I don’t want the last thing they remember about this night to be the sound of me falling apart.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. My shoulder aches from how I slept, wedged against the headboard with Dante’s weight on me, and I press my thumb into the sore spot at a red light just to feel a pain that has a source.
A cause. A location. Everything else hurting inside me has no edges. It just spreads.
Twenty-four hours. That’s what Victor gave him.
At home I stand in my kitchen and stare at the refrigerator like it’ll spit a meal out at me. I pull out eggs. Put them back. Pour a protein shake and don’t drink it. The clock on the microwave reads 9:14, then 10:02, then 11:37, and I don’t remember any of the minutes in between.
At 11:58, the group chat lights up.
Eli: I’ve resigned. Effective immediately. Victor has agreed not to make it public yet while I figure out next steps.
Eli: I love you. All four of you. This is the only way I can protect you.
Eli: Don’t contact me for a few days. Please. I need to sort out what comes next, and I can’t do that if I hear your voices.
I read it four times. The shake sits untouched on the counter, separating into layers.
Nobody responds. Not even Cruz, who fills every silence with noise because silence is uncomfortable for him. Not Dante, whose steadiness usually shows up first in a crisis. Not even Dakota.
Not me.
What do you say to a man who just burned down his own life so yours could remain untouched? Thank you is obscene. Don’t is too late. I love you too just twists the knife he already put in himself.
I set the phone facedown and slide down the kitchen cabinet until I’m sitting on the floor, and I stay there while the light changes across the linoleum.
The two weeks that follow are the longest of my life.
Training without him running the floor. Group texts that die after two messages.
Cruz showing up smelling like last call, Dante going quieter by the day, Dakota’s eyes flattening out a little more every morning.
We orbit each other and pretend it’s holding, and every day the hole where Eli used to be gets harder to look at.
Dakota calls at two.
“Brady.” Her voice is scraped thin. “I can’t. Cruz had to go to the gym. Appearances. Dante’s with his lawyer friend. I’m alone and I keep seeing Eli’s face and—”
“I’m coming. Fifteen minutes.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Angel. I’m already grabbing my keys.”
The drive across town feels wrong the whole way. Incomplete. We’re supposed to be five. We’ve been five since it started, learning the geometry of it, the way five people fit into beds and booths and each other’s lives, and now there’s a hole and the phantom pain is excruciating.
Dakota opens the door, and she looks like grief incarnate. Red-rimmed eyes. Skin gone pale under the gym tan. She’s drowning in one of Cruz’s hoodies, sleeves swallowing her hands, and when she sees me she doesn’t say a word. She walks into my chest and holds on.
We stand in her doorway for a long time. Her heartbeat against my ribs. Mine against her ear.
“He’s not dead,” she says into my shirt. “Why does it feel like he’s dead?”
“Because he cut himself out of us. And it doesn’t matter that he did it for the right reasons. The devastation’s the same.”
We end up on her couch, tangled together in a way that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with comfort. Her head on my chest, my fingers moving through her hair, her breath hitching every few minutes like her body keeps forgetting how the rhythm works.
“It’s my fault,” she says. “Gerald came to the gym because of me. He put eyes on all of us. Whoever took those photos—”
“Was holding the camera. Not you.”
“You sound like Cruz.”
“Cruz is right sometimes. Don’t tell him I said that.”
She almost laughs. It dies halfway out of her. “Everywhere I go, I bring the wreckage with me.”
I want to argue. I have all of Cruz’s words from that night memorized, everything about blame and responsibility and the choices other people make.
But my heart drags on the delivery because I’m drowning in my own version of the same guilt.
I’m the one who begged for visibility. That kiss is in those photographs. I wanted it.
And someone turned it into a weapon.
“We’re a real pair,” I tell her. “Sitting here fighting over whose fault it is, like the guilt’s a trophy.”
“Split custody?” she asks.
“Deal.”
The afternoon dissolves. We don’t talk much.
We exist next to each other, two bodies and two heartbeats and the shared knowledge of exactly how much we’ve lost. At some point her breathing evens out against my chest, and I lie there staring at her ceiling, thinking about that last night at Cruz’s.
The five of us. Laughing. Naive as children.
I drift.
The click of a lock wakes me.
Not Dakota’s key—I’d know the sound of a key. This is slower. Wrong. Metal working against metal in the dark, then the whisper of a door easing open, then footsteps in the apartment that belong to neither of us.
I’m on my feet before my brain finishes the math, body running on twelve years of training, planting myself between the hallway and the couch where Dakota is stirring.
The apartment sits in half-dark, streetlight bleeding through the blinds, and for two full seconds I see nothing.
Just hear the footsteps crossing the living room. Unhurried. Confident.
Then he steps into the light, and my blood turns to ice water.
Gerald Fitch stands in Dakota’s apartment holding a knife.
Not a kitchen knife. A hunting blade, long and dark, the kind built for opening things up. And his face—God, his face. This isn’t the concerned stepfather who performed for Victor at the front desk. The mask is gone.
Dakota makes a sound behind me, half gasp, half whimper, and I hear her scramble off the couch.
“Well.” Gerald’s voice comes out level. Almost pleasant. That calm is worse than anger. “There’s always one of you with her now, isn’t there. I’ve been watching the building for days. Figured tonight she’d finally be alone.” His head tilts. “Guess I was wrong.”
“Get out.” My voice holds steadier than my hands. “Right now.”
“You must be one of the boyfriends.” The knife turns in his grip, catching the light.
“I saw the photographs, you know. My PI took them. All of you, together like animals.” His eyes slide past me to Dakota.
“Your mother would be ashamed, Dakota. Running off. Spreading lies about me to strangers. Whoring yourself out to a whole gym.”
Behind me, Dakota’s breathing goes sharp and shallow. I know that sound. She’s not here anymore—she’s fourteen, she’s in a bedroom in Florida, she’s listening to footsteps in the hall at 2 AM.
“I tried patience.” Gerald takes a step. I match it backward, keeping myself squared between them. “Gave her time to come to her senses. But she’s left me no choice. She belongs to me. Always has. If she won’t come home willingly, then I’ll take her home the only way that’s left.”
I mentally check my options. Phone’s in my pocket—I can’t reach it without giving him an opening.
No weapon in reach. The door’s behind him.
He’s got forty pounds on me and a blade and fifteen years of obsession pushing him forward, and the smart play is to stall, to talk, to get Dakota moving toward the window or the bedroom or anywhere that isn’t here.
Then his mouth curls, and he looks past me at her like she's something he stepped in.
“Look at what they made you, Dakota. Passed around that gym like a rag—four men rutting you, and you spread your legs for every one of them. You were perfect when you were mine. Clean. Now you’re a used-up little slut nobody could ever love. They don’t know you like I do. Nobody ever will.”
Something in me stops calculating. It isn't even the slur that does it. It's clean—that one word, everything buried underneath it, and how almost tender he sounds saying it.
I close the distance and swing for his face.
This fight is nothing like the cage. No rules, no ref, no mat under my feet—just furniture and darkness and a man who fights like he’s owed anything he wants, and he wants our Dakota.
He’s stronger than he looks. The knife comes across in a flat arc, and I twist away from it, almost fast enough.
Almost. The blade opens a line across my shoulder, and the fire arrives before the wetness does, heat sheeting down my arm inside my sleeve.
I bury a hook in his ribs. Another across his jaw. He staggers into the bookshelf and doesn’t go down.
Dakota’s screaming behind me—words I can’t make out over the roar in my ears—and furniture scrapes across the floor.
Gerald recovers faster than any fifty-something construction worker should and comes again, knife leading, and I catch his wrist with both hands, but he’s driving forward with all his weight, and the point creeps toward my chest an inch at a time.
We hit the wall. Drywall cracks behind my skull.
He’s got the leverage, got the mass, and my cut shoulder is screaming as my grip starts to slip on his wrist, and a thought arrives with terrible clarity.
This is how it ends. Bled out on Dakota’s floor, protecting her from the monster she ran a thousand miles to escape.
Then Dakota is there.
Not frozen.