42. Dakota
DAKOTA
Water drips from my hair down the back of my shirt, cold trails that I don’t bother wiping away. The locker room door swings shut behind me and Victor is standing in the hallway like he’s been waiting.
“You got a minute?”
I nod because my voice left somewhere between Eli’s resignation text two weeks ago and the hospital waiting room last night.
I follow him to his office and sit in the chair across from his desk.
He doesn’t speak right away. He studies me with those dark eyes. I resist the urge to squirm. I know what he’s seeing. I saw it in the mirror this morning and looked away. “Ray stopped your session early.”
“I know.”
Victor blows air through his nose. “You dropped your hands three times in one round. You ate a jab from a girl you’d normally see coming from across the room.”
“I know.”
“Cruz came in smelling like whiskey he thinks he covered with mouthwash. Brady’s throwing himself through warm-ups like he wants to tear something. Dante hasn’t said a full sentence in weeks. Two fighters asked me if he’s sick.”
I stare at the edge of his desk. There’s a coffee ring there, I focus on it because focusing on Victor’s face feels like standing in front of a firing squad.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask.
“Nothing yet.” He leans back, and the chair creaks under his weight.
“I was at the hospital last night. I watched Cruz hold you like you were the only thing keeping him upright. I watched Dante plant himself between you and every stranger in that waiting room. I watched Brady sit there with eight stitches in his shoulder, and the only thing he cared about was whether you were breathing steady.”
My throat closes.
“I've known what the five of you are since that envelope hit my desk. Eli looked me in the eye and confirmed it—all five of you, months of it.” He taps one thick finger against the desk.
“But photographs only tell you what people do.
Last night showed me what you are. Four people don't orbit each other like that over friendship.
And these past two weeks, since the resignation, I've watched all of it curdle.
You're not a team grieving a coach. You're a family missing a limb.”
I’m too hollowed out to muster the panic. I just sit there and wait for him to finish the destruction that started when someone with a camera decided our love was worth fifty thousand dollars.
“So report us.” My voice comes out rough, the words flat. “Finish it. Eli already resigned. Take the rest.”
Victor’s jaw works. He looks at the wall, at the framed photo of the gym’s first fight team, and when he looks back at me there’s an expression I’ve never seen on him before. “I was wrong.”
I stare at him, certain that I’ve misheard. Victor Kaine doesn’t admit mistakes. Victor is the immovable center of this place, granite and iron, the man whose decisions land like verdicts.
“What?” I ask.
“I was wrong,” he says again. “I gave Eli an ultimatum because the rulebook told me to. Resign or I report you. Clean. Simple. Protect the gym.” He exhales through his nose. “Then I spent this morning watching what it costs you, and I realized the rulebook doesn’t have a chapter for what you are.”
“Victor—”
“Let me finish.” He stands, moves to the glass wall overlooking the training floor.
“I built Oath to be inclusive. Everybody says that word like it means rainbow flags and a nondiscrimination policy. It doesn’t.
It means making room for love in all its complicated shapes, even the shapes that make some people uncomfortable.
Especially those. Forcing Eli out because I couldn’t see past my own rigid read on ethics—that’s not inclusion.
That’s the opposite of everything painted on my wall out there. ”
The tears start before I feel them coming. Water sliding down my face, silent, the pressure of the last eighteen hours finding the crack and pouring through it.
Victor pulls a box of tissues from a drawer and sets it in front of me without comment. He waits while I press one against my eyes.
“Theo asked me a question last night,” he says.
“I came home rattled from the hospital, and he could tell. He always can. So I told him what I’d done.
The ultimatum.” Victor’s mouth pulls sideways, something between a grimace and a smile.
“He asked me what I would’ve done if someone had demanded he leave.
To protect the gym. If I’d have accepted that trade—professional ethics for the person I love. ”
“What did you say?” I ask.
“I said I’d burn Oath to the ground before I let anyone take him from me.” He turns from the window. “Then I sat with that answer all night. Because if it’s true for me, I don’t get to demand something different from you. From any of you.”
I wipe my face. “The photos. Blackmail. None of that went away.”
“No. And I’m still not paying. Blackmailers come back—you feed them once, they eat forever.
We’ll deal with that separately, and we’ll deal with it together.
” He sits back down, forearms on the desk.
“I have a proposal. A way to fix this that answers the legitimate concerns without gutting five people to do it.”
I freeze, wondering what he’ll say.
“Eli comes back. Not as your coach—that line stays. A coach dating his own fighters is an ethics problem no restructuring erases. But he coaches fighters he has no personal relationship with. Jonah’s group.
Micah. The new arrivals. You get reassigned to Ray permanently.
Cruz, Dante, and Brady get redistributed too—separate training groups, supervised by coaches who aren’t tangled up in this.
Nobody is with anybody they’re sleeping with.
Nobody’s judgment gets compromised in a cage. ”
My heart is doing something dangerous, something that feels like hope, and hope is the thing I trust least in the world.
“The conditions aren’t soft,” Victor says.
“Strict professionalism inside these walls. Always. No touching. No lingering looks. No behavior a stranger with a camera could read as anything but colleagues. What you are to each other lives outside this building, never inside it. You slip, we have a different conversation.” He holds my eyes.
“But inside those lines, you get to be together. I’m not reporting to anyone.
I’m trusting five adults to love each other without burning down the thing that shelters all of us. ”
“Is this real?” The words come out barely above a whisper. “Eli can actually come back?”
“The decision’s his. I won’t force a man back.” Victor’s voice gentles, which from him is like watching a mountain soften. “But the door is open. If he accepts the conditions, he can be on that floor tomorrow morning.”
I’m out of the chair before I decide to stand.
“Dakota.”
I stop at the door.
“Last night, when your stepfather broke in with a knife—you had three people at that hospital inside twenty minutes. Most fighters in this sport go their whole careers without one person who’d show up like that.” He nods once. “Don’t let a rulebook convince you that it’s worth less than a license.”
The hallway blurs past me. I’ve got my phone in my hand before the office door closes, thumb finding Eli’s name through the blur of tears.
He answers on the second ring.
“Dakota?” His voice is rough with the same grief I’ve been drowning in for weeks, my name a question and a prayer in the same breath.
I duck into the equipment room, press my back against the shelving. “Victor pulled me into his office after training. Eli, he—he said he was wrong.”
Silence other than his breathing.
“He’s restructuring everything. You come back and coach fighters you have no relationship with.
I go to Ray. Cruz and Dante and Brady get split into different groups.
Strict professionalism inside the gym, nothing that could read as anything but colleagues.
But outside—” My voice breaks and I push through it.
“Outside, we get to exist. He’s not reporting anyone.
He said he’d have burned Oath down before he let anyone take Theo from him, and he can’t demand anything different from us.
The door’s open. You can come back tomorrow if you say yes. ”
The silence stretches. Five seconds. Ten. Long enough that fear crawls up my spine—maybe he’s already made peace with the separation, already decided the clean break hurts less than threading this needle every day.
Then there’s an audible exhale, shaky and long, like a breath he’s been holding since 7:00 AM this morning.
“Yes.” The word cracks down the middle. “Of course yes. God, Dakota. Yes.”
I slide down the shelving until I’m sitting on the floor between a rack of thai pads and a bin of jump ropes, phone pressed to my ear, crying in joy.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll be there tomorrow. Whatever conditions Victor wants, I’ll sign them in blood.” A wet laugh escapes him. “Tell the others. Please. I tried to write a text six times today and everything I typed sounded like a man saying goodbye. I don’t want to say goodbye anymore.”
“Then don’t.”
“I love you. All of you. I never stopped. Resigning didn’t stop it, it just made it unbearable.”
“Come home, Eli.”
“I am.”
I sit there after the call ends, phone against my chest, breathing. Actually breathing, for the first time since he resigned. Then I open the group chat and type four words.
Dakota: Eli is coming back.
Cruz responds before I finish reading my own message—a string of emojis, three crying faces, a heart, a fist, another crying face. Then Brady’s voice message lands, six seconds long, and when I press play it’s just his voice cracking apart in four words.
“Oh thank God. Angel—”
The message cuts off there, like he couldn’t hold it together long enough to finish.
Dante sends one word.
Dante: Finally.
I laugh. It comes out half-sob, echoing off the equipment room walls, but it’s a laugh, and my body remembers how to make the sound.
The door opens. Cruz fills the frame, eyes red-rimmed and searching, and behind him Brady and Dante crowd the hallway as they sprint here from three different corners of the gym. Which they probably did.
None of them touch me. Cruz’s hands flex at his sides with the effort of it. Brady’s jaw works. Dante just looks at me, steady and dark-eyed, saying everything without moving an inch.
“Tomorrow,” I tell them. “He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Cruz closes his eyes. When he opens them, the whiskey-dull haze from this morning is gone, burned off by something brighter. “Sweetheart, if I don’t hug you in the next hour I’m gonna pull something.”
“Then we’d better get out of here fast.”
“My place,” Cruz says. “I’m ordering enough food to bury us.”
Brady wipes his face with the back of his wrist, wincing when the movement pulls his stitches. “I’ll bring the wine Eli likes. The one he pretends he doesn’t care about and then drinks half the bottle.”
“The pinot,” Cruz and Dante say together.
We stand there in the doorway of a cluttered equipment room, four people who can’t touch each other, grinning like idiots.
It’s not over exactly. The PI is still out there with a folder full of photographs. Gerald sits in a cell waiting for a trial that will drag every ugly thing back into the light. The restructuring will be awkward and hard, new coaches and new rules and eight hours a day of pretending.
But Eli is coming back. Tomorrow morning he’ll walk through those doors, and the hole in our family heals.
Right now, that’s enough.
Right now, that’s everything.