43. Eli
ELI
Cruz’s apartment is chaos when I arrive.
Not the destructive kind—the joyful kind, the kind that comes from four people who’ve been holding their breath for two weeks and just remembered how to exhale.
Music thumps from somewhere inside, a driving beat that has Cruz’s fingerprints all over it, and laughter spills through the gap before I get the door fully open.
Real laughter. Not the forced kind we’ve all been performing since I walked away.
Dakota sees me first. She stands by the counter with a wine glass in her hand, drowning in one of Cruz’s hoodies, and when our eyes meet across the room her face breaks me open.
Joy and relief and love so raw it hurts to look at.
She sets the glass down without looking and closes the space between us, and then she’s in my arms, and I’m holding her tight enough to bruise, and she holds me just as tightly.
She holds back just as hard. Maybe we’re hurting each other.
Maybe that’s what this kind of reunion requires.
“You’re here.” Her voice cracks against my chest. “You’re actually here.”
“I’m here, princess. I’m not going anywhere ever again.”
The others pile on before I finish processing that this is real.
Cruz reaches us first, massive arms wrapping around both of us, his laugh rumbling through his chest and into mine.
Brady presses close despite the healing shoulder, his face wet with tears he isn’t bothering to hide.
Dante completes the circle, his hand finding the back of my neck in that grounding gesture of his, steady and sure.
Five people in Cruz’s kitchen, tangled together, breathing in sync for the first time in two weeks. Nobody speaks. Nobody needs to.
Eventually we have to separate. Cruz herds everyone toward the living room where he’s laid out enough food to feed a fight camp—takeout containers from three different restaurants, a cheese board someone put actual thought into, two bottles of wine already open and breathing.
“I didn’t know what everybody wanted, so I got everything.” Cruz spreads his arms over the coffee table like a game show host. “Thai, Italian, that Korean place Dante likes. We’re celebrating. Calories don’t count tonight.”
I laugh. It startles me, the sound of it, how long it’s been since anything came out of me that wasn’t strained.
We eat sprawled across Cruz’s furniture, passing containers back and forth, talking over each other the way families do when there’s too much to say and not enough night to say it in. Brady walks me through the police interviews, Gerald’s bail denial, the DA’s confidence.
“He’s not getting out, Coach. The detective said with the knife and the breaking and entering and Dakota’s history, he’s looking at years. Real years.”
Dante sets down his fork. “I met with a lawyer Tuesday. If the blackmailer sends those photos anywhere, we have options. Privacy claims, extortion charges if they surface with a money trail. We’re not defenseless.”
Cruz goes quiet for a moment, rolling his wine glass between his palms. “I gotta say something. I’ve been drinking too much these past two weeks. Like, old-Cruz drinking. I’m cutting back. That’s a promise, not a maybe.”
His voice cracks on it. Dakota reaches over and squeezes his hand without a word, and he turns his palm up so their fingers lace together.
Then Dakota tells me about the hallway. About Victor finding her after a training session went sideways, about the conversation that rewrote everything.
“He said he was wrong, Eli.” Disbelief softens her whole face. “Victor Kaine looked me in the eye and said he was wrong.”
“I still don’t believe it.” I shake my head. “A crack in the foundation of reality.”
“Theo’s influence.” Cruz points his glass at me. “Man’s been civilizing Victor for two years. We’re just reaping the benefits.”
The food disappears. The wine flows. The conversation drifts from logistics to laughter to the kind of easy silence that only exists between people who don’t need words anymore.
At some point Cruz changes the music—slower, softer, bass like a heartbeat—and the energy in the room shifts from celebration into charged territory.
I notice it in Brady first. He’s been watching me all evening with an expression I know, need layered beneath the joy, and when the music changes he sets down his wine glass and looks at me across the coffee table with that vulnerability he carries into every intimate moment.
“Can we go to the bedroom now?” Barely above a whisper. “Please.”
It’s not a question. It’s a plea. Two weeks of separation compressed into eight words.
I stand and hold out my hand.
The bedroom barely contains all five of us, but we make it work because we always make it work.
Cruz’s bed is generous and still not built for this many bodies, and nobody cares.
Tonight there’s no choreography, no careful strategy.
Just need, immediate and overwhelming, all of us reaching for each other at once.
Clothes come off in a tangle of eager hands. I peel Dakota out of Cruz’s hoodie while Brady works her jeans down her legs and Cruz drags his own shirt over his head. Dante’s already bare when I glance his way, efficient as always, dark eyes cataloging everything.
“Missed this,” Dakota breathes as my mouth finds her throat. “Missed you. All of you. God, I missed—”
“We know, sweetheart.” Cruz kisses her shoulder blade. “We know.”
She ends up in the center of the bed because she always ends up in the center.
It’s where she belongs, the heart of this family, the axis the rest of us orbit.
Her skin glows gold in the lamplight, and watching the others touch her—Cruz’s huge hands spanning her waist, Brady’s lips on her shoulder, Dante’s fingers tracing patterns up her thigh—fills me with more than desire.
Gratitude. Reverence. The knowledge that I almost let fear take this from me.
I settle beside her and kiss her the way I couldn’t for two weeks. Every night I spent alone poured into the press of my mouth against hers. She responds with a sound that’s half sob, her hands fisting in my hair, her body arching like she wants to climb inside me and stay.
Cruz takes her other side, his mouth mapping her neck, her collarbone, the swell of her breast. Brady moves lower, spreading her thighs and settling between them with single-minded focus.
The first stroke of his tongue makes her gasp into my mouth.
“Brady—” Her whole body shudders. “Oh fuck, Brady, right there—”
He doesn’t answer with words. He answers with his mouth, slow and devastating, and Dante watches from the foot of the bed with his hand moving unhurried on his cock, patient, waiting for his moment.
We work her together, four men focused on nothing but her, and she falls apart beautifully.
The first orgasm hits when Brady slides two fingers inside her and seals his lips around her clit.
She cries out against my mouth, back bowing off the mattress, hands scrabbling for any skin she can reach.
Cruz captures her nipple between his lips and sucks, drawing the wave out longer, until she’s shaking and cursing and begging.
Brady doesn’t stop.
“Fuck.” She writhes between us. “It’s too much, it’s—don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”
He works her through the aftershocks and straight into a second build, mouth and fingers relentless. Her pleas dissolve into a breathless stream of our names tangled with profanity. When the second one crests, it hits harder, her thighs clamping around Brady’s head, her whole body tensing.
He finally pulls back with her arousal shining on his chin and a grin that could power the whole building.
“Two weeks,” he pants. “Been thinking about that for two weeks, angel.”
I’m so hard it hurts. I need to be inside her, need the confirmation that this is real, that I’m here, that I haven’t lost her. Dakota reads it in my face the way she reads everything in me. She reaches up, pulls me over her, wraps her hand around me and guides me home.
The heat of her swallows me whole. I have to stop, forehead pressed to hers, jaw clenched, because two weeks of nothing and now this and I refuse to embarrass myself in the first ten seconds.
“Daddy.” She breathes it against my lips, and my whole spine lights up. “Move. Please.”
“Give me a second, princess.” My voice comes out torn. “You feel too good.”
Cruz shifts behind me. His hand lands warm on my lower back, a question and an offer in one touch.
“Yeah?” he murmurs.
I nod, beyond speech, and hear the click of the lube cap from the nightstand.
His fingers work me open while I stay buried in Dakota, barely moving, the stretch and burn giving me an anchor against the impossible heat of her clenching around me.
Brady climbs up the bed to her head and she turns, takes him into her mouth, and her moan vibrates through her whole body as Cruz adds a second finger inside me.
“Look at you,” Dante murmurs from beside us, voice low and rough. “Both of you. Fucking beautiful.”
When Cruz finally presses inside me, the fullness steals my breath. I’m caught between them—Dakota beneath me, Cruz behind me—connected at both ends of myself. None of us moves. We just breathe, three chests rising and falling together.
Then Cruz rolls his hips.
The motion drives me deeper into Dakota and she cries out around Brady’s cock and the chain reaction begins.
We find a rhythm. Cruz sets the pace and I surrender to it, let him control the movement, let myself be the current running between his body and hers. Every thrust of his pushes me into her. Every clench of her drags a groan out of me that Cruz feels through my spine.
“That’s it, Coach.” Cruz’s mouth grazes my ear, his voice pure gravel. “Let me do the work. You just feel it.”
Dakota’s hips rise to meet each stroke. Her mouth works Brady with growing desperation, and when she pulls off him to gulp air, Dante is there, replacing him without a word.
She switches between them, one cock and then the other, greedy and glorious, her pussy gripping me tighter every time one of them groans her name.
The sounds in the room are obscene. Wet flesh, ragged breath, the bed frame creaking its protest under the weight of five bodies moving as one.
“Fuck, her mouth,” Brady chokes out. “Angel, I’m—slow down or I’m gonna—”
She doesn’t slow down. She hums around him, deliberate and merciless, and Dante laughs low in his chest.
“She knows exactly what she’s doing, man. She always does.”
I’m not going to last. Cruz finds that spot inside me and hits it with every stroke, and Dakota clenches around me each time she moans, and the sight of her stretched between all of us—it builds from somewhere deeper than my body, somewhere I locked shut four years ago and these four people pried open with their bare hands.
“Cruz—” It’s all the warning I can manage.
“I got you.” His arm bands across my chest, pulling me back against him even as he drives me forward. “Come for us. Come inside her.”
The orgasm breaks me apart. I bury myself as deep as I can go and come with a shout I couldn’t silence if my life depended on it, and Cruz follows seconds later, rhythm shattering, grip bruising on my hips as he empties himself inside me.
The feel of it pushes me through another wave, aftershocks rippling while Dakota keeps rolling her hips beneath me, chasing her own edge.
Brady goes first, pulling from her mouth with a strangled sound and striping her chest. Dante follows, painting her collarbone, her breasts, and the feel of her covered in them—debauched and radiant and thoroughly claimed—tips her over.
She comes with all four of our names on her lips, back arching, pussy milking the last of me until I’m shaking.
We come down in a sprawl of tangled limbs and heaving lungs. Cruz eases out of me with a care that belies his size, and I slip from Dakota, and we all end up horizontal, sweat-slick and boneless.
Someone should get a cloth. Nobody moves.
Then I feel it—the tremble in Dakota’s shoulders, the hitch in her breathing. She’s crying. Not sad tears. Release. Two weeks of holding the dam together, and this cracked it wide open.
I gather her against my chest.
“Let it out, princess. We’ve got you.”
“I thought—” She presses her face into my throat. “I thought I broke it. All of it. I thought Gerald followed me here and cost everyone everything and you were gone and it was my fault—”
“Hey.” Dante’s hand smooths down her spine. “Nothing that man did was ever your fault, baby. Not one thing. Not when you were fourteen and not now.”
“He came here and Victor found out and Eli left—”
“And Eli came back.” Brady’s voice, fierce despite its softness. “We all came back. That’s the whole point. We keep coming back.”
Cruz drapes himself along her other side, one massive arm reaching across all of us like he can hold the entire pile together through sheer wingspan.
“Sweetheart, listen to me. You didn’t break anything. You’re the reason any of this exists. Before you walked into that gym, we were four idiots circling each other, too scared to say a damn word. You’re not the crack in the foundation. You’re the foundation.”
She laughs through the tears, wet and shaky. “That’s the corniest thing you’ve ever said.”
“I got worse ones locked and loaded. Don’t test me.”
She shakes against my chest, laughter and crying tangled together, and I hold her through all of it while the others press close, five heartbeats slowing toward a peace well-deserved.
This is what I almost gave up. The thought is unbearable, so I don’t hold it. I hold her instead. Cruz’s hand rests warm on my hip. Brady’s breath fans across my shoulder. Dante’s steady presence anchors the whole bed.
Minutes pass. Or an hour. Time stopped mattering when I walked through that door.
Then I feel it—the shift in the air, the tension rebuilding despite exhaustion.
Cruz is already hardening against my thigh.
Brady’s eyes have gone dark again, tracking the mess drying on Dakota’s chest with renewed hunger.
Dante props himself on one elbow and looks down at her with an expression that promises she won’t be resting long.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Dakota murmurs, but her voice has gone low and warm, and her thigh slides over mine.
Dante’s smile spreads slowly. “Two weeks, baby. You really think that was going to cover it?”
Cruz’s laugh rumbles through the mattress. “Round one was for missing each other.” He stretches, joints popping, and reaches for the lube again. “Round two’s for keeping each other.”
I look at them—my fighters, my family, the people who dismantled every wall I spent forty years building—and feel the want rise in me again, endless, bottomless, finally free.
We’re just getting started.