44. Dante
DANTE
“Round two's for keeping each other.”
Cruz’s words are still settling over the bed as I look down at Dakota and file every detail away, the way I file everything.
The tear tracks drying on her cheeks. Her thigh sliding over Eli’s.
Cruz’s hand still splayed across Eli’s hip even as he stretches for the lube—keeping contact, like he’s afraid Eli might evaporate if he lets go.
Brady’s fingers tracing loops on her stomach that aren’t lazy anymore, his face alive in a way I haven’t seen in two weeks.
Two weeks of silence. Two weeks of drilling combinations that meant nothing, of lying in beds that stayed cold no matter how many bodies filled them. Eli’s absence hollowed us out. We circled each other like planets that lost their sun, orbits decaying, waiting to spin off into the dark.
But he’s here. In Cruz’s bed with Dakota in his arms, and the relief lands in my body like a physical thing. A weight lifting off my sternum. Breath reaching the bottom of my lungs for the first time since he walked out believing he’d never come back.
Dakota’s eyes find mine across the tangle of limbs, holding the promise I just made her. No question in them anymore. Just an invitation, and a hunger the first round didn’t touch. She reaches for me over Cruz’s bulk without saying a word.
I take her hand. Let her pull me in.
She tastes like salt when I kiss her. Tears and sweat and the faint trace of Brady and Eli still on her lips.
I go slow, savoring her the way I’ve been starving to for fourteen days.
She melts, her palm coming up to cup my jaw.
Behind her, Eli shifts to make room, his hand brushing my forearm. Permission. Acknowledgment. Welcome.
“Hi,” she whispers against my mouth.
“Hi, baby.”
“I need more.”
“I know. I’ve got you.”
We’ve learned each other over these months.
Learned the rhythms, the tells, the small confessions bodies make when words fail.
Dakota needs to be built up slowly before she’s overwhelmed.
Eli needs eye contact, needs the tether of being seen.
Cruz needs to be needed. Brady blooms under praise and falls apart beautifully when you tell him he’s good.
That knowledge isn’t power over them. It’s power for them. The kind that lets me give each one exactly what they’re too proud or too scared to ask for.
I roll Dakota off Eli’s chest and onto her back, settling between her thighs. She’s still soaked from before, and when I slide two fingers into her she arches with a moan that pulls every nerve in my body tight.
“Easy.” I press my free arm across her hips. “We’re not rushing this.”
“Dante—”
“Fourteen days, baby. I’m going to take my time.”
Eli props himself on one elbow beside her, watching.
His hand finds her breast, thumb circling until her breath stutters.
Cruz mirrors him on the other side, mouth latching onto her neck, sucking marks she’ll wear tomorrow under her collar like proof of claim.
Brady slides up to the headboard and lifts her head into his lap, stroking her hair back from her damp forehead.
Four men and one woman at the center of everything. But she’s no trophy. She takes what she wants, gives what she chooses, commands the whole room without raising her voice above a whisper. She built this. We just showed up and refused to leave.
I add a third finger and curl them.
“Oh, God—” Her hips buck. I hold her down.
She whines, fighting the arm across her stomach for half a second before she surrenders to it, and the surrender is the whole point. She trusts me to control her pleasure. Trusts me not to waste it.
“Look at her,” Brady murmurs, thumb tracing her cheekbone. “Look how good you are, angel.”
She flushes at the praise the same way he does. I catch Eli’s small smile.
When I finally replace my fingers with my cock, we both exhale like we’ve been holding the same breath.
I sink into her inch by inch and stop, buried deep, letting the connection settle.
Her heat wraps around me and I have to close my eyes, count my heartbeats, remind myself patience is a discipline like any other.
Then I move. Long, deep strokes that make her feel every inch. She arches into each one, moans spilling out of her, and Eli catches her mouth in a kiss to drink them down. Cruz abandons her neck and works lower, his tongue mapping her stomach, sliding toward where we’re joined.
“Cruz,” I warn.
He grins up at me, wicked and unrepentant. “What? I’m helping.”
His mouth closes over her clit, and she clenches around me so hard I have to stop moving or lose it entirely. He works her with his tongue while I stay buried inside her, and the twin sensations wreck her fast.
Her thighs shake. Her heels dig into the mattress. “I can’t—I can’t—”
“You can,” Eli tells her, low and certain. “Let go, princess.”
She comes with a scream Brady muffles behind his palm, her whole body shaking, her walls pulsing around me in waves that test every ounce of restraint I own.
I don’t stop. Don’t give her a second to land.
I keep the same slow rhythm while Cruz keeps his mouth on her, and within a minute she’s climbing again, oversensitive and overwhelmed, tears sliding into her hairline while she begs for a thing she can’t name.
Eli takes one of her hands. Brady takes the other.
They anchor her while Cruz and I take her apart.
“Too much—it’s too much—”
“Color, baby,” I ask.
“Green. Green, don’t stop, don’t you dare—”
The second orgasm hits harder than the first. She thrashes against the bed, against their hands, her voice breaking into sounds that stopped being words.
I fuck her through every contraction, feel each pulse grip me, and when she finally goes limp I let myself chase my own end.
It builds from the base of my spine and detonates, and I bury myself as deep as I can get and pour two weeks of grief and fear and want into her.
I pull out with care and collapse beside her, gathering her against my chest while aftershocks ripple through us both. Cruz presses in against her back. Eli and Brady fold around the edges until the pile has no borders, no way to tell where one of us ends and the next begins.
We breathe together in the dark.
Her voice finds the silence first. Small. Frayed. Stripped of everything.
“I love you. All of you. I need you to hear me say it while I’m not falling apart.”
Nobody moves. Nobody breathes.
“When Gerald came through my door with that knife, I wasn’t scared of dying.” Her fingers tighten in mine. “I was scared of dying without telling you one more time. You’re the only real family I’ve ever had, and I almost lost it, and I—”
Cruz makes a sound against her back that might be a sob. Brady’s grip on her hand goes white-knuckled. Eli presses his forehead to hers and whispers a thing meant only for her.
I hold her tighter. This woman who survived a childhood designed to break her, who became the heart of a thing none of us knew we needed.
“You’re never losing us.” I say it into her hair, and I mean it like a vow. “We’re yours. All of us, completely, permanently. Whatever comes next, we face it together. The blackmailer, the trial, the gym. None of it touches this room. None of it touches what we built.”
“Promise,” she whispers.
“Promise,” four voices answer, stacked on top of each other.
We rest. We don’t sleep.
Cruz hardens against her back first and Dakota laughs, wet and startled and alive.
“Already?”
“Sweetheart, I’ve got two weeks of backlog. Blame Eli.”
“I’ll take that blame.” Eli’s voice carries a warmth I’ve never heard from him before this year. Before us.
Round three finds its own shape. Brady ends up between Cruz and me, and it takes patience and half a bottle of lube and Eli’s steady voice walking him through the stretch, but when he’s finally seated between us, taking both of us, he makes a noise I’ll carry to my grave.
Dakota kneels beside him, one hand working herself, the other stroking his face.
“You’re so good, Brady. So good for them. Look at you.”
He shatters under the praise the way he always does, coming untouched from being filled by the two cocks, and the clench of him drags Cruz over the edge with a groan. I keep going and come also with my hand in his hair and his name on my tongue.
Round four belongs to Dakota. Eli takes her from behind while she rides Cruz beneath her, a configuration we’ve practiced until the geometry works, and she comes so many times she loses count out loud, laughing and crying at once while Brady and I hold her hands and watch her burn.
By the time exhaustion wins, the sheets are wrecked, the room smells like sweat and sex and the candle Cruz lit hours ago and forgot, and none of us can do more than fall where we land. Dawn bleeds through the curtains. We spent the whole night making up for two stolen weeks.
Dakota sleeps in the middle of the pile, breathing slow and deep, her face peaceful in a way I haven’t seen since before Eli left.
Cruz lies unconscious beside her, one heavy arm thrown across her waist, staking his claim even in sleep.
Brady curls against Eli’s chest, both of them drifting, their breathing synced without either knowing it.
I stay awake a while longer.
This is what I do. I observe. I catalog.
I store the moments that matter so I can return to them when the world gets heavy, and this one goes in the vault beside the first time Cruz kissed me in that park and the night Dakota let me tie her to a cross in a stranger’s club and cried from relief instead of pain.
Five people who shouldn’t work. A coach who spent forty years denying half of himself.
A brawler Victor pulled out of a jail cell.
A preacher’s son taught to hate his own desire.
A woman who fought her way out of hell with nothing but her hands and the determination to survive.
And me, the watcher, the one who keeps the records, who never expected to find a place where every version of me fits.
We almost lost it. We didn’t.
Tomorrow brings the new chapter. Eli back at Oath, coaching fighters who aren’t us.
Restructured groups, new boundaries that will chafe until we adjust to the shape of them.
The blackmailer still out there with those photos.
Gerald’s trial waiting down the road like weather a storm, only this time we can see it coming.
Tomorrow can have all of that.
Tonight, Dakota shifts in her sleep and murmurs a name. Mine, I think, or maybe all of ours run together. Cruz’s arm tightens around her. Brady sighs against Eli’s chest, and Eli, even asleep, pulls him closer.
I close my eyes and let the pile take me under.
Tonight is for celebration. Tomorrow is for everything else.