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Emergency meeting. Cruz’s. 7 PM. Everyone.

The last gathering, maybe, of something that might not survive the week.

I start the truck.

39

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.

Emergency meeting. Cruz’s. 7 PM. Everyone.

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 arewhoever 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.