Page 178 of Filled

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.

43

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.