Page 177 of Filled

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 anythingdifferent 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.