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He sits across from her. Beside Cruz, who’s grinning like Christmas came early.

Marco arrives a beat later, claps me on the shoulder. “Williams. You’re up. Victor wants the speech crew.”

“What speech crew?”

“The one I just made up. Come on.”

I groan but let him drag me out of the booth. As I stand I catch Dakota’s eye one more time. There’s a flicker of something in her eyes—amusement, recognition, maybe a question I’m not ready to answer.

Across the lounge, Victor is climbing up onto one of the leather banquettes with his beer raised, Theo tucked against his hip and grinning up at him like a man who can’t believe his luck. The whole gym. Every fighter, every coach, every loud-mouth and quiet one turns toward him.

“You miserable bastards.” Victor’s voice carries. “Get over here. I’m doing the thing.”

“He’s doing the thing!” Cruz roars from the booth, and the whole room laughs.

We all get up. We all move toward him. Even Eli, even Remy, even Kai who looks shy about it. We crowd around the banquette like kids at an assembly.

Victor looks down at us. At all of us. The gym he built. The fighters he kept. The new ones he gathered after the fallout. His face does that thing where the hardness drops away and there’s just him. Just the man.

“This is family,” he says. Simple. Quiet. “All of you. This is what we built. Theo and me and every one of you. So. Drink. Eat. Don’t break Theo’s fucking club.” He grins. “Happy birthday to me. I love you assholes.”

Cruz starts the applause. The rest of us follow. Theo’s laughing and pulling Victor down to kiss him and someone wolf-whistles, and Victor flips us off without breaking the kiss and the whole lounge erupts.

I find myself standing next to Dakota in the crush. Her shoulder presses against my arm. She doesn’t pull away.

“Is it always like this?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.”

She’s quiet for a second. Then, softly: “I’ve never had this.”

I don’t know what to say to that. So I do the only thing I can think of. I bump my shoulder against hers, gentle, and I leave it there.

“You do now,” I say.

She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t move away either.

Across the room, Eli is watching us. Cruz is watching Eli watching us. Dante is watching Cruz. And Theo, glittering and impossible, is watching all of us with the expression of a man who sees a story before anyone else has even opened the damned book..

I take a long drink of my beer.

It’s going to be a long night.

11

DAKOTA

The bass thumps through the floor of Eclipse, vibrating up through my heels. Four drinks deep and my skin feels too tight, the press of bodies around the booth too close, Brady’s shoulder warm against mine, making my pulse stutter.

I need air. I need a mirror. I need to splash water on my face and remind myself who the hell I am.

“Bathroom,” I mumble against Brady’s ear, and his hand brushes my lower back as I slide out of the booth, sending sparks through me.

The corridor behind the back lounge is dim, lit by red-glass sconces that cast the walls in shades of blood and amber. I try one door which is storage, mops, and the smell of bleach. Another empty office. The music dampens with each turn I take, until it’s a heartbeat behind drywall instead of the room around me.

I push open a door and freeze. It’s not a bathroom.

The light flickers on automatically. They’re soft, warm, recessed into the ceiling so that nothing in the room casts a harsh shadow. Black walls. Polished concrete floor. And in the center, against the far wall, a wooden X bolted to the brickwall. Cuffs hang from the top and bottom of each arm, leather softened from use, the buckles a brushed nickel finish.