Page 176 of Filled

“What do you want me to say?” I ask.

“Nothing yet.” He leans back, and the chair creaks under his weight. “I was at the hospital last night. I watched Cruz hold you like you were the only thing keeping him upright. I watched Dante plant himself between you and every stranger in that waiting room. I watched Brady sit there with eight stitches in his shoulder, and the only thing he cared about was whether you were breathing steady.”

My throat closes.

“I've known what the five of you are since that envelope hit my desk. Eli looked me in the eye and confirmed it—all five of you, months of it.” He taps one thick finger against the desk. “But photographs only tell you what people do. Last night showed me what you are. Four people don't orbit each other like that over friendship. And these past two weeks, since the resignation, I've watched all of it curdle. You're not a team grieving a coach. You're a family missing a limb.”

I’m too hollowed out to muster the panic. I just sit there and wait for him to finish the destruction that started when someone with a camera decided our love was worth fifty thousand dollars.

“So report us.” My voice comes out rough, the words flat. “Finish it. Eli already resigned. Take the rest.”

Victor’s jaw works. He looks at the wall, at the framed photo of the gym’s first fight team, and when he looks back at me there’s an expression I’ve never seen on him before. “I was wrong.”

I stare at him, certain that I’ve misheard. Victor Kaine doesn’t admit mistakes. Victor is the immovable center of thisplace, granite and iron, the man whose decisions land like verdicts.

“What?” I ask.

“I was wrong,” he says again. “I gave Eli an ultimatum because the rulebook told me to. Resign or I report you. Clean. Simple. Protect the gym.” He exhales through his nose. “Then I spent this morning watching what it costs you, and I realized the rulebook doesn’t have a chapter for what you are.”

“Victor—”

“Let me finish.” He stands, moves to the glass wall overlooking the training floor. “I built Oath to be inclusive. Everybody says that word like it means rainbow flags and a nondiscrimination policy. It doesn’t. It means making room for love in all its complicated shapes, even the shapes that make some people uncomfortable. Especially those. Forcing Eli out because I couldn’t see past my own rigid read on ethics—that’s not inclusion. That’s the opposite of everything painted on my wall out there.”

The tears start before I feel them coming. Water sliding down my face, silent, the pressure of the last eighteen hours finding the crack and pouring through it.

Victor pulls a box of tissues from a drawer and sets it in front of me without comment. He waits while I press one against my eyes.

“Theo asked me a question last night,” he says. “I came home rattled from the hospital, and he could tell. He always can. So I told him what I’d done. The ultimatum.” Victor’s mouth pulls sideways, something between a grimace and a smile. “He asked me what I would’ve done if someone had demanded he leave. To protect the gym. If I’d have accepted that trade—professional ethics for the person I love.”

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I said I’d burn Oath to the ground before I let anyone take him from me.” He turns from the window. “Then I sat with that answer all night. Because if it’s true for me, I don’t get to demand something different from you. From any of you.”

I wipe my face. “The photos. Blackmail. None of that went away.”

“No. And I’m still not paying. Blackmailers come back—you feed them once, they eat forever. We’ll deal with that separately, and we’ll deal with it together.” He sits back down, forearms on the desk. “I have a proposal. A way to fix this that answers the legitimate concerns without gutting five people to do it.”

I freeze, wondering what he’ll say.

“Eli comes back. Not as your coach—that line stays. A coach dating his own fighters is an ethics problem no restructuring erases. But he coaches fighters he has no personal relationship with. Jonah’s group. Micah. The new arrivals. You get reassigned to Ray permanently. Cruz, Dante, and Brady get redistributed too—separate training groups, supervised by coaches who aren’t tangled up in this. Nobody is with anybody they’re sleeping with. Nobody’s judgment gets compromised in a cage.”

My heart is doing something dangerous, something that feels like hope, and hope is the thing I trust least in the world.

“The conditions aren’t soft,” Victor says. “Strict professionalism inside these walls. Always. No touching. No lingering looks. No behavior a stranger with a camera could read as anything but colleagues. What you are to each other lives outside this building, never inside it. You slip, we have a different conversation.” He holds my eyes. “But inside those lines, you get to be together. I’m not reporting to anyone. I’m trusting five adults to love each other without burning down the thing that shelters all of us.”

“Is this real?” The words come out barely above a whisper. “Eli can actually come back?”

“The decision’s his. I won’t force a man back.” Victor’s voice gentles, which from him is like watching a mountain soften. “But the door is open. If he accepts the conditions, he can be on that floor tomorrow morning.”

I’m out of the chair before I decide to stand.

“Dakota.”

I stop at the door.

“Last night, when your stepfather broke in with a knife—you had three people at that hospital inside twenty minutes. Most fighters in this sport go their whole careers without one person who’d show up like that.” He nods once. “Don’t let a rulebook convince you that it’s worth less than a license.”

The hallway blurs past me. I’ve got my phone in my hand before the office door closes, thumb finding Eli’s name through the blur of tears.