Page 100 of The Best Trick

Thor grinned.

“You know what I mean,” Zeus said.

“How's the case?” I asked him.

He shook his head all stormy and proceeded to tell us how baffling it all was. He was trying to solve a cold murder that the police had given up on, and it was driving him crazy. In other words, he was loving it.

In addition to starting his own detective agency, Zeus had bought the little house he'd grown up in. He’d fixed it up and then sold it at a deep discount to a struggling family. It was just like him.

I reached up and wiped and nonexistent crumb off his lapel, just wanting to touch him. “You should have worn it!” I teased.

He rolled his eyes. “Stop it!”

“It would look amazing with this whole outfit,” I said.

He snorted like I was being so silly. I was talking about the Medal of Honor, of course. The three guys had all received one in a big ceremony a few weeks after the arrests had happened. It was a powerful event. I feel like I didn’t fully grasp everything we'd gone through until we were standing there, the four of us side by side, with all those people clapping.

It's not that the medals weren't important to Odin and Thor, but Zeus’s medal meant everything to him. He'd grown up wanting to dedicate his life to enforcing the law, after all, and having that Medal of Honor was an acknowledgement that he’d done the right thing in defying those corrupt orders all those years ago. Him and Odin. And Thor had told truth to power.

And I believed in them. I knew their hearts from the start.

The whole world had said they were wrong, over and over. It had felt like everyone had been hunting us.

Now everything had changed. There would be no more hunting—not ever!

Unless you counted the kind of hunting that took place with my guys wearing leotards and Robin Hood types of outfits. And me in a sexy elf girl costume. That type of hunting was alive and well, hopefully never to end.

The week we were in D.C., we thought about visiting Agent Denko, who now lived in a maximum-security prison. There had been times where we would have relished the opportunity to go face-to-face with him and taunt him. The man had that exculpatory bag the whole time. He could have turned in the evidence and saved our asses at any point, yet he chose not to.

But when we talked about visiting him, it just wasn't that important anymore.

We were happy.

Everything was new now.

I waved at a woman from across the gleaming hardwood floor—I recognized her as one of the regulars at the climbing wall. A few months ago, I had done this big rock-climbing and bungee-jumping excursion in the Rockies with a group of badass women. It was unbelievably exciting, and I definitely planned on doing it again at some point, although probably not in the next year or two. I would be sticking to my cheese-making classes and preparing our home in the hills. A bit of redecorating.

I spotted Odin across the gleaming expanse of hardwood floor. I grabbed Zeus’s and Thor’s hands and pulled them over to Odin.

“This is amazing, baby!” I said to him. “I can't stop looking at this collection altogether. Everybody is loving it!”

Odin turned to me giving me a simmering look.

“What?” I asked.

Slowly he pulled off his glasses.

“Oh my god,” I breathed. “Be careful or I might drag you out of your own art opening.”

“Stop causing trouble, Odin,” Thor warned.

Odin snorted. We still called each other our on-the-run names. Everybody else did, too. It seemed right, with all we’d been through. Like the names you get at the end of a trial by fire.

The four of us stood staring at the biggest canvas of all, as big as a car. It was a self-portrait that Odin had done of us with Doris, who we had adopted. We were a family. I couldn't believe how good it felt.

“How many people have offered to buy this one?” Zeus asked, grabbing a flute of ginger ale from a passing tray.

“It doesn't matter, this one’s not for sale,” Odin said. “It stays in the family.”

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