Page 31 of Monochrome (ORCA #4)

JUNO

ONE YEAR LATER

I wish I could say I’d orchestrated all of it, that I’d known that when I went away, my boys would all find their mates, but I hadn’t known.

There was no way I could have.

But I was so happy it had happened that even a year later, when I looked around the backyard, taking in my family, I was so damn happy I could burst.

The boys had decided the right thing to do was to return the painting to the museum that owned the restoration and preservation center I’d stolen it from, and I agreed.

Detective McMahon had pulled strings, and so had Eli, and the SPD had turned the forged painting over to us as well.

Quin had organized the anonymous return of the painting and had included the forgery, suggesting in the letter he’d included that the forgery be put on display, not the original.

As far as we knew, the curator had taken his advice, but none of us had been to see it in person yet.

Constantine Yang had been tried, found guilty of all his crimes, and sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of my son and daughter-in-law, Zach Grayson, and Tessa and Owen Li, as well as money laundering, embezzlement, and tax fraud, among a host of other crimes.

His accomplices that the boys hadn’t already eliminated were in the wind, so no one else could take the fall.

Marcus, Felix, and Ethan had spent the better part of the last eight months combing through all Con’s files, tracking down as much of the money Con had embezzled as they could find.

Turned out he’d also been diverting and reselling raw materials as well as finished products and pocketing the cash after laundering the proceeds through several of the shell corporations he’d established.

With Con out of the picture and no one on the inside undercutting the company’s profits, Grove Core’s revenue had improved, and no one was making noise about Ethan being replaced as CEO anymore.

It probably helped that Ethan had fired most of the Grove Core board, with the exception of only two members, and had replaced them with people he—and by that I mean Felix and Julius—had personally and financially vetted.

Ethan had come into his own, and I liked to think that being part of our family had healed the pieces of him that had broken when he’d lost his sister.

From my spot on the patio, I could see all the way down to the shoreline where Ethan was lumbering along in his panda form, the twins taking turns clinging to the fur on his back.

Julius was in his orca form, swimming out in the sound, the notch in his dorsal fin that showed he’d been claimed visible even at a distance, and like it always did when I saw them together in their shifted forms, they took my breath away.

They were perfect mirrors of each other.

Where Ethan was white, Julius was black, and where Ethan was black, Julius was white.

They were truly mirrored souls, the very rarest of fated mates, and it didn’t matter at all that Ethan wasn’t an orca shifter.

He and Julius had found each other, and that was all that was important.

“Grandma Juno! Look what I found!” Jude came running toward me up the grass, his little arm held over his head.

I couldn’t see what he was holding, but it didn’t matter.

I would tell him it was amazing because it was, and hearing the twins call me Grandma Juno never got old.

Jude had to take a second to catch his breath when he got to me, and when he finally opened his hand, a pale blue piece of sea glass sparkled in his palm.

I swung him up onto my lap and used my fingers and thumb to make a circle that I held up to my eye like it was a jeweler’s loupe.

I pulled his little hand closer to me, inspecting the glass from every angle.

“Oh, Jude. This is beautiful. What do you think it is?”

“A diamond,” he whispered, looking reverently at the shard of glass in his hand.

“It’s perfect.” I nuzzled into his neck, making him giggle and squirm.

“Just like a little boy I know.”

He looked up at me, his lips twisted into an expression of confusion.

“I’m the only little boy here.”

I nuzzled into him again, breathing in his sweet, joyful, sunshine scent and making him squeal.

“I know. So I must be talking about you.”

He puffed up his chest, closed his hand around his treasure, and hopped down off my lap, running pell-mell toward where his sister was digging with a small shovel, yelling the whole way.

“Grandma Juno says I’m perfect.”

A few minutes later, Lily came running over to show me a shell she’d found, and I told her how perfect she was too.

And so it went, each of the twins bringing me new treasures to examine.

Ethan and Julius had shifted back and were sitting on a fallen log, watching the twins and looking out over the sound.

Felix and Nero had left to go on a date to the Jade Crane, Nero’s favorite restaurant on the planet.

Quin and Dimitri had escaped to Quin’s studio, where Quin was spending more time exploring his own art.

Dimitri had taken on a lot of the forgery work, which let Quin devote his attention to running the gallery’s legitimate and covert operations.

Dimitri’s sister and Ben were inside at the kitchen table, going over a paper Athina had due next week.

Hadrian was working a job Felix had found for him, doing a salvage dive for some unique artifacts that had gone down with a ship off the coast of California more than a decade ago.

He was due back in a couple days, but since he’d been gone, Ben had been staying at the estate, and I liked having him around.

He was whip smart and had a keen eye for detail, and we’d spent hours talking shop about both academia and art.

He had an old soul, and in some ways, he reminded me of myself when I was young.

He’d recently started making noise about writing down some of my stories from my time in the field and as an art thief.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to incriminate myself in that way just yet, but maybe someday.

For now, it made Ben happy to take notes about my life, and I thought that was kind of adorable.

Marcus and Eli had been in and out.

Eli had left the SPD and hung out his shingle as a private investigator.

Eli and Cal had studied for and passed the private investigator’s exam together.

Cal had helped Nero with a few bounty hunting cases, but he ultimately decided he needed to pursue a different kind of fieldwork, and he and Jack had partnered up to work freelance special ops gigs.

Felix and Reuben had been instrumental in helping to promote their unique skill sets in the right places online, and Cal and Jack were currently working an op on behalf of a contact of Reuben’s.

Last we’d heard, they were somewhere in South America.

Colombia maybe.

Eli and Marcus had teamed up too, specializing in insurance fraud, and they were a force to be reckoned with.

The demand for their skills was so high, they had a waiting list. Julius sometimes helped out, but for the most part, he’d gone back to managing all our investments and digitally robbing from the rich and corrupt and funneling their money to organizations that needed it.

The boys all worked together when they needed to, and they’d all thrown in together to work a couple more complicated ops Felix had uncovered.

Watching them pool their talents made me immensely happy.

No one could say being raised by a professor and professional art thief had been a traditional upbringing, but I’d uncovered and fostered their unique skills, and they were no worse for wear.

They all made me proud every single day, no matter what they were doing.

My boys were happy and healthy and had found the loves of their lives.

They were doing work that brought them joy.

And that was all I could ask for.

Ben had asked me once if I missed being in the field, if I missed the thrill of the chase and the rush of the hunt.

But the truth was, my family was the greatest treasure I’d ever beheld, and it was worth more to me than tracking down any famous painting or ancient artifact lost to the sands of time.

My family was priceless and perfect, and they were all I needed.

THE END