Bria let out a brittle laugh. “You know we can’t do that. Madeline will be expecting us to retaliate. I’m sure she already has a plan in place for that. It seems like she’s had one for everything else so far.”

“Forget about Madeline right now,” Owen said. “We don’t need to do anything except wait for Gin to come home.”

He was standing by himself at the back of the kitchen. Everyone quieted at his words, and one by one, they turned to look at him with shocked expressions. Finally, Finn jerked his head at Phillip, who ran a hand over his blond ponytail before stepping forward.

“Listen, man,” Phillip said, his blue eyes locked onto his best friend’s face. “I know you don’t want to believe that she’s gone, but you saw the restaurant. There’s no way that anyone could have survived that fire, not even someone as tough and strong as Gin.”

Owen’s violet eyes crinkled, and his lips lifted a fraction. “If you believe that, then you obviously don’t know Gin at all. But I do. And I know that she’ll be here just as soon as she can.”

Tears pricked my eyes at the ringing certainty in his soft voice. He hadn’t given up on me. Even when everyone else had, even when they all thought that I was dead, Owen had believed that I would find some way to survive.

He had believed in me.

I stepped into the kitchen, wanting to rush straight into his arms, despite the furniture and people that separated us. A floorboard creaked under my weight, and everyone whipped around in my direction.

Finn was faster than all the others. In an instant, he’d grabbed the gun under his suit jacket and had it pointed at my head. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“The front door was open, so I figured that y’all wouldn’t mind if I came right on inside.”

Finn’s face paled at the familiar sound of my voice, and he did something I’d never seen him do before in all the years I’d known and trained with him—he dropped his gun. The weapon slid from his grasp and clattered to the floor, even as he swayed back and forth, as though he might faint.

Bria clutched his arm, and everyone turned to stare at me again, still wondering who I was and what was going on. I guess my grimy disguise was better than I’d thought.

So I reached up and peeled the black toboggan off my head, letting my dirty, dark brown hair flow down around my shoulders as I used the knit fabric to wipe some of the soot off my face. Then I raised my head.

Everyone let out a collective gasp.

I leaned against the doorjamb, crossed my arms over my chest, and grinned. “What’s wrong?” I drawled. “Y’all look like somebody died or something.”

19

For another long, drawn-out moment, my friends and family regarded me in shocked, absolute silence. They really, truly thought that I’d been dead this time. Yeah. Me too there for a while.

Then Jo-Jo screamed. So did Eva, Violet, and Catalina, and everyone stampeded toward me, or at least tried to, but they all couldn’t get around the butcher-block table in the middle of the kitchen. At least, not all of them at the same time.

But even as my friends surrounded me, I looked at Owen, still standing in the back of the kitchen, his hand lying flat over his heart, as though some terrible ache there had abruptly ceased. Yeah. Mine too.

My gray eyes locked with his violet ones, and he winked at me, as if to say, I told them so. I smiled and winked back.

Then I was swallowed up by the rest of my loved ones.

Just like before, Finn was the fastest, nimbly zipping past the others and skidding to a stop right in front of me. He started to reach over to hug me but abruptly stopped.

“What is that smell ?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. “What’s on your clothes, Gin? Is that . . . coleslaw in your hair?”

I opened my mouth to tell him that, yes, that was spoiled coleslaw in my hair since I’d been Dumpster-diving for the better part of the day, but his face split into a wide, happy grin before I could speak.

“Aw, fuck it,” he declared. “I don’t care.”

Finn wrapped his arms around me in a fierce bear hug and lifted me off my feet, making me laugh. One by one, the others piled on, until we were all cheering, talking, laughing, yelling, and crying at the same time. Finn put me down.

Bria nudged him out of the way, and her arms went around me just as tightly as his had. “I thought I’d lost you again,” she mumbled.

“You’ll never lose me,” I whispered in her ear, returning her hug with an even fiercer one of my own.

Eva, Violet, and Catalina were next. Then Roslyn and Xavier, and Phillip, Cooper, and Warren. Even Silvio gave me a firm, lengthy pat on the shoulder, which was about as demonstrative as I’d ever seen him be.

Jo-Jo was too choked up to say anything as she hugged me, but so many tears streamed down her face that they made her waterproof mascara run. A hand grabbed my shoulder, turning me to the right, and Sophia pulled me into her tight embrace.

“I . . . can’t . . . breathe,” I wheezed.

She loosened her grip. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Hug me again so I can really feel it this time.”

Her raspy laughter rang out through the kitchen.

One by one, the others fell back, until it was finally Owen’s turn. He slowly crossed the kitchen and stopped before me, his eyes sweeping over my body from my dark, matted, coleslaw-dusted hair down to my muck-covered boots and back up again. His relieved sigh was as soft as a whisper, but it made my heart quiver more than a joyous shout.

Owen reached out and cupped my face in his hands, carefully stroking his thumbs down my soot-smeared cheeks and staring at me with ferocious intensity, as though I were a most delicate thing of absolute beauty and wonder, instead of just covered with more dirt, filth, and grime than any person had a right to be. Tears pooled in his eyes, making them gleam like violet stars in his rough, rugged face. Without a word, he drew me into his arms and crushed his lips to mine, even as our friends hooted and hollered and clapped and cheered all around us.

It was one of the best moments of my life.

*  *  *

It took a while—it took a long while—but everyone finally calmed down, and we trooped back into the beauty salon. The area looked a bit worse for wear, given all the paint chips and pieces of paneling that littered the floor and all the holes that had been punched through the walls during that phony health inspection. But it was still more or less intact, right down to Rosco, Jo-Jo’s basset hound, snoozing in his basket in the corner. The sight cheered me.