Page 13 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

Just seeing the movement out of the corner of his eye, Keane reacted, slamming his elbow into the man’s face and sending him crashing to the floor.

The idiot tried to get up, so Keane slammed his foot over the man’s head, which was kind of funny because his foot was way bigger than the dude’s head.

Keane’s large foot size used to really embarrass him in junior high, creating some brutal times in the boys’ locker room after football practice.

But then Shay came along, and everyone stopped talking about it.

Not only because Shay’s feet were bigger, but because they’d both hit their growth spurts, and then everyone in school was too terrified to tease them about anything.

Pinning the man to the ground with one foot, Keane stared at Nelle Zhao.

“Now . . . don’t you feel better about yourself?” he asked.

She shrugged. “No.”

* * *

Nelle loved the cat’s ability to rationalize. Ohhh, he was in his tiger form when he tore those guys’ heads off, so anything he did as a tiger was apparently A-OK. But when he was human, suddenly all those human rules applied.

She didn’t really buy that. At all. But she knew he did.

Maybe it helped him sleep at night. Maybe it helped him not become a monster like the head of the de Medici Coalition.

The lion males they were battling against because the de Medici lions didn’t have any boundaries like that.

Whether big cat or big human, they would do whatever they wanted to, because everyone else was simply beneath them and nothing but prey.

It was cute, though. A tiger with boundaries and a moral code.

Who knew that kind of cat existed? She certainly didn’t.

Not until she’d met the Malone brothers, with all their upstanding morals and life rules.

How could that not be cute? Like when she saw tiger cubs hiss at each other, trying to be fierce but just looking adorable!

“You are just the cutest thing,” Nelle told him.

“Don’t do that,” he replied.

“Don’t do what?”

“Minimize me. It’s rude.”

Minimize him? Maybe she had, but what really shocked her was that he was using the term correctly.

She cringed. She was doing it again, wasn’t she?

Minimizing him? All this time, she’d only seen him as a very gorgeous but rather stupid brute.

Very stupid, actually. She’d initially thought that was Shay, too, but he’d turned out to be smarter than most realized.

She knew that because Tock didn’t have time for stupid people.

How did Nelle know that? Because Tock always said, “I don’t have time for stupid people.

” And she meant it. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist or graduate from Harvard, but you did need to have good, sound logic if you wanted to associate with Tock Lepstein.

That’s how Nelle found out that Shay wasn’t stupid.

At all. But she had dismissed his eldest brother as “kind of stupid.” Yet every second she spent with him, she was beginning to realize he wasn’t as stupid as she thought.

It didn’t prove he was smart, but he was definitely not stupid.

Malone proved that even more when he looked down at the man under his giant foot and asked, “How many more do you have outside?”

“I don’t know what you’re— owwwwww !”

“I could squash your head like a grape, or you could fucking answer me. Your choice.”

“Two outside the door. Four in the van.”

Satisfied with that answer, the Malone brother turned those green-gold eyes to her and asked, “So what did you do exactly?”

“Pardon?”

“To have some guy tracking you down here.”

“Who says I did anything?”

He didn’t respond, simply raised his right eyebrow.

“Fine,” she admitted. “He’s probably from the Vatican, and it may involve some gold bars.”

Mouth dropping open in shock, the tiger finally demanded, “Who pisses off the Pope?”

“Please,” she sighed out. “He could not care less about gold. He’s with God or whatever. But there are others who work for him that might care. Some priests or Vatican security.”

“Don’t we currently have enough problems with the Italians?”

“I did this ages ago. I thought they’d forgotten about it.”

“Who forgets about gold bars?”

“It’s not like they don’t have more.”

“That’s not the point!”

“No need to yell.”

She glanced over at the counter. The fox was again standing and next to her boss, the pair thoroughly enjoying this.

Nelle shouldn’t be surprised, though. This would not be the first time she’d brought trouble to the doctor’s business, but it was the first time she’d brought a big, angry cat along with her.

With a rather dramatic, put-upon sigh, the cat said, “We need to figure out how to get out of this without—”

“Murdering everyone?”

Malone stopped speaking again and simply stared at her for almost a minute before he asked, “What if we gave it back?”

“Gave back what?”

“The gold.”

“That’s probably been melted down by now.”

“You melted it down?”

“I didn’t do anything. I just put it in the system.”

“What system?”

“ The system.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, if you don’t know, then you don’t know.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Didn’t your uncles teach you anything?”

“The whole point of my revenge-filled life is that my uncles didn’t do anything for me, my brothers, or my mother after my father died, and that’s why I shoved them out of our lives.”

“Then why didn’t we start a war with your uncles instead of the de Medicis?”

“That’s because . . .” Malone’s words faded away, and he glanced off before asking, “What do you mean, ‘start a war’?”

“What did you think we were doing in Italy? Shopping?”

“I didn’t think you were starting a war. I thought you were just . . .” He briefly struggled to find the words. “I don’t know. I don’t know! I do know I didn’t think you were starting a war!”

Nelle shrugged. “They shouldn’t have made Charlie mad.”

Keane looked as if he were about to say something, but instead, he turned his angry glare to the man under his foot.

“Stop squirming!” he viciously barked.

Yelling at someone else seemed to calm Malone a bit, which Nelle found fascinating.

“Okay,” he said. “What’s the rest of the plan?”

Shocked by the question, Nelle glanced over at Dr. Weng-Lee and Layla. They were now right beside each other, elbows resting on the counter, chins resting in their open palms. Typical canines watching the drama unfold but offering no assistance whatsoever.

“Rest of the plan?” she repeated back to Malone.

“You all do have a plan . . . right? To deal with this war?”

Nelle answered him honestly. “Probably not.”

* * *

“How do you not have a plan?” Keane exploded.

“It’s surprisingly easy,” the badger replied.

Despite the man on the floor who’d attempted to kidnap her and in the face of Keane’s anger, Nelle Zhao appeared completely unfazed.

She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t amused. She wasn’t anything but calm.

And maybe a little curious. Which Keane found completely disconcerting!

At the very least, she should be reacting to his rage. He would have eleven-hundred-pound polars quaking in the middle of games when they blew a play because they knew it would bring his wrath, so he didn’t understand how this tiny badger didn’t seem to even notice his wrath.

How could she not notice his wrath?

Quickly realizing yelling wasn’t going to get him much from this weirdly unemotional badger, Keane attempted to calm down and instead asked a simple question.

“What exactly did you do in Italy?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“Why?” he asked.

She stepped onto the man’s hip, ignoring his grunt of discomfort, to give herself some much-needed height. She raised her arm and stroked Malone’s forehead.

“I’m concerned about this triple line in the middle of your head. It suggests stress. Have you thought about Botox?”

“I also do that here,” the wolf suddenly piped in. “I’ll give you a discount.”

“Shut up!” Keane snapped at the wolf.

“You’re going to give yourself hypertension,” Nelle went on. “Is that what you want? To be a cat with hypertension?”

Keane carefully took hold of the female’s wrist—he’d seen what a startled badger could do to an innocent face with their claws—and pushed her hand away.

“Just tell me what you did,” he ordered, expecting her to immediately comply like everyone else when he added his signature glower.

Again, she did that casual shrug of hers. “We gave them back their father.”

That sounded strange to Keane. What did she mean, “gave them back their father”? The last he’d heard, the head of the de Medici Coalition had been—

“You gave them back the corpse ?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you have the corpse?”

“Oh, that I don’t know. That was between Charlie and Max. Zhaos usually bury our . . . inconveniences.”

“Is that what you call those you murder?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“Yes,” she replied, simply. Calmly. He did not understand this woman.

“Let me see if I understand what you’re telling me—”

“This should be good,” the wolf said to the She-fox.

“—at this moment, we are in the middle of a brutal fight with a gang of vicious Italian lions, and instead of calming that down, you guys up the ante by taking the corpse of their patriarch and, I don’t know . . . throwing it at them?”

“Putting it at their dinner table for them all to see before having their family home violently breached by Italian law enforcement,” Nelle clarified.

Keane gawked at Nelle Zhao for what felt like hours. Because he didn’t know what to say or do until the wolf suddenly said, “Wow.” Because even the canine thought what had just been said was insane.

Because it was.

“Okay, ya know what?” Keane took in and let out another breath. “We need to have a meeting.”

“A meeting?” she repeated back. “What kind of meeting? You mean a meeting-meeting?”

“Okay.”

“We don’t really do that unless it pertains to basketball. We mostly do more informal get-togethers.”