Page 24 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

N elle sat down and tapped Streep’s hip. “Move, please.”

“Huh?”

“Move. I want Keane to sit here.”

Her teammate smiled. “Really?” She scrunched up her nose in a very adorable but completely annoying way. “Are you two . . .” She giggled. The giggle was too much.

“Move your fucking ass, Streep. I need to keep an eye on him.”

The smile dropped. “Fine. Bitch.”

Nelle motioned to Keane, but he merely frowned and reached for a chair closer to his brothers.

“Max,” she prompted her other teammate.

“Keane! Get your ass down here!”

With a snarl, the cat slammed down the chair he’d been holding and made his way to the chair Streep had just been forced out of.

Once he was sitting next to her, she smiled at him to soothe his annoyance. But, unlike other males, he didn’t immediately fall in lust, which he believed was love—thereby never leaving her alone again—he just seemed annoyed.

“Yes, yes,” Edgar Van Holtz said as he made his way back to the table. “Yes. I understand.” He disconnected the call and dropped into his chair. He glared across the table at Rutowski and her friends. “My nieces and nephews—”

“ Grand nieces and nephews.”

The wolf’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I was just informed that they’ve all gone into a safe house, since you were all attacked today at your homes?”

“Hearing from my kid?” Rutowski shot back, turning to her friends. “I told you he’s trying to recruit my baby into his little shifter army of government drones. Right, Uncle?”

“Your daughter is an adult. If she wants to work for a proper agency rather than causing problems—”

“We fixed things.”

“The four of you single-handedly delayed the end of the Cold War!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Yoon replied. “We were in high school.”

“You were in East Germany!” Van Holtz yelled. “Years of work. Years! Undone for”—he gestured toward the Russian— “her!”

“Fuck you, old wolf! No borscht for you at next Thanksgiving!”

“Oh, no! What will I do without your cold, boring beet soup?”

“Okay!” Nelle stood, spreading her arms wide apart, even though no one had gone toward anyone else . . . yet. “Let’s all calm down, shall we? What we should be discussing is what’s happening now .”

“Yeah!” Max chimed in. “And not what happened thirty years ago, when you were all . . . what? About forty?”

The wolf, Rutowski, and her friends all turned their glares away from one another and over to Max.

“The end of the Cold War actually took place in 1991,” Stevie said. “And if you guys were in high school in the eighties, that would make you—”

“I think we’re also forgetting,” Rutowski quickly cut in, “that as per school and federal records, Ox was a resident of Manhasset, New York, since she was eight years old. Rescued!” She dramatically added, “By democracy .”

The wolf glared at the She-badger and yelled, “Are you kidding me with that bullshit?”

“I’m sure,” Nelle interjected in her best calming voice, “that these wonderful ladies regret everything they did way back then. Right, ladies?”

“Not really.”

“I’d do it again.”

“We’ve actually done much worse things. This was nothing.”

“You whine like little puppy with wounded foot, Van Holtz. You sicken me.”

Edgar turned his frustrated gaze to Nelle, and she sat down again.

“Yeah,” she admitted, “as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that was a mistake.”

* * *

“Why are you here, Edgar?” Charlie asked, and Keane loved how “over it” she sounded.

Honestly, Keane didn’t see what Nelle was so worried about.

While one MacKilligan sister was starting shit, and the other was appearing to get some kind of anxiety rash based on the way she was scratching her neck and hands any time someone raised their voice, Charlie seemed the only one being calm and rational.

“You know why I’m here. Because you decided to drag a corpse to Italy. That was a . . . less than wise move.”

“They wanted to know what happened to their father. I thought I was being helpful.”

“Then you burned their family home down.”

“That wasn’t us; that was them.”

“Before raiding one of their ships, killing everyone onboard—”

“No,” Max corrected. “Not the hostages. We freed them.”

“—and sinking the fucking thing to the bottom of the Boston Harbor.”

“You wanted them to find the foreign bears on meth?” Steph Yoon asked.

“And I wasn’t there for that last part,” Charlie explained. “I was baking.”

“She was,” Max agreed. “She was baking. And the Boston Harbor thing wasn’t our thing. It was the crones.”

“Call us crones again, and I will gut you where you sit,” Rutowski warned.

Chuckling under his breath, Keane looked down and noticed an ant walking across the table. Without thinking about it, he balled his hand into a fist and slammed it down. All conversation stopped, and everyone looked at him.

“Ant,” he told them, before using a napkin to clean bug juice off his skin. “Probably a scout. It would only bring more. Best to take out now.”

“Was that directed at me?” the wolf asked Keane.

“I do not care about you so . . . no.”

The canine stared at him for a long moment before refocusing on Charlie.

“Anyway,” the wolf continued, “The Group is not happy.”

The innocuously named “The Group” was the organization that kept a tight rein on shifters in the United States.

Keane had heard about them but didn’t really care about their existence, because when his father was killed by the de Medicis, they hadn’t helped either.

Although he had heard from Shay that Charlie, her sisters, and Max’s teammates all worked on a little-known division of The Group.

At least they’d done one job for them, but based on the way the wolf was looking at them now, it seemed that recent partnership was probably over now.

“The Board isn’t happy,” the canine went on.

“What’s The Board again?” Mads asked.

“A bunch of snobby, extremely wealthy shifters that think they secretly run the world,” Rutowski explained. “Not surprisingly, the Van Holtz Pack has several seats on this so-called Board.”

“BPC isn’t happy,” the wolf announced.

The younger badgers looked to the older ones for explanation.

“That’s the Bear Preservation Council,” Yoon announced, a black hoodie pulled onto her head.

Wasn’t she hot in that? It was a short-sleeved tee with a hood, but still.

Seemed uncomfortable in the summer heat.

“It’s a worldwide organization of very annoying bears that pretend they’re conservationists, but we all know better. ”

“And,” Edgar went on, “Katzenhaus isn’t happy.”

“Katzenhaus can fucking blow me,” Charlie snapped. When Edgar raised a brow at the sudden anger in her voice, she said, “They could have shut down the de Medicis coalition decades ago, but they did nothing. Now they’re going to complain when someone fights back? Fuck them .”

“She’s not wrong,” Rutowski smugly said between sips of coffee.

“No one asked you.”

“Watch tone, old man,” the Russian warned. “I have no loyalty to you through blood or love.”

“And you remember, Oksana Lenkov, I can send your ass back to Russia any time I want.” He gave a brutal smile. “I’m sure you still have friends there.”

While the Russian badger and the old wolf glared at each other, Rutowski slapped her hand on the table and hissed in anger. That’s when Stevie suddenly jumped up from her chair and yelled, “No, no, no, no, no! No hissing at the dinner table. No hissing at the dinner table!”

She began panting and shaking her hands.

“All right, all right,” Nelle said. She stood and went to Stevie’s side, putting her arm around the badger’s tiny shoulders. “Everyone just calm down.”

“Calm down?” Max gestured to her younger sister. “She’s already hysterical over some hissing.”

“Shut up, Max!” Stevie yelled, before abruptly bursting into a nightmare amount of tears.

Max rolled her eyes, but her teammates went to calm down the hybrid She-badger. Keane wasn’t surprised about Nelle and Streep doing such a thing, but he was surprised that Mads and Tock had joined them.

“Just breathe,” Nelle told Stevie. “Slowly. Calmly. Everything is going to be just fine.”

Keane glanced at his brothers, but all they could do was shrug. What exactly were they worried about when it came to Stevie? She was so sweet. Crazy emotional, but sweet.

“Is that child . . . crying?” Rutowski asked.

“Is she dying?” Yoon wanted to know.

“Should we get her a doctor?” álvarez suggested.

“Her weakness sickens me,” the Russian announced.

Keane watched as Max’s gaze moved to the four older She-badgers. She locked onto them like they were delicious snakes that had just slithered into her den. Apparently, it was one thing for Max to mock her baby sister, but it was another for someone else to do it.

With a small smile, she said, “Just ignore my sister. She’s just emotional because she probably got her period. You guys remember what that’s like, right? You know . . . before the menopause hit.”

* * *

When Stevie’s eyes had shifted color from blue to green to gold to golden green to blood red, Nelle knew she had to step in.

They’d all known. They couldn’t afford for her to shift into her true form in front of Edgar Van Holtz.

He’d have Stevie put down, and Charlie would kill .

. . well . . . everyone. Everyone on the planet.

You did not mess with the woman’s baby sister.

You just didn’t. Only Max could get away with that.

So Nelle, Mads, Tock, and Streep had rushed in to calm the hybrid and situation down. And it had been going great . . . until Max had made that direct hit on the older She-badgers.

Rutowski, despite her age, was nearly over the picnic table with her hands around Max’s throat when her three friends caught her and dragged her back.

Her attack was so aggressive and unexpected that even Stevie was quickly distracted from her panic attack.

Now she was watching the three She-badgers trying to get control of their friend with the rest of them.