Page 36 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

“I see why they keep you around,” Rutowski noted. “Because it’s not for your brilliance.”

“Where is everyone?” álvarez asked, as Mads’s aunt simply walked toward the back of the house like she owned the place.

“How the fuck should I know?” Keane demanded, already feeling a headache pounding inside his skull.

Yoon snorted. “Kitty not a morning person?”

Keane was about to shift to tiger and bite the heads off all these bitches when a dressed and smelling awesome Nelle entered the room.

“Good morning to all,” she greeted, before sitting down on the couch next to Keane. “How is everyone this beautiful day?”

“Big kitty’s cranky.”

“Maybe because you’re calling him ‘big kitty.’ ”

álvarez flopped into a club chair across from them, one leg tossed over the arm.

“You guys are all so serious,” she complained. “Do any of you know how to have a little fun these days? Or are you too busy showing your asses on the Internet?”

“Fair question,” Nelle shot back, “but let’s table that to find out if you own any actual underwear ?”

álvarez looked down at herself. She wore a pair of denim overall shorts with very wide legs.

This one bright red and covered in old paint stains.

It was clearly made for a much bigger person, so when she splayed her legs apart, Keane had seen much more than he’d wanted to this early morning.

She also wore no bra under her bright, white, and too-tight T-shirt.

“I’m an artist,” álvarez said, as if it explained anything.

“So you’re too poor to buy underwear?”

“ No , heifer. And you sound like my mother.”

“Because she wishes you’d wear underwear, too?”

“I don’t understand why anyone needs underwear. The world is an amazing and beautiful place. With so much to see! Who cares if the person next to you is naked or not?”

“What does that have to do with underwear and you not wearing any? And just to let you know that although you’re wearing a T-shirt, your nipples are hard and for all the universe to see.”

“Of course they are. Because I love life !” she roared, which just seemed to harden her nipples more. “Besides,” she added, “my tits are fabulous.”

“For your age?” Nelle brutally asked.

“For any age, bitch.”

And, much to Keane’s annoyance, she was not wrong. Her tits, for any age, were amazing.

“Where are my dogs?” Rutowski asked as she walked back into the room.

“I haven’t seen your dogs since last night,” Nelle said. “Did see that coyote, though.” She looked at Keane. “It was waiting for me outside the bathroom this morning. Personally, I find that odd.”

“What about you guys?” Rutowski asked Keane and his brothers. “You see my dogs?”

“Yeah,” Keane said. “I saw them about three or so. They were staring at the door, so I let them out.”

When he didn’t say anything else, she barked, “And then?”

He shrugged. “And then I closed the door and went back to bed.”

álvarez covered her mouth and turned her head. But they all heard the snort of laughter. Yoon cringed, and the Russian just stood there in extremely high heels. How did any female, full-human or shifter, ever walk around in those things?

“You didn’t let them back in?”

Keane reared back a bit, because the She-badger was hysterically yelling at him. It seemed an excessive reaction when discussing five pet dogs. Couldn’t she just go to a rescue and get more?

“How is letting your dogs back into the house my job?”

“You were the one who let them out!”

“It seemed that was what they wanted, and I didn’t care either way.” He jerked his thumb toward Nelle. “But I knew this one would be really annoyed if those things shit in the house, so I let them out.”

“He’s right,” Nelle calmly agreed. “I would have been annoyed.” She crinkled her nose. “The smell. Ech.”

Rutowski stormed toward the front door. “If something has happened to my dogs—”

“Then you should get smarter dogs.”

She spun around, glowering at Keane. “You sent them out alone onto a street with tigers!”

“My cousins don’t want your ball-licking canines. Maybe if they were goats . . .” He glanced at Nelle. “People have pet goats, right?”

* * *

Sensing that Keane was not having a good morning, and not wanting the old badgers pissing him off any more than necessary considering the day she’d been planning and needed his assistance with, she asked, “Is there something specific you ladies want? Or are you just here to annoy everyone with all that perfume?”

álvarez, Yoon, and Lenkov looked at Rutowski, and she, after taking a very long moment to silently glare at Nelle, said, “I’m not dealing with any of these basketball-playing bitches. Let’s go.”

As one, they all walked out of the house, slamming the door behind them.

“My, they are free-wheeling with that word.”

“I’d say that it was because they’ve been hanging around a lot of wolves for decades,” Finn reasoned. “But honestly, I think they just use it about any females they don’t like.”

“I’m just glad they’re gone,” Keane muttered.

“Now, see?” Nelle teased him. “The last few minutes could have totally been avoided if you’d just taken me up on my offer last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you’d slept with me, you’d be so much more relaxed.”

“Oh, my God!” Keane exploded, his brothers’ eyes wide in surprise.

“Look how tense you are right now. As if you’re about to snap. Cats should never be this brittle unless they’re old and about to die.”

Rubbing his face with both hands, he growled out, “Nelle—”

“Even if you’re not going to sleep with me, you should definitely sleep with somebody .”

“I don’t want anyone else.”

Startled, Nelle immediately looked at his brothers, but they were already getting up and leaving the room. Neither wanted to be involved in this. Not that she blamed them.

“Now everyone is going to know you love me,” she told him.

“I do not love you, and you completely misunderstood—”

“I didn’t misunderstand anything.”

“Shut. Up, ” he snarled, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

Finally, he said, “I didn’t mean it that way. What I said. I meant . . . I don’t want anyone at all. Too much on my mind.”

“Okay.”

“So stop staring at me.”

“I can give you moon eyes, if you’d prefer.”

He looked at her. “Moon eyes?”

She tipped her head to the side, opened her eyes wide, and blinked at him several times while hitting him with a small, shy smile she’d learned to do from Japanese anime.

Keane snorted a laugh and quickly looked away.

* * *

Charlie was handing out treats to her bear-neighbors when Tracey Rutowski walked up to her and demanded, “Where are my dogs?”

“Well—” was all Charlie got out before the impatient female pushed past her—her big badger shoulder ramming into Charlie’s even bigger badger-wolf shoulder—and stormed into Charlie’s rental house. A few seconds later, Rutowski’s three friends ran after her.

“Sorry, sorry,” one of them said. “We’ve got her. No worries.”

Once they all disappeared inside, one of the grizzlies waiting outside her house for treats sweetly offered, “We can kill those women for you, sweetie. Just say the word.”

The other bears in front of her house all grumbled in agreement, but it honestly wouldn’t help. The more annoying a honey badger was, the harder they were to kill.

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Brooks. But thank you.”

Charlie followed the older She-badgers into her house.

She didn’t know why Rutowski was worried.

No way could Charlie keep the woman’s five, perfectly trained Belgian Malinois that had wandered into her yard early this morning.

Not if she wanted to continue living with Berg.

He kept telling her, “No more dogs!” But it wasn’t really her fault.

Dogs just liked her, and she liked them.

And all the dogs she’d taken in permanently had all needed homes.

They were street dogs that had been scrounging for food and living in filth.

She wasn’t okay with that. Thankfully, Berg wasn’t against dogs as a whole.

He and his siblings had one of their own.

Some giant Russian breed his mother bred and raised.

She would send them a new puppy when the old dog died.

The triplets mostly used their dogs for general home protection, since the large dogs were used in Russia to hunt bears and guard prisoners, but they treated them well and even petted them sometimes.

“You’re obsessed with strays,” Berg would still complain when another dog he didn’t recognize wandered by him. But Charlie didn’t think that was fair. She simply refused to ignore suffering. How could she?

“Hey, Zé,” she said to the jaguar just waking up on top of the china cabinet in the dining room.

She didn’t know why he ended up there most mornings, still in his shifted cat form, but he’d only recently discovered that he was an actual shifter.

Maybe he enjoyed doing a little stalking at night before finding higher ground to get some sleep.

Charlie couldn’t shift, so she had no idea what his thinking was, but Zé had hooked up with Max and deserved a safe space to wake up every day.

Even if it was the cabinet in her rented home.

Walking past the dining room table, she brushed her hand through the hair of Kyle Jean-Louis.

A jackal with genius artistic skills and a disturbing level of psychology knowledge for an eighteen-year-old.

He’d been crashing at her house for a while now.

Apparently it was hard for him to “create” with his other siblings around.

He had been close friends to Stevie for more than a decade, so it didn’t seem like a problem for him to stay at the house for a little while, too.

“Got any plans today, Kyle?” she asked.

“Just more disappointment,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate muffin.