Page 51 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

“It might be slightly insane.” She looked Nelle over. “It was not your idea.”

“No. But I said I’d try.”

“I see.” She took another sip. “You know, some may feel that you simply need better friends. The MacKilligans are known to attract trouble.”

“Don’t blame this on them. The de Medicis are out to get us all, and it’s not because Charlie MacKilligan killed their father.”

Jules looked up from her glass, eyes wide. “Charlie MacKilligan killed Giuseppe de Medici?”

“Oh. You didn’t know that already?”

“No.” Pushing her glass aside, Jules rested her elbow on the table and her chin in the palm of her hand. “What a fascinating life you manage to live, Gong Zhao.”

* * *

Britta, like her brothers, was not one for big emotions unless she was startled.

So the quiet urgency in her voice had Charlie handing the notebook back to Stevie—who immediately returned to the bookshelf to stow it away in plain sight among the many other composition notebooks she had in order to confuse the unwitting—and running up the stairs.

The She-bear was already heading out of the kitchen and to the front door of Charlie’s rental house.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked as they neared the exit.

“Berg got a call from the pride on the street over. Said a van was headed this way that they didn’t recognize, and it smelled like lions they did not know.”

Charlie was in the living room now when Britta made that statement. In response, Charlie held her arm out and, pulling it from behind the couch, Max tossed her sister a sawed-off shotgun that was already loaded and ready to fire.

“How many weapons do you have in this house?” Shay demanded from the love seat.

Ignoring the question of a concerned father, Charlie walked out of the house, across the porch, and down onto the street.

But Charlie wasn’t alone. Not only were the triplets, Max and her teammates, and Stevie beside her, but now Malones were coming out of their RVs, adult bears out of their houses, and everyone else who had been in her rental house, all coming onto the street to surround her.

Protect her. All waiting until a white van came speeding onto their street from a different direction than they’d been expecting—meaning they’d taken a circuitous route for some reason.

Maybe to confuse the cats on the other block who’d ratted them out?

But the van didn’t stay long. Charlie heard the back doors open, a thump, and then the doors closed. With that, the van screeched off, leaving nothing but something wrapped in a tarp and duct tape.

“Shit.” Charlie tossed her weapon to Streep and took off running, pushing past everyone who wanted her to wait. But she knew what she was looking at. It was a body.

She crouched beside it and sniffed, hoping she could guess the remains without actually looking. Unfortunately, her sinuses were acting up after she’d made the mistake of standing by the blooming bushes next to her fencing, and now she couldn’t smell anything.

Glancing over her shoulder and seeing Stevie coming up behind her, she gestured to Max to stop her, and unleashed the claw on her forefinger to carefully tear open the top layer of tarp that wrapped what had been dumped on the street.

But she quickly realized she had more layers to rip through, tons of plastic, black garbage bags, tearing down and down until she finally reached the face of her . . . father.

Charlie yanked the wrapping harder and exposed the deep wound to her father’s neck. His throat had been cut, literally, from ear to ear. Nearly decapitating him.

Eyes narrowing, her mind racing, she motioned to her sister with one finger.

Max took off running, her teammates right behind her.

Nat started to run with them, but Finn caught their sister in his arms and kept her from going anywhere. She was a little young for that sort of thing. Of course, once she hit eighteen, there would be no holding her back, but Charlie would deal with that when they got there.

“Oh . . . Daddy,” Stevie sighed, crouching beside Charlie. “Poor Daddy.”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

“You could be a little upset,” Stevie admonished her.

“I am,” Charlie said.

“Then why are you smiling?”

“I am not smiling! I am very upset at the death of our father.”

“Because it’s our dad? Or because the de Medicis had the nerve to kill a MacKilligan?”

“Does that matter?”

“Charlie!”

Charlie waved her sister’s recriminations off.

What she needed at this time was to understand what was happening.

Had they hunted down her father to kill him?

Or had he been dumb enough to go to them?

She’d only killed the de Medici patriarch because he’d come to her without warning and begun the conversation with threats to her family.

There had been no other way to deal with it, at least in her mind.

But if the de Medicis had hunted the idiot down. .. ?

Berg put a comforting hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “You want me to call the cops?” he sweetly asked.

“Are you kidding—” was all Charlie got out, as her father’s body jerked and he coughed up blood; his brown eyes opened to look right at his daughter. Proving that, despite the brutal, normally life-ending wound—even for a honey badger—the old bastard wasn’t dead.

He. Still. Wasn’t. Dead!

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Charlie roared, startling shifters for miles.