Page 61 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

Once inside, the door closed and locked, she walked around him in a circle, yelling at him in French, and confusing the hell out of him.

Not only because he didn’t speak French and he had no idea what she was saying, but because he hadn’t actually done anything yet.

So how did she know to pull him away . . .

Keane sniffed.

The woman wasn’t a woman. She was a fox. An Arctic fox.

Keane rolled his eyes. He didn’t have time for the antics of foxes!

The most irritating and frustrating of shifters!

Yes! Even more irritating and frustrating than honey badgers!

Foxes were a breed that mostly spent its time following after wolves for food and liquor or aligning themselves with bears .

. . for food and liquor. Of course, when his kind met foxes in the wild, they usually just ate them.

At least that’s what he assumed. He didn’t really know.

Not a lot of foxes attempted to hang around Malones.

She continued to yell at him until he finally said, “I don’t understand you! I’m American!”

She briefly froze. “American?” she repeated, but in that French way that made it sound like he could not have said anything worse. When Keane nodded, she threw her hands up in the air before grabbing his arm again and pulling him toward the back of her store.

She was still speaking, in French, which he still found annoying. And he didn’t want to go anywhere with her. He wanted to leave, he wanted to find—

The female shoved him into a backroom. There was another door that led to the alley behind the store, and he was about to walk through that door until he heard a “ding” and, from the left side of the room, what he thought was a closet turned out to be an elevator.

That’s when she said the first word he’d understood.

“Allez! Allez! Allez!” she verbally pushed, while gesturing with her hands.

Go. She wanted him to go.

Confused by the elevator, he allowed her to harass him into the small space; Keane forced to lower his head and shoulders so he sort of fit.

She followed behind him and, within seconds, they were traveling beneath Paris.

When the elevator doors opened again, Keane stepped into another world. A world of foxes. All the foxes. Arctics. Reds. Grays. Even a fennec walked by in her fox form, stopping to sniff him, before making a “blah!” dog-sound and sauntering off again. It was rude.

“Allez!” the first fox loudly ordered again, using her hands against him to push.

At first, he didn’t let her move him, because she needed to understand that despite his casual attitude on her bossiness, he was still able to tear apart every fox in this room—despite their vast number—if he so decided.

He just wanted to make that clear. Which he did by standing there and glowering.

Once he got his message across, however, he let her push him out of the elevator and into the giant underground space.

Thankfully, the ceilings were much higher, so Keane could stand at his normal height.

While his escort walked off, yelling for someone named Elise, Keane took a moment to get his bearings and he figured out the deal pretty fast.

While a small portion of the enormous space was being used by seamstresses for the clothes they sold upstairs, the rest was being used by thieves.

There was a pile of empty wallets about ten feet from him.

Other foxes brought in boxes of assorted high-end electronics from another elevator that was so big, he assumed it was taking that stuff from a loading dock above ground.

Then there was the section he was sure Nelle would love. Designer clothes; shoes and boots; and bags. So. Many. Bags.

Unable to help himself, Keane walked over and picked one up.

He opened it, looked inside . . . and smirked.

Fake. These were fake bags that he bet cost the foxes a few cents to make and that they sold for thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A lot of Birkins and Chanels and Fendis.

Not far from all these bags were more that, when he looked at them, he realized were definitely not fake.

Those, Keane guessed, were stolen. Like the cases full of diamond-encrusted jewelry that stood across the room like sentries for thievery.

Nelle would probably be surprised he could tell fake from real when it came to bags, but he’d learned that from his mother, because she refused to take anything from a Malone that she wasn’t assured was the real thing. She had no desire to go to jail for trading in “hot goods.”

“I am much too pretty to go to prison,” she’d tell him. “Although I do look fabulous in orange.”

“ ’Allo?”

Keane turned, blinked.

“Down here, genius.”

He looked down and saw another tiny fox standing in front of him. Her accent was French, but at least she spoke English.

And yes, Keane knew he was being a typical American right now, but he was stressed out and angry. He didn’t have time to worry about being a respectful tourist in a foreign land.

“Is Babette correct?” the Tibetan fox asked.

“About what?”

“Were you about to shift in the middle of Paris? Like some idiot?”

Keane leaned down so the female would understand him perfectly.

“I. Want. My. Honey badger back! ”

“ Mon Dieu, ” she sighed, her body leaning away from his yelling. “I hate the cats.”