Page 74 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

“O ooh, bacon.”

Keane took the platter of bacon from the Russian’s hand and sat down at the table, but Nelle wanted to know what they were doing next. Because she was ready to go home. Now.

“Why are we still here?” she asked Rutowski, who had been using a fresh baguette to “swordfight” with a willing Yoon. Because that was completely normal behavior for two fifty-somethings with children and careers!

At her question, Rutowski did that thing again. The thing that made her look like an irritated sixteen-year-old girl dealing with her uncool dad.

Head dropping back, mouth open, eyes rolling and crossing before huffily announcing, “You ask so many questions !”

“Because this seems insane to me. To still be here!”

“Well, we had to allow you time to keep fucking,” álvarez joked, before being distracted by an empty platter presented to her by a hungry tiger.

“You do have more bacon, don’t you?”

“This is a wolf house. Of course we have more bacon, but . . . it takes longer to finish an entire platter of bacon when thirty wolves are grabbing at it.”

“How does that affect me?” Keane asked.

álvarez backed away from him and pulled out another platter of bacon from the oven.

“Let’s not fight,” álvarez admonished, once she’d handed off the platter to Keane and turned back to Nelle. “If we’re going to get through this, we’ll need each other.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Nelle asked dryly.

She nodded in agreement. “I was trying something, but even I didn’t buy it.”

“We’re waiting,” Yoon said, sitting on one of the kitchen counters.

Waiting for more from that response, Nelle studied the woman who dressed like she was a South Korean teenager living in an online gaming café.

Black jeans, black high-top Keds at the moment, rather than the black boots Nelle had seen her in so far, and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a hood.

When Nelle had walked in, she’d had the hoodie pulled down to her forehead, but now she’d pushed it back and started eating the baguette she’d been using as a weapon moments before.

She had such a pretty face; Nelle didn’t understand why she insisted on hiding it.

“Waiting for what . . . exactly?” Nelle asked when the badger didn’t add anything to her initial comment.

“We’re waiting for Trace to tell us . . .” Yoon looked around the room for her friend. “Where did Tracey go?”

* * *

Keane realized his plate was empty of bacon again, so he began roaring until another platter of bacon replaced the empty one.

He began eating again, and álvarez told him, “You’re just lucky we’re used to cooking breakfast for entire packs, big kitty.”

He didn’t know what she expected him to say, and he didn’t care.

All he knew was that he was hungry. He’d had a night of great sex and was madly in love with a honey badger that sometimes walked outside into a yard in the middle of France, grabbed a middle-aged woman by her hair, and dragged her back into the house they were all hiding in.

“Get off me!” Rutowski raged at Nelle.

“I would let her go, little badger,” the Russian warned over the two females screaming. “My friend can be very mean.”

Nelle did let the older She-badger go, but she did it by throwing her across the kitchen and into Yoon.

“Why are you throwing her at me ?”

“What are you up to?” Nelle accused, pointing a finger at Rutowski. “Who were you on the phone with just now?”

While staring at Nelle, Rutowski held her phone out. Nelle reached to take it, but the device hit the floor first, and the She-badger slammed the heel of her boot against the fragile glass.

Nelle, snarling through fangs, went for Rutowski, but Keane was up and over the table before she could get her claws on her; he wrapped his arms around Nelle’s waist and pulled her away.

Rutowski’s friends stood between her and Nelle, using their bodies to hold her back.

It was not easy for any of them to keep the two enemies apart.

They were ready for a fight, and neither was giving in.

“I don’t owe you anything!” Rutowski yelled at Nelle.

“Bitch! You owe me everything! You’re lucky you still breathe!”

Hissing, enraged, Rutowski almost made it through her friends to get Nelle while Keane was busy trying to drag Nelle from the room, but she ripped out of his arms and announced, “ That’s it! I’m done.”

She slashed her arms across each other and motioned to the door. “Let’s go, Keane. We’re going home.”

Keane was fine with that. He’d been wanting to go home since he’d gotten on the jet to bring him to France. He followed her out of the kitchen.

As they moved down the hall, Rutowski called out, “I know who gave you up to Manse. It wasn’t just Jules.”

“I don’t care!” she yelled back.

“Really? Because it was done to purposely hurt your family.”

He wasn’t surprised when Nelle stopped walking.

* * *

Nelle Zhao returned to the kitchen.

Trace had known she would. She was too much like her mother not to. Not that Trace was about to say that to Zhao’s face. That was just a quick way to get a claw to the head.

Zhao stood on the other side of the kitchen table, while Trace slid onto the countertop. A habit that she’d started in childhood—much to her parents’ annoyance—and had not been able to break more than fifty years later.

The big cat stood beside Zhao now, and Trace realized these two hadn’t simply fucked.

They’d bonded. She knew the signs. The look.

The scent that came off them. It was all there.

They seemed to realize it, too. Unlike her.

In the beginning, she’d refused to believe what she had with Wolf had been anything more than sex.

She’d eventually figured it out, though.

But she’d made sure to make him suffer for making her fall in love with him.

To this day, she was still pretty mad about it, and it didn’t help one bit that her friends still called her “Blessed Lady Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Is this bullshit?” Zhao asked before Trace could say a word.

“I don’t bullshit,” she told her. “That’s Steph.”

“True. I’ve been trained in the art by my parents, who successfully ran a Ponzi scheme for forty years until they retired and moved to Barbados.”

“Still proud about that,” CeCe muttered.

“Hey! No one told that dude to involve family and friends and charities ! Who fucks over charities? Full-humans, that’s who! He deserved that prison time.”

“So, yeah,” Trace cut in before Steph could go on one of her rants, “me and Ox are straight shooters, Yoon bullshits when necessary, and CeCe is an artist, so she can do the abstract thing.”

“The abstract thing?”

CeCe nodded. “I have a very direct, unassuming way of discussing things until . . .” She glanced off and sighed out, “Flowers.”

The bonded pair waited for more, but there was no more. None.

CeCe shrugged. “See? Perfect.”

Closing her eyes, Zhao placed two fingers from each hand against her brow and stroked them across her skin several times. Trace had seen the badger’s mother do the same thing. She may have looked more like her handsome father, but Zhao was her mother’s child in almost every other way.

“Just . . . tell me who,” the kid finally said.

“You’ll never believe it coming from me.” Trace slid off the counter and picked up the burner phone she’d crushed under her foot. It wasn’t her main phone. That she still had tucked into the back pocket of her jeans.

Tossing the burner into the trash, she walked past Zhao and the cat.

“You’ve got five minutes to get your shit.”

“We’re going home,” the kid insisted.

Trace stopped at the door, looked at Nelle. “If that’s what you want. But understand . . . we really don’t give a fuck what you do. Think about that a minute and what that might truly mean to you and all of France .”

* * *

“Is it me,” Keane asked, when the four She-badgers had walked out of the kitchen, “or does Rutowski always sound like a cranky sixteen-year-old?”

Nelle leaned back so she could see his face. “Oh, my God! I thought it was just me who kept hearing that!”

She stepped closer to him. “I strongly suggest we kill all four bitches and then go home. What do you think?”

“Won’t Mads be upset we killed her aunt?”

“She’ll get over it.”

“She hasn’t gotten over you decorating her house. I’m pretty sure wiping out her aunt and her aunt’s friends will ensure she never will.”

He was right, of course. But these females!

“If we let them off to do whatever they want in France . . .”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Nelle said to Keane’s justified worries. “We’ll have to come up with some bullshit excuse as to why they must come back with us, and then we’ll let someone else deal with their crazy when we’re safe at home.”

“All right. I think we can—”

Keane slowly turned his head away from Nelle and stared out one of the kitchen windows.

“What’s wrong?”

He didn’t reply, but he didn’t have to when he started sniffing the air—nose twitching, brow furrowing—low, quiet growls coming from the back of his throat.

Nelle walked past him and went to the back door.

She stepped out and looked around at the beautiful yard and deep into the forest of trees surrounding the back of the property.

She still didn’t see anything, but the light summer breeze changed direction, and she smelled .

. . shifters. Different breeds and species, but they were definitely shifters.

She returned to the kitchen, but Keane was gone.

When she heard something right outside, she immediately slid into one of the lower cabinets, pulling her legs in tight, and closing the door.

A few seconds later, she didn’t hear anything, but she scented a cat.

Cheetah. She could hear him sniffing, trying to find her scent.

He stopped in front of the cabinets and, when he started to pull the door open, Nelle kicked her legs out, sending the cat flying across the room.