Page 8 of To Kill a Badger (The Honey Badgers Chronicles #6)

“F uck off, fuck off, fuck off.”

Max stopped dribbling the basketball in her hands and looked over at the chairs where the team had dumped most of their stuff.

Towels, hairbrushes, phones, any sports creams with lidocaine.

When anyone took a break, they went to sit in the chair with their stuff.

But, at the moment, no one was sitting there.

No one wanted to get yelled at if Mads saw anyone, “Being lazy!”

Max heard it again. “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.”

A few seconds later, it was Nelle who walked over to a neatly folded pile of sweatpants, sweatshirt, and designer microfiber towel with a several-thousand-dollar designer handbag sitting on top of it all.

She reached into that bag and took out her phone covered in a diamond-encrusted case.

Nelle had that phone case specially made, because most cases didn’t have actual diamonds on them.

For very good reason, too. No one needed actual diamonds on a phone case that could easily be grabbed while riding the subway.

“Is that your ringtone?” Max asked.

“Only for my sister.”

“Did you tie her up and leave her in the closet again?” Max shook her head. “You have to stop doing that. It’s going to give her a complex.”

“My sister is a complex, easily diagnosable by a good psychiatrist. And tying her up in a closet isn’t why she’s calling. Instead, I’ve decided not to involve myself in this travesty called her life any longer. Hence the ringtone.”

Max loved that Nelle used words like hence and notwithstanding , and Max’s personal favorite, unbeknownst .

It was fun having a friend who could speak fancy words with the confidence of a nineteenth-century English earl.

The only reason Max C’d her way through every English class in high school so she could graduate with her teammates was due to Nelle.

“No teammate of mine is going to fail an American English class in an American public school,” she’d say.

And she said it in a way that suggested Max should be much more insulted for the nation of her birth, but she really couldn’t be bothered.

Besides, Nelle made books fun. Well, more fun than anyone else ever had.

Normally, Max liked comic books and magazines.

Who had time to read thick tomes with vaguely sexual titles like Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter when the books themselves had absolutely nothing to do with anything as interesting as sex?

But her friend always made sure Max got interesting books to read and write papers on, because their English teachers loved Nelle so much.

And anything that kept Charlie MacKilligan away from their classrooms “to discuss Max’s grades” was worth a change in the teaching plan.

“What travesty?”

“Her wedding.” Nelle sighed, looking at texts on her phone. “It’s happening in a few days.”

“Your sister’s getting married? That’s why you’ve been locking her in the closet?”

“I thought she’d see how stupid she’s being and end this nightmare. But she has not.”

“Maybe she loves the guy.”

“My sister only loves herself. And that lemon sponge cake from that Chinese bakery on Seventh. It’s going to be her ten-tier wedding cake.”

“Ten tiers? Isn’t that a lot?”

“Not when you’re having five hundred people at your wedding.”

“Jeez. Are you going?”

“I’ve been told I have to. I’m supposedly her maid of honor.”

Max glanced off before asking, “Didn’t you throw her out a window just after high school?”

“I also threw her out a window a week ago during an argument, but we weren’t that high up, so it didn’t really do any damage.

” Nelle shut off her phone. “Look, the only reason she made me maid of honor was because our mother told her to. Trust me when I say she’d rather have one of her very, very blonde friends do it instead. ”

“It sounds like you’re jealous,” Max teased. But the look Nelle gave her had her changing to, “Or you’d rather set yourself on fire than be part of this wedding.”

“She’s marrying a full-human, Max. A full-human! He doesn’t even know what she is. None of her so-called ‘friends’ do either,” she added with air quotes.

Honey badgers were known to spend most of their lives around full-humans.

They were small predators, and it was simply easier to deal with full-humans than it was to manage the obsessive nature of canines, the arrogance of cats, or the excessive food bills of bears.

But badgers usually married their own. Who else but a fellow badger would understand that when you were out until five in the morning, you weren’t cheating “with some whore,” but were actually robbing a bank or toppling an empire or accidentally burning down London in 1666.

Before they could delve deeper into this conversation, Max heard the opening music to the original The Omen movie.

She went to her pile of clothes and tossed them aside until she reached her black backpack, which she had bought on the street from some guy selling fake Chanel bags, and dug through it until she found her phone.

“I hate your ringtone!” one of her teammates yelled out.

“Sorry.” Max dismissed the call before looking at the number. She smiled.

“Tell me that’s not her,” Nelle gasped. When Max only smiled wider, Nelle did something she rarely ever did . . . she threw herself at Max, desperately attempting to get her phone.

* * *

Nelle was doing her best to get Max’s phone when that bitch called right back.

“Oh, my God!” one of their teammates yelled out when they heard that ridiculous ringtone again.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Max said with a laugh. She grabbed Nelle by the throat and pushed her back. Then she answered her phone! She answered it!

“Hello?”

Nelle couldn’t exactly make out what her sister was saying, but she could sense the fake tears from where she was, as she desperately reached for that damn phone.

“Oh, I know, hon. I know,” Max said in that soothing voice she used when she was starting shit.

“Give it!” Nelle barked, after punching Max’s hand off her throat. It was like playing one-on-one, but instead of fighting over a ball, they were fighting over that goddamn phone.

“Of course your wedding is the most important thing ever!” Max lied. “Absolutely everyone is talking about it! And you know your baby sister. She’s just jealous of the love you’ve found with your fiancée. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Nelle stopped fighting long enough to stare at Max in openmouthed shock.

“You lying little cun—” was all she got out before Max slapped her hand over Nelle’s mouth.

“You know,” Max continued on, “we can make sure she gets to your wedding. Me, and Mads and Streep and Tock. Especially Tock. You know how she is about being on time. We can make sure Nelle is totally involved, you know”—Max’s smile turned so wicked, Nelle’s knees almost buckled—“if the four of us are invited to the wedding and reception. We’ll make sure she’s there and ready to be involved.

Not only as your maid of honor,” she added with unbelievably fake sincerity, “but as your sister . A sister who loves you.”

That’s when Nelle snapped and she knocked Max’s hand away, so she could wrap her arm around the badger’s throat and drop both of them to the ground.

Somehow, Max kept up her side of the conversation while they struggled on the floor.

“Really?” Max went on. “Then it’s a definite deal, sweetie! We’ll take care of it. So stop crying and be happy! You’re getting married to the man of your dreams! Okay, okay.” Then the bitch had the nerve to add, “Love you!”

Livid beyond reason, Nelle rolled the pair so that Max was on her knees and Nelle was draped over her back.

Holding her with one arm, she pulled the other back and started punching her best friend in the face and head.

But before she could turn Max into a bloody mess, a big shadow covered them, and the size of it had both females pausing so they could look up until they saw Keane Malone’s never-smiling face gazing down at them.

“What—” he began, but a woman wearing a baseball cap that had N EW Y ORK written across the front stepped in front of him, cutting his next words off.

The hat’s logo made it look like it represented the New York Yankees baseball team or the New York Giants football.

But it was for the shifter-only New York football team.

Nelle just never bothered to learn the team’s name, mostly because she didn’t care about their name.

She had never understood America’s love for their football.

Real football was fabulous, but American football was just a chance for bear-like men—and actual bears on the shifter-only teams—to knock each other down for a few hours.

She could watch that at any shifter bar.

The female, who smelled like feline, pointed at Nelle and Max. “Are one of you the badger that told him you had a doctor who could fix his shoulder?”

“That was me,” Nelle said, tightening her arm around Max’s throat in the hopes of choking her out.

“Well, I want you to take him to that doctor now .”

Not liking how this feline was speaking to her, Nelle didn’t know whether to keep choking out her teammate or this woman. Right now . . . both were pissing her off.

* * *