Born to Be Badger (Honey Badger Chronicles #5)(115)

“I didn’t let them do anything. By the time I heard about any of this, he was dead. Katzenhaus didn’t want to blow up their organization by turning cat against cat. And BPC doesn’t tell their bears what organizations they can work for. If some bear gets killed in a drive-by, they send flowers to the widow and go about their day. There was nothing left to do but start a war. Something no one wanted. So it was left alone. Except . . .”

“Except?”

“The Malone brothers wouldn’t stop looking for the people who killed their father,” Mads said.

Savta nodded. “Yes. They still weren’t much of a problem because they weren’t close to the rest of their family or involved in the government. But then”—she stared hard at Tock and her teammates—“they joined up with you.”

“And they knew we’d never stop either.”

“You are also unaffiliated but still have many contacts. Including me. The mistake, it seems, was for Giuseppe to come here to talk to Charlie MacKilligan on his own. And you can stop smirking,” she said to Max.

But Max couldn’t stop smirking. She even tried, but the smirk stayed on her face.

“What can I say?” Max finally asked. “She’s my hero.”

Before her grandmother could say something vicious to the honey badger she loathed most of all, Tock said, “You need to go.”

Shocked, Savta looked at her. “Emily—”

“You need plausible deniability, Savta. You need to go.”

“Whatever you’re thinking—”

“We never stop. We never back off. And we never lose with grace.”

“The honey badger motto,” Rutowski said with an approving nod.

Staring at Tock for a few more seconds, Savta grabbed her purse and sunglasses and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Tock then looked at Mads’s aunt and her friends, but Rutowski smiled and shrugged. “We’re in. Like you, we’re also unaffiliated, which really pissed off Reagan . . . and Bush.” She smiled at her friends. “Such good times.”

*

Shay sat on a picnic table, watching the dogs sleeping under the summer sun, his daughter in his arms. She’d climbed into his lap to give him a hug and then fell asleep with her head against his chest and her arms and legs tight around his body. He didn’t want to wake her from her nap, so he just held her.

And when Tock placed her head against his shoulder, nothing had ever felt so perfect before.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m great. You?”

“Good.”

“How long do we have to stay here?” he asked.

“Rutowski said you and your brothers could stay as long as you want.”

“Tell them thanks, but no thanks.” Keane stood in front of them as Finn and Mads came up from behind. “We’re going home. I already called Mom. She’s coming back. Bringing the aunts. It’s time for us to decide where to go from here.”

“And where’s that?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not going to stop until every de Medici is dead.”

Shay nodded. “So a thoughtful, rational plan. Good to know.”

*

It took a while to track Charlie down. But only because they never bothered to look up. While everyone else was on the ground floor, she was sitting on the roof of the Van Holtz Hamptons mansion. Just staring.

Everyone worried when Charlie started baking, especially what Max called Charlie’s Extreme Baking, when she just baked and baked and baked until she’d driven herself to exhaustion. And there was good reason to be worried about that.

But for Max, the real concern came when all Charlie did was silently stare. No screaming at Max. No worrying about Stevie. No cuddling with Berg. No giving a Van Holtz the finger. Not even thinking about her dogs. Because all she was doing was staring. To Max, that was the most frightening Charlie of all, and Max didn’t get frightened.

She sat by her sister, their feet braced against the roof tiles—the only thing holding them up there. Sure, Charlie could have stared from the part of the roof that had been built to hold a large number of people for a party, including chairs, a barbeque, and a wine fridge. But nope. She’d decided to hang out on the steeply sloped part of the roof like an angry bat contemplating the end of the world.

“So what do you want to do?” Max asked her sister. “Anything you say . . . we’re in.”

“This is normally where I say we run them to ground and we kill them all. But I’m not in the mood to hunt right now. In fact”—she put her arms behind her, propping herself up a bit—“I’m feeling a bit more . . . Max-like, at the moment.”

Max grinned. “Really? So you wanna start some shit?”

“I do. And if the de Medicis want a war, I say we give them a war. A badger war.”

“Okay,” Max replied. “And what’s the first step in a badger war?”

Charlie finally looked at her, and the grin she now wore was broad and beautiful.

“First,” Charlie said, “we make them bleed.”

“Because they already made us bleed?”

“Yes. And now they’re gonna bleed, too. Only not just with blood.”