“Finn is not my boyfriend.”
Tock stopped a third time and faced Mads. They stared each other down the way they would a player on an opposing team.
“Fine,” Mads said when the insane staring went on for way too long. “He’s my boyfriend. But, quite honestly, I don’t know if I’m his girlfriend.”
“He puts up with the rabid animal you allow to sleep on your clean sheets. Trust me. He’s your boyfriend.”
“He’s not rabid. He’s had his shots.”
“The vermin-y dog or the oversized cat?”
Mads shrugged. “Both.”
Disgusted her normally sensible teammate would do any of that for a dog that wasn’t even domesticated, Tock started walking again, her nose high, each sniff bringing her closer to . . . something. She just hadn’t figured out what yet.
They came around the corner of a container but found their way blocked. Not by another container or even a wall but by big cats. She glanced over her shoulder and found even more behind her and Mads.
The tigers—their massive size that told her they were Amurs—appeared to be dockworkers; a few were even wearing badges identifying them as such.
“Badgers,” one of them said, “lurking around these containers make us very nervous.”
That actually made complete sense to Tock. When honey badgers “lurked,” it was usually because they were about to steal something.
Having decided not to bring her guns when the docks were filled with federal agents and cops, Tock only had a tactical knife on her. But that would do the job. She started to reach for it, but before her hand could wrap around the handle of the weapon strapped to her back, Mads was holding up her smartphone toward the cat that had spoken.
The tiger looked down, leaned in a bit, and squinted. “Finn?” he finally asked the screen image. “Is that you?”
“Back off, Donovan,” Finn warned over the phone.
“Or what?” the cat scoffed.
“Or I tell your mother what you did in the fifth grade.”
The cat’s expression went from mocking to fear to anger. “My own cousin . . . the disloyalty.”
“Disloyalty?” Keane exploded from the other end of the phone.
Tock couldn’t see Keane’s face but she could easily imagine him snatching the phone from his younger brother and yelling into it. And watching the restless reactions of the cats standing right in front of them, they’d heard all this before. “You’ve got the nerve to spout off about disloyalty to us, motherfucker? Fuck you!”
“Okay,” the cat said over Keane’s ranting. “Okay! But they better not be here to steal. That’ll be a problem.”
“They’re not,” she heard Finn reply. He must have taken the phone back from his brother. “Just back off.”
The cat nodded and Mads lowered the phone, disconnecting the call. The tigers moved off without saying another word, leaving Tock and Mads alone among an endless sea of shipping containers.
“Did you tell Finn what we are doing here today?” Tock asked Mads when they started searching again.
“No. Why?”
“But he blindly backed you with his borderline-criminal Malone cousins anyway?” Tock waited until Mads looked in her direction and then she mouthed, Boyfriend.
*
“I can’t believe they actually said that to us.”
Shay cringed. His male cousins weren’t always the brightest. For the Malones, the true intelligence went to the females of the family. The males ranged from their dad—smart enough to be recruited by the CIA—to their Uncle Seán, who thought it was a good idea to tell his wife that she did look nice in that dress . . . but she was prettier when she was twenty-two.
So, yeah. He didn’t expect his cousins to think too deeply about whether it was a good idea to say some dumb shit to Finn, Shay, and Keane about “loyalty.” A loyalty the family never showed their own blood kin when Shay’s old man died.
Of course, now that Shay knew his father had been a federal agent, it made more sense that the Malones had had so little to do with their brother and his half-Asian family. Federal agents, in their minds, were no better than NYPD. Cops were cops were cops. And the Malones didn’t deal with cops.
Keane didn’t care about the Malone credo, though. The Malones had done nothing to avenge his father’s death and even less to care for his kids and wife. As far as Keane was concerned, they weren’t family at all. Just more enemies for the eventual funeral pyre he was working to build.
Shay got angry about it at times. So did Finn. But nothing topped the rage that tore Keane Malone’s soul apart.
Keane parked the SUV and they all got out.
“Do you need anything from me?” Shay asked his daughter as he helped her to put on her overfilled backpack. He saw the other kids rolling their backpacks around, but not his daughter. She didn’t want rollers on her bag. She just wanted sparkle and the Hello Kitty brand.
“Just ask Uncle Dale to look in on the dogs if you go out today.”
“Dani—”
“Please, Daddy.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
She threw her arms around his waist and hugged him. “Love you, Daddy.”
“Love you, too, baby.”
She pulled away and ran toward math camp. What his ten-year-old self would have thought of as the most boring camp ever, his daughter ran toward. Happily! He’d never seen her more excited. Well, at least she had the smart female genes from his Malone side.
“Call Dale,” Keane suddenly ordered, staring at his phone. “Tell him to stay home and take care of those dogs.”
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Because we’re going to the docks.”
“Why? What happened?”
He gripped his phone so tight, the glass started to crack. “Those motherfuckers have been texting me.”
“Our cousins? What did they say?”
“Just get in the car.”
“Keane, we’re not getting into a fight with our Jersey cousins.”
Keane glowered at Finn and, for a brief, horrifying moment, Shay was afraid he’d have to kill his eldest brother to save his younger one.
But then Keane blinked and said, “No. We’re not. We’re going there to protect Shay’s new girlfriend.”
“From what?” Shay asked.
“We can’t trust our cousins to leave her and her badger friends alone. So we’ll go there and calm the situation down ourselves.”
“Calm the situation down? By what? Starting a fight with the Malones?”
Keane shoved his damaged phone into his back pocket. “That’s on them.”
Shay watched his brother walk back toward the SUV, but he couldn’t let this go . . .
“And Tock is not my girlfriend!”
*
Tock and Mads continued searching around the containers until they got a text from Charlie telling them to meet her by the car. They had turned around, about to head back, when Mads’s head suddenly lifted and she started walking toward a big container.
She checked the door and reared back, nearly crashing into Tock.
“What?” Tock asked, steadying Mads before she could fall on her ass.