“Fine.” Benji motioned for Charlie to take a seat but she just stood there. Still not speaking, that blank expression on her face.
Honestly, Max found that blank expression much more terrifying than Charlie’s obvious-anger face. But that could be because she really hadn’t seen that expression before. It was new and Max wasn’t crazy about new when it came to her family.
Benji took a moment to let the silence settle before he said, “We want you five to work for us.”
“We’re not rats,” Mads announced. “I won’t tell you anything about my family.”
Nelle cringed and Max informed her teammate, “That’s not what he’s talking about.”
“It’s not?”
“No. So shut the fuck up.”
“Your teammate’s right, of course. You see, we know how talented you all are and we want to put those talents to work for us.”
Nelle smirked. “So you’re starting a basketball team?”
“Of course not.” He stretched his arm out, hand open, and the grizzly turned over a batch of red folders. “We’d like to utilize your other talents.”
“Our other talents?”
“We’re not fucking anyone for some spy job.”
Max turned in her chair so she could look at her teammate. “Again, Mads, I don’t think that’s what he means so maybe shut up.”
“Again, she’s right,” Benji said with a smile. “I’m talking about your other skills.”
He tossed one of the folders across the table so it landed in front of Tock. “Three months ago, uranium stolen from a Russian lab, the entire event somehow managing to take thirty minutes—precisely.”
Another folder landed in front of Nelle. “A year ago, a truckload of gold bars taken from outside the Vatican.”
A folder in front of Streep. “Six months ago, a billionaire—who escaped justice even though he liked his conquests . . . rather young—found with a bullet to the back of his head and his two-hundred-million-dollar impressionist art collection gone.”
He stopped and stared at Mads. “Shockingly, I have nothing on you. Either you’re really good or . . . very boring.”
“That’s just rude,” Tock muttered.
“But your family,” he said. “Now that is some fascinating shit. But we didn’t have space for the number of folders we’d have to use.”
Benji moved around the table until he stood behind Max. Now he slowly leaned around her and placed a thick red folder on the table in front of her.
“Then there’s you, Miss MacKilligan.” He stood straight and patted her shoulder. “And then there’s you.”
He began to pace around the room. “I mean, where do I start? The diamond heist in Uruguay? The missing Gutenberg Bible from Paris? Or the tapestries stolen from the Vatican Gallery of Tapestries? That’s a good one, too. Happened in the middle of the day with a full crowd of tourists mulling around, waiting for the pope to arrive for a visit. Now that, ladies, is skill.”
Max focused her gaze on the unopened folder. She couldn’t look at her sister because she knew Charlie wouldn’t be happy. In fact, she might hate her. Charlie had tried so hard to keep both Max and Stevie out of trouble and away from a “typical MacKilligan career.”
She knew Charlie wouldn’t just be disappointed in her, but ashamed, and that was something Max couldn’t deal with. Because the only other person Charlie was ashamed of was their father and Max never wanted either of her sisters to see her that way.
“What is the point of this?” Mads asked, the only one among them who seemed to have found legal ways to occupy her time between basketball games.
“You work with us, none of this ever gets out.”
Mads sat up a little straighter. “And if we don’t work with you? Then what?”
“Sweetie . . . what do you think? We have enough evidence to put you all away for a very long time. Well”—he glanced at Mads—“maybe not you, but all your family. And not just here in the States, but in places where you don’t want to go to prison.” He leaned down so his head was right by Max’s. “Just ask your mom about that.”
Wow. He’d gone there. Had gone there hard. And her friends were none too happy about it either. The four of them jumped up from the table—despite their bound hands—and started yelling at Benji. The guards he had with him immediately rested their hands on their holstered weapons. And the cops outside the glass had finally found something interesting to watch in this conference room.
Only Max stayed in her seat because . . . because . . . did it matter? Any of it? Now that her sister knew the truth. Now that she knew everything, would Charlie ever forgive her? Or just push Max out of their lives as she’d done to their father?
Max couldn’t even think about it. It was too horrible for her to even . . .
It was instinctual, the way Max shoved herself and the chair she was sitting in back and out of the way. Because she didn’t hear anything. See anything. She simply sensed a change in the air around them as Charlie launched herself across the table and directly into Benji. She didn’t take him to the ground, though. Instead, she forced him into the wall that was a solid fifty feet behind him.
Benji laughed and grabbed her upper arms, pushing her back. “I heard you’d be the problem here. The Group, Katzenhaus, BPC . . . they may all be scared of you. But I’m not, freak. Now get her out of my sight,” he ordered his team.
A male grizzly grabbed Charlie’s left arm and a She-grizzly grabbed her right; together they led her back toward the door.
“Now,” Benji continued on, “where were we?”
Charlie stopped halfway across the room, pulled her arms free, and spun around to face Benji again.
“What?” Benji asked. “What are you going to say, Miss MacKilligan, that I could possibly give a fuck about?”
It seemed that Charlie was trying to say something. She kept opening her mouth to speak but nothing was coming out. Max had never seen her like this. Charlie almost always had something to say. Usually something precise, brutal, and definitely threatening. Yet this time . . . she kept trying but there was nothing. Not a word.
Fed up, Benji simply flicked his hand toward Charlie, and the bears again grabbed her arms. This time, instead of leading, they began to drag her from the room. They got a few feet but abruptly stopped again. It took a second, but Max realized that the reason the bears had stopped was because Charlie had stopped.
With her head down and her entire body shaking, she refused to move.
Each bear took an even stronger grip on her arms with both hands and again tried to drag her from the room. It should have been easy. They were grizzlies. Max, herself, was once sent flying about a mile through trees when she’d startled a grizzly female camping in the Alps with her family. But no matter how hard those two pulled, Charlie wasn’t moving.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Benji demanded. “Get her out of here.”
“We’re trying,” one of the grizzlies snarled.
When Charlie finally lifted her head, her eyes hadn’t shifted to wolf gold, the way they sometimes did during a firefight or fistfight. Instead, they were . . . bloodred. Like all the capillaries had broken at the same time.
The muscles in her neck bulged, her shoulders seemed to extend so that they were even bigger, and her combination of badger fangs and wolf fangs extended but the canines also seemed to grow thicker and longer than usual.
Max thought for sure her sister was finally going to shift. Maybe not into a badger or a wolf, but into something else. Something amazing.
But no. She didn’t shift. God knows, she didn’t need to.
Charlie turned her hands so that she could grip the forearms of the bears holding her and then, with a roar that shook all that surrounding glass, Charlie lifted her arms—and the bears. She lifted the motherfucking bears!—and crossed her arms, sending the grizzlies hurtling in opposite directions.
“Down!” Max screamed to her teammates as a grizzly flew over them and cras
hed into the glass walls, nearly shattering them. The people in the office next door jumped to their feet in shock.
Weapons were drawn but Benji quickly threw up his hands. “No! Don’t shoot her!”
Because he knew that if he killed Max’s sister, the only thing he’d be doing would be running for the rest of his life. Max wouldn’t stop until she killed him. And if he killed her, her teammates wouldn’t stop until they’d killed him.
Benji and his crew would need to manage Charlie without killing her and, Max had to admit . . . she couldn’t wait for them to try.
* * *
Mace and Smitty both jumped up, ready to move. Both males were former Navy SEALs and were used to taking action as soon as there was trouble. That was just the way they were.
“Stop!” Dez yelled before they could go out the door.
Mace gawked at her. “You’re not going to do anything?”
Dez went to the door herself, opened it, and ordered her people: “Stand down! Now! You do nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Dez!”
She faced her husband. “I was told to observe. Nothing more. The kid said he can handle it.”
“That kid can’t handle shit!”
“Don’t get in the middle,” Dee-Ann told them.
“You, too?” Smitty asked his cousin.
“I’ve been up against that one,” Dee-Ann said, gesturing toward the older badger sister. “And if you like your body parts still attached to your body, don’t get your dumbasses in the middle.”
* * *
Once she’d tossed the bears holding her away, Charlie flexed. And it was terrifying.
Still, Max knew that at least she was safe. She always knew she was safe with her sister, no matter how mad she might be at Max. Unfortunately, her teammates didn’t have that same sense of security; hands grabbed Max and yanked her down. She managed to bang her head on hard wood and was rubbing it when she found her “afraid of nothing!” badger friends cowering under the conference room table.
“We have to get out of here,” Streep desperately whispered. “She’ll kill us all!”
“We could burrow out,” Nelle said, getting out of her zip ties easily. Actually, they all could have gotten out of their zip ties but that would have just pissed off the cops.
“We might burrow into an actual jail,” Tock explained, reminding them that they didn’t know the layout of this building.
“Let’s go for that office next door,” Max suggested, deciding it was best to get her friends out of here. “On my mark, three . . . two . . . one!”
They bolted from under the table as something—something generally human—crashed onto the floor a few feet away from them. Still, they kept moving, with Max shoving them from behind. They scrambled out of the conference room and into the office next door. When Max turned around to slam the door behind her, Imani slipped past her into the office as well.
“Don’t mind me,” she said as she moved across the room to stand by the only full-human. A Latina woman with a short haircut, a badge around her neck, and a handful of popcorn caught between her fingers.
Max moved to a part of the glass that hadn’t been damaged by the grizzly toss and watched her sister.
Charlie was attempting to make her way across the room to get to Benji but all his guards were getting in her way. One swung at her from the front, but she caught his arm and twisted. Max cringed, hearing the splintering of bone. While Charlie was busy with that male, another came up behind her with a gun and hit her in the back of the head. Should have taken her right out. Should have. Didn’t.
Still twisting the arm in front of her, Charlie reached back with her free hand and grabbed the hand holding the gun. She tightened that hand into a fist until Max could hear more bones breaking. Charlie snatched the gun from all those broken fingers and swung her arm back, hitting her assailant across the face.
Max got ready to move, terrified Charlie would do what she always did when she got her hands on a gun during a nasty fight. Go for the headshots. But with one hand, Charlie dropped the clip and cleared the chamber. Then she tossed the gun away and started toward Benji again.
The breath Max let out was shaky, but relief flooded every cell. If Charlie started killing people in the middle of a police station—shifter or no—this would end so badly, and Max didn’t even want to think about it. So she didn’t; instead, she assumed Stevie had asked Charlie not to kill anyone. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d asked and probably not the last. So she kept the request for important times like this.
The final group of six guards attacked Charlie at once, throwing her to the ground and surrounding her. She disappeared from sight as the guards swarmed her. Mads immediately put her hand on Max’s shoulder. She was afraid Max would run to her sister’s rescue.
But that was not her plan. For many reasons.
The guards continued to kick and punch for several long seconds but, eventually, they slowed to a stop and then separated, revealing a hole where Charlie should be. The curious canines practically stuck their heads in that hole while the cats and bears just dipped their fists in to see if it was a true hole.
While they were distracted, a clawed fist came up through the flooring near the door. Seconds later, Charlie crawled out, covered in concrete and wood.
“I feel like we should warn them,” Nelle softly suggested, but none of them moved. None of them tapped on the glass or gestured wildly to the angry female sneaking up behind the guards. They didn’t do any of that and Charlie went from sneaking to galloping down the length of the conference table. Literally, she galloped. On all fours. Still human but, you know, galloping.
By the time one of the She-tigers turned to see what was happening, Charlie had launched herself over the group, directly at a stunned Benji.
The guards scrambled to un-attach her from Benji’s head, but now that she had her hands on him, Charlie seemed in no mood to let him go.
She wrapped her left arm around his neck tightly, probably choking him, and fought off the guards with the other. She was mostly just pushing them back until she grabbed one of the chairs that had been abandoned by Max and her teammates.
Lifting it up, Charlie swung it, hitting the guards in their heads or chests. After knocking most out or, at least, to the floor, Charlie pulled Benji to the table, tossed him on it, flat on his back. She wrapped her hand around his throat and proceeded to drag him across the tabletop until she reached the end. He was punching her, but nothing seemed to stop her. She yanked him off the table, put him on his feet, took a step back, and then she kicked him. Right in the chest, sending him exploding through the glass conference room door.
By the time Charlie followed him into the bullpen of cop desks, the lion had crawled across the floor. He was shaking his head, trying to stop himself from passing out, most likely.
Charlie started after him but a roar stopped her.
It was the two who’d come in with Benji earlier. The grizzly was huffing, ready to charge, and the other one . . . the . . . the . . . ? What the fuck was that thing? Was he a wolf? Or a fox? She’d never seen a wolf or fox with such long legs—ridiculously long legs.
Both males had shifted and the grizzly shook his head, his anger setting off the cops in the room. None of them wanted to watch a grizzly mauling.
Charlie faced the males and, without hesitation, began to walk toward them. Another bear, a polar cop with a long white ponytail and a gray-and-black beard that made him look like a criminal biker, tried to grab her. Not to hurt her, though. To stop her from getting hurt. But Charlie just pushed his hand off her arm and, when the grizzly went up on his hind legs and roared, Charlie kicked him right in the nuts. When he bent over from the pain, she grabbed his giant grizzly head with both hands and proceeded to slam it into the polar bear’s desk. Again and again and again. When the wolf-fox thing came at her, she finally spoke, growling out a dismissive, “Oh, please!” before she backhanded the wolf-fox into the conference room so s
he could continue bringing down that grizzly’s head on the polar’s desk.
Then it came. The sound every human rhapsodized about. You know, all that Lion King shit.
Benji’s lion roar reverberated across the room and probably outside, confusing people on the street.
Charlie dropped the unconscious bear and faced him.
Benji launched himself toward her, front and back legs stretched out, maw open, fangs flashing—
And Charlie swung her fist—once. It collided with Benji’s face and sent the four-hundred-pound cat spiraling across several desks and through a bathroom door.
Charlie stood there a moment, waiting for another attack. But everyone who’d come for her was out cold or still recovering.
Finally, she let out a long breath and turned her head toward the office they were all hiding in. Well . . . “hiding” might not be the right word since the whole fucking room was made of glass.
Charlie strode over to the office and shoved the door open. That’s when Max realized that her teammates were hiding behind her. Seriously! Hiding! Honey badgers!
But Charlie didn’t notice any of them. Instead, her gaze locked with Dee-Ann Smith of all people.
She pointed a finger. “Your husband and his uncle—”
“Had nothin’ to do with this,” Dee-Ann quickly said. Usually the woman spoke as slow as molasses but not this time. “None of these people work for the Group, BPC, or Katzenhaus. And they ain’t cops. The Van Holtzes kept their promise to you.”
“That better be true, Smith. Because I warned them. I warned them all.”
“I know. It wasn’t us. This was all them.”
“Them who?”
Smith shrugged. “Got me. Ain’t heard a name yet.”
“Fine.” Charlie’s eyes—which had thankfully returned to their boring brown—lasered over to Max and her hiding teammates. “You five—out. Now.”
Max’s teammates ran out of the room and Charlie turned, following them. She assumed Max would be right behind them and she was right. She would . . . in one second.
Max walked across the room and immediately Dee-Ann backed up, throwing up her hands. “Woman, do not kiss me again!”
Badger to the Bone Page 21