“I guess you heard, huh, Max?”
“I heard a little. Yes.”
Unable to help herself—curiosity being her main weakness, damn her bear genes!—Betsey leaned over so she could peek around the corner. Max now stood in front of the imposing Alpha female. Big shouldered and slim-hipped, with gray and brown hair, she towered over the tiny badger.
“You understand, don’t you? Why you can’t stay? It’s nothing personal, I swear. We just have to protect our pups, and your younger sister, with her recent mood swings, puts our pups in danger. You understand that, right?”
“I understand,” Max replied . . . still smiling.
The Alpha leaned over, patted Max’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell Charlie myself. And I promise, we will not just send you out into the world alone. We’ll arrange something for you. Something safe. Okay?” With a soft, sincere smile, she turned to go, but Max’s voice stopped her.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t giving you permission to tell my big sister that our baby sister is too much of a freak to stay here among your boring, useless, stable pups.” Max was still smiling and Betsey knew that wasn’t a good sign. Not a good sign at all. “She’s under enough stress and I don’t want to add to it. And other than snarling at your pups every once in a while, Stevie isn’t a threat to anyone here. She just needs quiet sometimes. The howling wears on her nerves, which isn’t exactly surprising when you understand that she is almost positive that she knows when the world will end—during our lifetime due to climate change and a coalition of dictators turning on each other.”
The Alpha faced her again, attempted to remain calm. “I don’t see how that’s our—”
“Both my sisters need to be here right now. It keeps them calm. It keeps them . . . I won’t say ‘happy’ since neither is what you’d call happy. But they’re not hysterical either, which is great. I mean, the reality is that the three of us won’t be here much longer. Any day now I’m expecting Stevie to get a call from one of these big universities with an invitation to work at some fancy lab where she can get some more degrees and hopefully prevent the end of the earth as we know it. You just have to wait a little longer.”
“I’m sorry, Max”—and the Alpha did seem truly sad—“but that’s just not going to work for our Pack. I’m sure you and Charlie will understand that.”
Still smiling and with a sweet laugh, Max said, “Oh, you misunderstand again. This isn’t a discussion. I’m actually telling you that if you upset either or both of my sisters, I’ll kill you and, possibly, anything you might remotely love.”
And still she smiled.
As with most wolves under threat, the Alpha’s softness disappeared in a blink, replaced by hard, animalistic rage. “What . . . what the fuck did you say to me?”
“I know I was clear and concise. Because I don’t have to beat around the bush. You see, I’m trained. Trained to kill. Not maim. Not harm. Not disable enough to give me time to get away. But to kill. And, quite honestly . . . I’m really fucking good at it. I have to be, because it’s up to me and Charlie to protect Stevie. She has great work to do. She has a world to save and she can’t do that if she’s making meth for a Peruvian drug lord. And Charlie . . .” Max let out a long sigh before her smile returned. “She has the weight of the world on her shoulders. All she cares about is keeping Stevie from being captured and used by the government or drug lords or whoever else my father has tried to sell her to. She has had so much stress in her young life that it shocks me she has not gotten an ulcer. Yet. So we trained, Charlie and me. To protect our sister—our family. Because the three of us and our grandfather are all we’ve got. Which is why, of course, we couldn’t join the military. Great training but a little too limited and restrictive for our needs. And me getting up at five a.m. every day with some dude yelling at me? Yeah. That wouldn’t last long. So our neighbor . . . a few farms over . . . former Marine, former Navy SEAL, former Black Ops. He taught us everything he knows. All we had to do was take care of his cats when he did mercenary jobs. And I fucking hate cats. But I did it.” She stepped closer to the Alpha female and, based on the expression the wolf shifter now wore, she finally understood what she was truly facing. Not some poor girls with no one to care for them. No, she was dealing with something else. Something brutal and untamed, with no feeling for anyone they didn’t consider “family.”
“So let me be clear that when I say I’ll kill you . . . I mean it.” Her grin widened. “I’ll kill you and have you buried before the sun rises. It’ll be like you never existed,” she added with a laugh. “So, yeahhhhh. You’re going to let us stay here. You’re not going to bother Charlie. You’re definitely not going to say anything to Stevie. And if you even hint to my baby sister that she’s in any way unstable or mentally unwell . . . I’ll dismember you while you’re still breathing. And, in case you’re concerned, because it seems like you’d be concerned—you’re clearly very caring—I won’t miss a lick of sleep or have any PTSD over it. Your screams will mean nothing to me, because I won’t give a fuck. Why? Because I’m a cunt. I’m a raving, raging cunt. At least that’s how my last boyfriend described me as the EMT guys were shoving him into that ambulance.” She clapped her hands together. “So we understand each other, right? We never have to have this conversation again?”
Without meeting Max’s eyes, the Alpha shook her head. “No. We won’t have to discuss this again.”
Max let out a relieved sigh. “That’s great. Really. But don’t worry. I promise you, we’re going to be out of here in another month or two. As soon as we hear from one of the many universities trying to woo Stevie to their campus but definitely after I graduate since Charlie’s made it a personal goal for herself that I get my high school diploma. The things she worries about, I swear!”
Betsey scrambled back to her spot against the wall. She couldn’t hear Max moving, but her scent became stronger as she neared the stairs that led to the hallway.
Max came up the stairs, entered the hallway, and headed down toward the kitchen. But when she was right in front of Betsey, she stopped. Slowly Max turned her head toward Betsey, then raised her forefinger to her lips. “Shhhhh,” she said, as she had the first time Betsey had met her.
“Max!” Charlie barked, coming down the hallway toward them. “If you want to eat, you better get to the kitchen. That ravening horde of yours is devouring everything I made.”
“Do you mean my basketball team?”
“Whatever,” Charlie tossed over her shoulder as she headed up the main stairs toward the second floor.
Smiling, Max walked off, leaving Betsey to slide down to the floor, resting her chin on her raised knees and staring blindly ahead at the wall in front of her.
After a few minutes, her mother stepped in front of her. “Honey? Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she lied. “I’m fine.” She licked her lips and added, “But your next birthday . . . you’re coming to Chicago to visit me.”
chapter ONE
Nine years later . . .
Max MacKilligan didn’t see it coming. For once. But how could she when she’d been so focused on the white kid nap van and her ice cream cone? It wasn’t until her psychotic cousin grabbed her from behind and yanked her deep into the alley that she realized the bitch had been standing behind her.
Flung to the ground, her ice cream tossed off somewhere, Max didn’t even have time to put her arms up to protect her face before she was hit again and again. First with a fist and then . . . ? A crowbar?
Christ! What was with this woman? Why did her cousin hate her so much? This was the second time she’d tried to kill Max. The second time she’d come after Max specifically. Not even sending someone else to do the job, but coming herself. Why did the bitch have it in for her? Max didn’t even know Mairi MacKilligan personally. She was from the Scottish side of their family and even the American side barely recognized Max and her two sisters. Until recently, the Scottish had paid them absolutely no mind.
Maybe this was a hate crime. Maybe Mairi just hated Asians. Max was half Chinese. Honestly, Max really didn’t know. Usually people had to get to know Max MacKilligan before they started hating her.
But then Mairi screamed and Max was able to look up in time to see that her cousin had been shot several times in the chest and stomach by a long-range rifle. She praised her solid decision not to do all this alone and scrambled to her feet, ignoring the pain in her face and skull from where her cousin had cracked her with that damn crowbar.
Of course, this beating of one cousin by another was pretty meaningless. Because Mairi and Max were honey badgers. Gunshots to the chest and stomach . . . ? That didn’t kill their kind. Crowbars to the head? Nope. That wouldn’t kill their kind either. It took much more than any of that to actually do serious damage to a MacKilligan.
Still, Max was on a mission here, so she moved with purpose, scrambling over her cousin and charging out of the alley, across the busy Leiden street, and directly into the plain white van that held the men hired to kidnap her.
When Max hit the inside of that vehicle she looked at the men, expecting a sense of urgency about their job. But all they did was gawk at her. Like idiots. What were they doing? Didn’t they have a kidnapping to perform?
She waited another few seconds until she saw her cousin, bleeding from all her gunshot wounds, stumble out of the alley. Max didn’t have time to wait for these men to get their shit together.
“Go!” she ordered them, pulling the black hood over her head. “Go! Go! Go!”
* * *
Mairi MacKilligan stood on the corner and watched the white van speed off. People ran up to her, speaking to her in some fuckin’ language she didn’t understand, attempting to help her. As if she had time for any of that. She wasn’t like these people. Boring, useless full-humans. Easily destroyed by the slightest shot to the body. So, no. Mairi didn’t need an ambulance and Christ knew she didn’t need the fuckin’ coppers.
So, she turned away from all those panicked people and headed down the street to her car. Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she stopped long enough to answer.
“What?” she demanded, slapping away the people still attempting to help her.
“Bosses want you back,” a male voice ordered. “Our people will pick you up at the airstrip.”
The call disconnected. Not even a time given! Idiots!
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she raged, realizing she had to get back to Rome right away. She had to get to that fuckin’ airstrip before her twin aunts’ hired men came looking for her. Mairi wasn’t supposed to be here. She wasn’t supposed to be going after her cousin.
But she really hated that bitch, and nothing would make her feel better about life and the world in general than seeing the little twat dead.
* * *
The black hood came off and he saw her for the first time.
This was her? This tiny woman with purple hair and a few bruises on her face? She was the reason an entire unit of ex-military had been hired to snatch her off the Netherland streets?
He didn’t understand why they were here. Why they’d grabbed this girl. Especially when their jobs mostly consisted of wiping out small villages at the behest of cold-blooded warlords. But the man who’d hired them wanted her, and he wanted her alive, although he didn’t seem to care how she was treated in the interim. Again, strange. Usually the ones who made these kinds of orders had very specific requests—whether to treat the victim as a princess or to manhandle her for some sort of petty revenge—but this guy had been beyond vague. The only thing he’d been specific about? To not trust her. To use metal cuffs and make sure they were tight. And not to ever let her “off the leash.” Usually kidnap victims were so terrified and panicked that they could be released from bondage after a few days. They never tried to make a run for it, always assuming their rich families would pay the ransom demand.
This girl, though . . . she was literally a nobody.
Crouched in front of her, he brushed her hair off her face, and dark brown eyes locked on him. He didn’t see panic in those eyes, though. Didn’t see fear; despite the fact the kidnappers were all wearing black balaclavas to cover their faces.
Her unconcerned gaze looked the group over, studying them. Patowski, standing behind him, said, “If I were you, little girl, I would just stay quiet and wait until this is over. Don’t give us a problem and you’ll be just fine.”
One of the men turned on more lights in the private airport hangar and Zé took in the bruises on her face. The blood dripping down her swollen chin from her damaged lip.
Anger welled up inside him. An anger he’d been well known for when he was a U.S. Marine. His anger and, as one fellow Marine put it, “your sense of annoyance at the very presence of most human beings,” had gotten him some nicknames that should have insulted him more than they did. “Lord Unhappiness” was a personal favorite and “Colonel Fussy-Bottom” was another that almost made him smile. But the one his former teammates used the most was “Captain Destructo.”
Seeing this girl’s face made him feel very Captain Destructo.
Assuming he knew who had done this, he stood and pushed the kid, Anderson. Although Anderson had gotten an honorable discharge from the Marines, Zé could sense that was only by the skin of his teeth. He was sure the kid had wanted to stay but the Marines had wanted him out. And seeing the way the boy enjoyed hurting others, Zé wasn’t exactly surprised. Why the team leader had picked Anderson for this job, Zé would never understand, but he wasn’t close enough to anyone to find out. Maybe it was simply because the kid would do anything they told him to. Anderson didn’t have much of a moral compass.
Zé snarled at the kid. “What did you do to her?”
Anderson’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me. What did you do?”
“Nothing! One second she was disappearing into an alley and a few seconds later, she was charging into the van.”
Zé frowned, confused. “She what?”
“I’m telling you what happened.”
“It wasn’t him,” a female voice announced, and they all looked down at her. Once the hood had been removed, she’d been sitting there, gagged, her arms handcuffed behind her back. Now the handcuffs and gag were on the floor, and her free hands were briefly scratching her scalp.
Pointing at her face, she said, “This was courtesy of my cousin. I guess she followed me here, to the Netherlands. The woman is obsessed with me.”
She opened her swelling mouth wide and immediately winced at the pain, placing her hand against her jaw.
“It’s not like I was the one who left her in prison all those years,” she muttered. “Why is she coming after me?”
“Get me an icepack,” Zé ordered Anderson before crouching in front of her.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Trying to make me feel safe there, green eyes?”
“Not particularly, no.”
She laughed at that but abruptly stopped, frowned, and then out of goddamn nowhere, she leaned in to him and pressed her nose against his neck. And Zé could be wrong, but it seemed like she was . . . sniffing him?
Zé froze, wondering what the fuck was happening. It was over in less than five seconds, but in that brief time, this tiny woman had managed to completely disturb him. And it didn’t help that when she leaned away again, she asked, “What are you doing here?”
He had no idea what that meant, but it didn’t matter. The other men heard it and their attention was immediately on him.
Confused, Zé admitted, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have to know what I mean. What are you doing here”—her gaze bounced from man to man for a moment—“with them?”
Christ, this idiot was going to get them both killed.
Zé tried again. “Lady, I don’t know you. And you can’t even see my face.”
“No. But I can smell you. And, of course, you don’t know me . . . but you k
now me.”
Now just annoyed, Zé snapped, “What the fuck does that even mean?”
“You know exactly what it means.” She frowned in confusion and her head tilted to the side. “Oh, my God,” she said softly, her eyes widening, “you honestly don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
Zé felt the muzzle of a semiauto pressed against the back of his neck.
“Yeah,” Patowski growled, “he doesn’t know what?”
“He doesn’t know what he is, and I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“What he is?”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded, smiled. “He’s a cat.”
Which was weird enough, but then to illustrate this comment, she lifted her hands, curled her fingers like they were claws, and made what could only be called a “rowrrr” sound.
A moment before, the barrel against his neck had been pressing down hard, but now it loosened and Patowski asked, “What?”
“You know. Kitty. He’s a kitty-cat.” She shrugged. “Well . . . actually . . . he’s a jungle cat, I think. Cats definitely aren’t my thing, but he’s not a lion or a tiger. Those are scents I’m well acquainted with.”
The gun moved away from his neck and Zé stood.
“Oh, boy,” Patowski sighed, removing the balaclava and revealing his face. A move that didn’t bode well for this woman. And when all the others did the same . . .
Uh-oh.
But Zé also understood their reaction because this woman was clearly insane. He needed to save her, but she was insane, which would only make his job that much harder. He’d thought he’d be dealing with some scared-to-death rich girl that he could move around as needed while he got her out of here and took down Patowski’s operation at the same time. That was his current assignment. Look, he knew from personal experience that leaving the military life behind was not easy. Civilian life had many challenges and none of the camaraderie most of these men had been used to. But to simply forget about the laws of the land so one could make a few bucks by kidnapping, murdering, or doing anything else someone with cash asked one to do was a shitty life decision in Zé’s estimation.
Badger to the Bone Page 2
