“Headache?” Berg softly asked.
She didn’t bother to lie to him. She’d never believed in suffering in silence if she didn’t have to. “Yeah, but it’ll be fine.”
The once they get out of here was implied.
Charlie glanced over at her younger sister to see how she was holding up. As usual, Max was on her phone. She lived on that thing, making Charlie wonder if her sister had an entire other life that she was unaware of. Then again . . . she probably didn’t want to know one way or another.
Max stopped texting long enough to scratch the right side of her face, where she had those fresh scratches going from her eye down her cheek.
“What happened to your face?” she softly asked because she was too bored not to.
“Nothin’,” Max lied.
“You messing with that cat again? Leave the cat alone.”
Max lowered her phone. “I want her off our property. She’s spraying everything. It’s driving me nuts. Besides . . .” she suddenly added, “I can take her.”
“Dude. She’s a cat that brazenly lives in a neighborhood filled with bears. That’s not brave. That’s crazy. She’s a crazy cat and she’ll tear your eyes out. So stop it!”
Max started to reply—because she could just never let things go—but the sound of someone clearing his throat distracted her.
Charlie looked across the giant desk she and her sister were sitting in front of. The wolf male on the other side raised one eyebrow. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Well—” Max began, but Charlie put her hand on her sister’s forearm to stop her.
“Of course,” Charlie said nicely. “Please. Go on.”
“Thank you.”
This was Niles Van Holtz. Head pooch of the Van Holtz Pack. Or alpha dude or . . . whatever they called themselves.
Charlie had the feeling that Van Holtz thought because she was half wolf, she’d respond to him like the rest of the wolves in the world seemed to. But she didn’t. Because she was also half honey badger and because her wolf grandfather hated the Van Holtz Pack. “Rich pricks,” was how he described them.
And Van Holtz was rich. His family had a chain of very expensive restaurants around the world and he had private offices in almost all the major cities in the States and Europe, complete with a full staff. All those offices weren’t for the restaurant business, though. Van Holtz was also in charge of an organization called The Group. They took care of shifter problems and, to The Group, those shifter problems included hybrids. During the time he’d been in charge, Van Holtz had somehow managed to also team up with Katzenhaus, which protected the cat nation and the Bear Protection Council (BPC). Those two organizations protected their own species worldwide and, until recently, didn’t really bother with hybrids unless they had to.
But, according to a very smug Van Holtz, “That’s all changed. We protect everyone now, don’t we, ladies?”
And, at the time, he’d put those wolf eyes on Mary-Ellen Kozlowski of Katzenhaus and Bayla Ben-Zeev of BPC, and what he got back was a less than enthusiastic, “Yeah. Sure.”
Of course, the protection of the MacKilligan sisters wasn’t what really had Charlie dealing with any of these people from shifter worlds she knew very little about. It was the problem that was surrounding Charlie and her sisters. The same problem that had been making their lives nightmarish ever since they’d been born. Her father. Always her father. But this time he’d brought company with him. The Guerra twins out of Italy. Caterina and Celestina. Two very vindictive, angry wenches who were not only Freddy MacKilligan’s half-sisters—which had been unknown to Freddy and the rest of the family for most of the twins’ lives—but who had also just found out they were honey badger shifters.
Angry, vengeful, spiteful honey badger shifters.
Short of a war involving nuclear powers, there was no other worse combination in the universe.
Add in that they were very wealthy women with no real boundaries, and everyone in this room knew that the Guerra twins had to be dealt with. Quickly.
Since they’d last been seen at the wedding of Charlie’s cousin, however, the twins had gone deep into hiding and had been very quiet, which did not fool Charlie or her sisters at all.
Those bitches weren’t gone; they were plotting.
“There is something else we need to discuss with you,” Van Holtz said, his folded hands resting on his giant desk.
Ahhh, here it comes.
“About your Uncle Pete . . .”
Charlie gazed at Van Holtz; then she looked over at Max.
“Do we have an Uncle Pete?” Charlie asked her sister.
“We have several Petes. A few Peters. Most are out of Glasgow.”
“This is your Uncle Pete in New Jersey.”
Charlie stared at Van Holtz again before asking her sister, “We have an Uncle Pete in New Jersey?”
“Maybe. MacKilligans have a lot of Petes.”
“He is your father’s uncle, actually,” Van Holtz clarified.
“So he’s our Great-Uncle Pete,” Charlie said. “Yeah. We don’t know him.”
“Well, sadly, he has died.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And we believe that he was murdered.”
“Shot in the head somewhere in Brooklyn?” Charlie guessed. “Because we’ve lost a few MacKilligan men that way over the years.”
“No. He died in his bed.”
“A MacKilligan dies in his bed and you think he was murdered? MacKilligan men don’t usually end that way.”
“What makes you think it was murder?” Max asked. “If he’s our great-uncle, isn’t he, like, a thousand years old?”
“Not quite.”
“MacKilligan men, when they’re not shot in the head,” Charlie explained, “they tend to live a very long time. Sadly,” she added, thinking of her father. The man who would not die.
“There is evidence he was suffocated. Maybe with a pillow. . .”
Charlie frowned. “Are you sure he’s a MacKilligan? Because that doesn’t sound right.”
“My sister’s correct,” Max said. “Most MacKilligan siblings start trying to kill each other with pillows by the time they can crawl.”
“It’s true,” Charlie insisted when she saw the look of growing horror on Van Holtz’s very handsome face. “My sisters and I didn’t do that, of course. But, then again, we weren’t babies together. So we missed the whole infanticide period of the honey badger childhood. Anyway, what all that means is most of our family has developed a tolerance for that sort of thing. I’m not saying a badger couldn’t be killed that way, but it would take ages to put one down with a pillow. And a lot of strength to keep them pinned to the bed.”
“It’s really just faster to shoot them in the back of the head,” Max said. “We specify back of the head because shooting them in the front causes damage but doesn’t always kill. We have very hard heads. So, depending on the bullet, it may not actually rip through the skull and get to the brain.”
“And we have quite a few cousins that, if a bullet did hit them in the brain, we’re still not sure it would actually do any damage because they are that stupid.” Charlie glanced at Max. “Right?”
“Absolutely. I hit one of my cousins with a bat once . . . it did nothing. It was wood. It broke . . . on his head.”
“And Max took a really strong swing—”
“Okay!” Van Holtz barked, holding up his hand. “Please stop. I can’t listen to this anymore. What I’m telling you is that we are certain your great-uncle was murdered. That’s all you need to know.”
“And we need to know that . . . why? Exactly.”
“Because. There’s going to be a funeral. A large one. We’ve heard your relatives from Scotland will be coming.”
Charlie leaned back in her chair and stated flatly, “We’re not killing our cousins for you.”
Van Holtz’s eyes grew ridiculously wide. “That is not what we’re talking about!”
“It’s not?” Max asked. “Because it makes sense. They’ll all be in one place and we can pretty much just mow them all down. Women and children first!”
“No!” Van Holtz yelped before he looked away and took several deep breaths. “That is not what we’re asking.”
“Ohhhh,” Charlie said. “So you just want us to go to the funeral so we can spy on our family. Right?”
Van Holtz glanced over at his younger cousin Ulrich Van Holtz, who everyone called Ric.
“I see.” Charlie brushed nonexistent lint off her jeans. “Because a honey badger family is not nearly as important as a pack or pride or a teddy bear picnic.”
“I don’t think bears call themselves . . . that.”
“Look,” Ric said, “we’re not trying to have you do anything you don’t want to do. And we are not interested in family business information. But we were hoping that you could provide us with information about—”
“Our Uncle Will,” Charlie finished for the also good-looking younger Van Holtz. Did all their males look that good?
“Your uncle is a very dangerous man,” Ric went on. “We’re not even sure how he’s being allowed in the States, but he is and we want to know why he’s coming here.”
“I know why he’s coming here,” Charlie replied, glancing at her sister; Max smiled back because it was hitting her too. “If Will is coming here, he’s coming here for one reason. And that’s to make my dreams come true. He’s coming here to kill my father.” She clapped her hands together. “Isn’t that awesome?”
Van Holtz stared at them for several seconds before he admitted, “Sometimes I have no idea how to respond to you.”
* * *
Shen continued to stare at the closed cabinet door until he realized someone was standing beside him.