“Yeah . . . it probably did. But we have a patch for that now you can get off our website.”
“And,” Rutowski quickly cut in, moving everyone’s attention on to the last of her friends with a sweep of her arm, “this is Oksana Lenkov.”
“Doesn’t she have an adorable nickname, too?” Max asked, her voice so cutesy, it could only be mocking.
“Yes. We all call her Ox.”
Tock looked at “Ox.” She was blond. Stunning. With big blue eyes and sharp cheekbones. Dressed in thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes and shoes. She also had what could only be called a permanent sneer. She looked like she was ready to kick someone in the face with those designer shoes for doing nothing more than passing her on the street and saying, “Excuse me.”
“That is my nickname,” Ox sneered at a silent Max in a European accent of some kind. Tock would guess Russian. “I like it. Do not annoy me, tiny Asian badger.”
Eyes wide, Max looked at Tock; and as soon as that grin spread across her teammate’s face, Tock knew Max was going to make it her mission in life to torture Ox.
It wasn’t surprising, though. Max hated being called “tiny.”
*
Listening to the badgers banter back and forth was irritating Shay to no end. He wanted to get to his daughter. He wanted to make sure she was okay. He wanted to wash the blood out of his hair. He wasn’t worried about his mother. He just had to give her a heads-up and she would go underground with her sisters. She’d done the same thing with her sons when his dad was murdered. They’d almost missed the funeral the Malones had the nerve to arrange.
Yeah. He needed a phone and to get moving.
Oh. And he should check on his baby brother, too. He kept forgetting about Dale.
“I need to get my daughter,” he repeated when there was a brief lull in the conversation.
“How?” álvarez barked; clearly fed up with him. “Again. You are covered in blood and naked. There’s no way to get from Jersey to the Island without people noticing.”
“How the fuck do you know we live on the Island?” Keane demanded.
“Maybe it’s your annoying accent.”
“Okay,” Tock interjected as Nelle again placed her hand on Keane’s chest to prevent him from attacking. “Before this gets out of hand, Shay and I will go get his kid and then we’ll meet you wherever you say. Sound good?”
“Absolutely,” Rutowski replied. She handed over the keys to her Mercedes. “Take the car and meet our choppers here in”—she looked at her watch—“four hours?”
Tock looked at her big watch. Nodded. “Got it.”
“Like a last flight out of Saigon, huh, Tock?” Max joked before glancing at Stephanie Yoon. “No offense.”
“That was Vietnam,” Yoon sighed out. “I’m Korean. Dumbass.”
“Does anyone care that I’m in here dying?” Streep called out from deep inside the van.
“No,” all her teammates replied.
*
Tock texted one of her cousins—grudgingly—and found out there was a safe house not far from where Mads’s aunt would have choppers waiting for them. She drove Shay there while he stayed low in the backseat. While he took a shower in the upstairs safehouse bathroom, another one of Tock’s cousins showed up with appropriately sized clothes for the extremely large cat and Tock.
“How are you doing?” her cousin asked.
“Fine.”
“Really? Because your bullet holes are still bleeding,” her cousin pointed out. Which was true, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t fine. The wounds were still bleeding because they were healing. Bad blood pouring out so the wounds could heal up without infection. Ahhh. The wonders of being a honey badger shifter.
Not that the healing didn’t hurt. It always hurt to be a honey badger, but Tock would take temporary pain over permanent death any day.
Her cousin helped her clean the wounds and wrap them before finally leaving, briefly pausing at the front door to warn, “You know Savta is involved now, right? I mean . . . more than she was before. And old gal is pissed.”
But Tock wasn’t exactly surprised to hear that. Her grandmother protected their family with an Angel of Retribution approach that she took very seriously. Whatever Mira Malka-Lepstein might feel about Tock’s teammates didn’t matter, because whoever had attempted to kill them had also gone after Mira’s granddaughter. A mistake one simply did not make if one hoped not to have the older honey badger involved.
Once her cousin had gone, Tock packed up her stuff quickly and tossed anything with her blood on it into the trash that would be taken to an incinerator later that afternoon. By the time she was ready, Shay was bounding down the stairs, hair wet from the shower, black T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers covering up almost all the scrapes and bumps from the earlier attack.
“Let’s go!” he ordered, heading toward the front door.
Tock grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the couch in the living room.
“Sit.”
“We don’t have time—”
“Sit,” she said again, pushing him down until he was on the couch. “You’re bleeding a little.”
“Dani—”
“Don’t worry,” Tock told him as she dug into the leftover first aid supplies so she could deal with the bleeding scrape on his forehead. “I have eyes on her. She’ll be safe until we get there.”
“Eyes?” Shay lifted his frowning face, gazing right at her. “You called in your family?”
“Something like this . . . They’re going to be involved anyway. Might as well get them involved in a way I can manage. So, I’ve got eyes on your daughter, your mom, and your little brother. And my one cousin who likes dogs is picking up the puppies and the three adults from your house.”
“Seriously?”
“Dani is not going to forgive you if you don’t grab those dogs and bring them along. I don’t want her feeling any panic over this. She’s too young for that.”
He suddenly gripped her wrist, gazed at her with those big green-gold eyes. “Thank you.”
Shay said it so earnestly that Tock had to frown to keep from feeling things. She hated feeling things. Feeling things was just an annoying weakness. She was not weak.
“That’s fine. No big deal.” She cleared her throat. “We STEM daddy’s girls have to look out for each other.”
Tock pulled her wrist away and focused on the wound across his forehead.
“There,” she said, once she’d cleaned and bandaged it. The cut wasn’t that deep, so she hadn’t had to sew it closed. And she couldn’t help but chuckle when she’d first seen all the different shades of bandages in the bag her cousin brought. Her politically correct cousins wanting to make sure there was something that would match Tock’s skin tone. But there were ones light enough to match Shay’s skin tone as well and that was actually kind of cool. “All done. Now you won’t freak your daughter out when she first sees you.”
She looked at her watch. “Let’s get going. We have thirty minutes to—”
Tock stopped talking when Shay took her hand and held it.