Finn could only assume they were just too shocked by the sudden brutal attack. Over Danish?
Thankfully, her three friends were fast and didn’t seem nearly as shocked by the move. Nelle caught Max’s knife-holding arm while Tock and Streep grabbed her around the waist. With much effort, they dragged her back toward the door.
“Just let it go!” Tock ordered Max.
“Fuck him!” Max screamed. “Fuck all of them! Kill ’em all!”
“Don’t forget!” Streep reminded her. “He’s the half-brother of your half-sister!”
They were by the door and suddenly Max MacKilligan stopped fighting. The change was so abrupt that Finn and his brothers lowered their arms and braced their legs apart, waiting for another random attack. A more vicious one. And they were right to expect it. Because MacKilligan went for the jugular as only a MacKilligan could and would.
Her smile this time was not the off-putting faux-friendly grin that scared so many. This was a smile that Finn was guessing was the last thing on earth many full-humans saw before MacKilligan finished them off.
And, with that slow spreading smile, she said, “One day . . . your baby sister is going to come to me and ask me a question about men and dating”—she leaned away from her friends and toward the brothers—“and I’m going to tell her every. fucking. thing.”
Keane was nearly across the room, his hands around MacKilligan’s throat when Finn and Shay caught him and tackled him to the ground like they’d just sacked a quarterback.
“You bitch!” Keane roared from the floor.
“You don’t deserve that Danish, you ungrateful prick!” Max screeched back.
“Your Danish looks dry!”
MacKilligan gasped. “You motherfucker!”
The honey badgers dragged their hysterical friend out the side door and Finn and Shay kept Keane pinned to the ground until he finally threw them off in a burst of tiger strength.
“Get off me!”
The three brothers jumped to their feet and now squared off against each other.
“I was handling that!” Finn told Keane.
“Yeah, I saw how you were handling that. In your usual mealy-mouthed way. Letting those rats walk all over you!”
“But you did such a great fucking job dealing with it yourself!”
“They’re out, aren’t they?”
There was no point in talking to Keane when he was like this. So Finn didn’t bother. He just watched his brother storm toward the hallway, turn around, return to the kitchen table, grab a box of Danish, then storm back to the hallway and upstairs to his room. When Finn heard Keane’s bedroom door slam closed, he let out a breath.
“Can you believe—”
Shay held up a hand, another Danish already in his mouth. “I’m not getting in the middle of—”
The rest of Shay’s statement was lost to his chewing.
“How did you even get that Danish?” They weren’t standing close to the table.
He swallowed. “I was holding it the whole time.”
Disgusted, pissed, and a lot of other things, Finn was about to go to his room and try to get some more sleep. But he’d barely taken a few steps when he heard his brother’s low whistle.
He turned around and Shay jabbed his thumb toward one of the overhead cabinets.
Finn walked across the kitchen and opened the cabinet door.
That’s where he found her. Sound asleep on her right side. A pillow from the couch under her head; one hand tucked under her cheek, the other curled into a fist and pressed against her upper chest. Her hair was still in the two braids she’d worn the night before. He didn’t know any honey badgers with blond hair but maybe she dyed hers. The bruises on her face had turned black and blue but the open wounds on her neck that he’d noticed had already healed.
Fascinated, Finn leaned close to see how big this woman was. He remembered this She-badger from the night before and he recalled her being, you know . . . normal sized. Definitely bigger than Max MacKilligan, who could easily fit into this cabinet space. But she didn’t seem uncomfortable. In fact, she was snoring a little.
“Huh,” Finn said softly when he saw that the badger’s legs were tucked up and around all his mother’s seasoning jars.
How could she possibly be comfortable like that? She looked like a pretzel.
Finn began to pull back when he realized that he was being watched. He lifted his gaze to see that the She-badger was no longer asleep but was now wide awake and studying him closely.
“What’cha doing?” she asked.
“I was just curious to see how you got yourself in there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I swear it wasn’t weird.”
“Okay.”
“Your friends already left, by the way.”
“Friends?” she asked with a confused frown, but then just as quickly she said, “Oh! My teammates. They left?” She lifted her wrist and glanced at her fitness watch. “That was fast.”
“You didn’t hear any of what went on out here?”
She snorted. “I grew up in a family of hyenas.” She untangled herself from the cabinet with ease, forcing Finn to move back so she could get out. “There was never a quiet moment in my house at any time. Either I learned to sleep through anything or I would have died of sleep deprivation by the time I was three.”
She jumped from the cabinet and down to the floor.
“So how did it go?” she asked.
“How did what go?”
“Our Danish-covered thank-you? For saving us last night.”
Finn shook his head. “Not too well, I’m afraid. We didn’t really want what MacKilligan was offering.”
“Really? That’s too bad. Having MacKilligans on my team has always worked out for me.”
“You have great need for a stolen Bugatti in your driveway?”
“I can steal my own Bugatti. It was one of the first things my family made sure I knew how to do, whether I wanted to know it or not,” she said. “But when you need to get rid of that Bugatti because you can hear the police sirens thirty seconds away and you’re bleeding from the leg because your cousin just stabbed you to make sure you couldn’t run and your aunts have blocked the door so you can’t get back into the house and your own mother won’t give you bail even though you know you’re not responsible for this particular felony and you’re at that awkward age where you can be tried as an adult but you can’t move out of your home because you can’t legally sign a lease yet . . . Max MacKilligan is the one you want on your side.”
She shrugged, lifting her arms up and letting them drop.
“But, ya know . . . you do you.”
And with that, the She-badger walked out.
Finn faced his still-feeding brother and said the only thing he could think of saying in that particular moment . . .
“Huh.”
chapter THREE
The SUV stopped in front of the Queens, New York, house that the MacKilligan sisters had been living in for quite a while now.
Well, quite a while for them. The sisters really weren’t known for living in any one place for any length of time. The fact that Max had been able to make it through junior high and high school with the rest of them so that she could stay on the basketball team was an absolute triumph and was, Mads finally realized, the work of Charlie. The eldest MacKilligan sister had determined that both her younger sisters would have some kind of normalcy in their childhoods. Impossible at the end of the day, but what she did insist on was that they had a home at least until they finished high school. For Max that was when she was eighteen and graduated with the rest of her team. For Stevie that was the same year because she’d tested out of high school and went to Oxford University for something or other involving science.