Then she walked off. Just like that. As if what she’d just said was in any way a normal or reasonable conversation!
“Wait . . . what?”
* * *
Dutch walked into the communications room of the Group’s Team Center.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked the She-bear hybrid sitting in front of a bank of monitors.
Hannah was one of Dutch’s favorite people aside from Max and Stevie. Just a relaxed female who didn’t let the little things bother her. She’d had a very tough life growing up, but you couldn’t tell because she handled things so well. Although that mellowness could be because she vented any aggression she might still have in her system on the ice by playing hockey for a minor-league team.
“I thought you should see this.” She motioned to the chair next to her and he sat down. “I haven’t said anything to anyone else. Yet. You always told me to alert you first if this came up.”
“Alert me first?” Dutch didn’t remember all the things he’d told Hannah over the years, because he tended to talk a lot sometimes, and couldn’t keep track of everything he said. “About what?”
“Just got this from one of our Bulgarian contacts.”
Hannah brought up a shot of a hole in a decrepit-looking cell. A big hole. Not neatly dug but . . .
“Oh, God.”
“Renny Yang’s cell in Bulgaria,” she said. “Although once the authorities found out she’d left the country, they haven’t exactly been scouring the streets looking for her. Or alerting anyone else to her sudden disappearance.”
“They don’t want her back,” he guessed. “No one would.”
Dutch could think of a thousand things he’d rather do than deal with this right now. A thousand things! But he couldn’t avoid it. Or her.
He couldn’t avoid dealing with Renny Yang. Jewelry thief and bank robber who’d only been caught because she insisted on making very bad choices with men. Oh, Renny was also the mother of his best friend. A mother Max hadn’t seen since she was eight. Sure, they’d kept in touch via smuggled cell phones and the occasional letter, but Dutch always got the feeling that Max didn’t know her mother as well as she thought she did.
And Renny definitely didn’t know her daughter any longer. Because Max wasn’t the little girl Renny had left behind. She’d grown up with Carlie Taylor and then Charles Taylor. Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan and Stevie Stasiuk-MacKilligan were her sisters. All these people had taught Max a different way of life. A chance to be something more than a really good thief.
Not only that, but Renny was a true honey badger. She knew how to start shit. She knew how to cause problems. She knew how to blow up a person’s life and not feel a bit of remorse about it. And he was afraid that would go for Renny’s daughter’s life as well.
Sadly, Dutch had always known this time would come. Unless Renny had been put into a specially built prison just for shifters—and there were a few of those around the world—she wouldn’t be stuck in Bulgaria for long. He was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had. But Devon, also a bad choice of boyfriend for Renny, had gone too far in the last month. He’d forced Renny’s hand by going after Max. And doing that more than once.
Like most honey badgers, Renny wasn’t going to let some guy hurt her kid.
“Ric will have to be informed,” Hannah reminded him.
Ric—Ulrich Van Holtz to the rest of the world—was in charge of the New York division of the Group while his older cousin was the head of the entire organization. Dutch enjoyed working for Ric. He was calm and rational. A typical wolf, really.
Ric also ran, and was the head chef at, the Fifth Avenue Van Holtz Steakhouse, which meant that every time Dutch went there for dinner or just to chat with his boss, he got food for free. Considering how much Dutch could eat when hungry and that Van Holtz Steakhouses were shifter friendly and offered the kind of meats one could usually only obtain by big game hunting, this was one of the best job perks Dutch could get.
“Can you wait a couple of days before you tell anyone else?” he asked.
“Sure. No one’s looking for her, so it’s not a problem.”
“Thanks, Hannah.”
“Need me to do anything else?”
“Find out when she gets to the States.”
“You sure she’s coming here?”
“Trust me . . . she’s coming this way.”
Dutch started toward the door, but quickly stopped, facing Hannah again. “Any sign of Freddy?”
“MacKilligan?”
“Yeah.”
Hannah spun her chair around. “I thought you said that guy was dumb.”
“Dumb as they come.”
“I don’t see how. He’s always one step ahead of me. And I’m good.”
“Could he be working with somebody?”
“He must be. Maybe he has a new girlfriend to help him out.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Also . . . someone else is looking for Freddy. That I can tell you.”
“Do you know who?”
“No. Want me to find out?”
Dutch shook his head. “Don’t bother. We need to just find him. Preferably before he gets himself killed.”
“It’s nice you care,” she said with a smile.
“I don’t. Not about him, anyway. And Max doesn’t care either. I just don’t want Stevie to cry. I hate when she cries.”
“Softy.”
“Again, thanks, Hannah.”
She faced her multiple screens. “Anytime.”
* * *
“I tried to eat a child?”
Max nodded. “Sort of. I mean, we assumed you were trying to eat him. You had him by the back of the neck and had dragged him off to a nearby tree. But that tree has a lot of leaves, so we couldn’t exactly see what you were doing. For all we know, you were just playing with him. You know . . . testing your claws and things.”
Vargas did that thing again. He had done it a lot in the last fifteen minutes. With his elbows on the table, he buried his head in his hands and dug his fingers into his scalp. It was like he wanted to massage his brain but the skull kept getting in his way.
Finally, he looked up again. “Was anyone hurt?”
She waved his obvious concern away. “The kid’s fine. His father and uncles are a little pissed but the Kapowskis are always pissed. They’re like the pissiest grizzlies on the block.”
“I think I’d be pissed, too, if someone tried to eat my kid.”
“Allegedly.” He frowned and Max explained, “In case there’s any legal trouble. We go with ‘allegedly.’ ”
“Legal trouble? As in getting arrested for eating a child? That seems like something one should go to prison for.”
“Allegedly eating a child . . . actually, allegedly attempting to eat a child. And you were having a rough moment. We thought you had completely healed up but it seems the damage to your brain was worse than we thought, so it took a bit longer for your recovery. You feel fine now, though, right?”
“Even if I can’t tell whether this is reality or a fantasy world where I’m a cat?”
“Christ, we’re not still arguing about that, are we?” Max didn’t even bother to keep the annoyance out of her tone. If he couldn’t accept this shit after everything that had happened, he’d never be able to move forward, and Max wasn’t one to linger on things for long. What was the point? “You now know what you are . . . right?”