He stopped and stared at Mads. “Shockingly, I have nothing on you. Either you’re really good or . . . very boring.”
“That’s just rude,” Tock muttered.
“But your family,” he said. “Now that is some fascinating shit. But we didn’t have space for the number of folders we’d have to use.”
Benji moved around the table until he stood behind Max. Now he slowly leaned around her and placed a thick red folder on the table in front of her.
“Then there’s you, Miss MacKilligan.” He stood straight and patted her shoulder. “And then there’s you.”
He began to pace around the room. “I mean, where do I start? The diamond heist in Uruguay? The missing Gutenberg Bible from Paris? Or the tapestries stolen from the Vatican Gallery of Tapestries? That’s a good one, too. Happened in the middle of the day with a full crowd of tourists mulling around, waiting for the pope to arrive for a visit. Now that, ladies, is skill.”
Max focused her gaze on the unopened folder. She couldn’t look at her sister because she knew Charlie wouldn’t be happy. In fact, she might hate her. Charlie had tried so hard to keep both Max and Stevie out of trouble and away from a “typical MacKilligan career.”
She knew Charlie wouldn’t just be disappointed in her, but ashamed, and that was something Max couldn’t deal with. Because the only other person Charlie was ashamed of was their father and Max never wanted either of her sisters to see her that way.
“What is the point of this?” Mads asked, the only one among them who seemed to have found legal ways to occupy her time between basketball games.
“You work with us, none of this ever gets out.”
Mads sat up a little straighter. “And if we don’t work with you? Then what?”
“Sweetie . . . what do you think? We have enough evidence to put you all away for a very long time. Well”—he glanced at Mads—“maybe not you, but all your family. And not just here in the States, but in places where you don’t want to go to prison.” He leaned down so his head was right by Max’s. “Just ask your mom about that.”
Wow. He’d gone there. Had gone there hard. And her friends were none too happy about it either. The four of them jumped up from the table—despite their bound hands—and started yelling at Benji. The guards he had with him immediately rested their hands on their holstered weapons. And the cops outside the glass had finally found something interesting to watch in this conference room.
Only Max stayed in her seat because . . . because . . . did it matter? Any of it? Now that her sister knew the truth. Now that she knew everything, would Charlie ever forgive her? Or just push Max out of their lives as she’d done to their father?
Max couldn’t even think about it. It was too horrible for her to even . . .
It was instinctual, the way Max shoved herself and the chair she was sitting in back and out of the way. Because she didn’t hear anything. See anything. She simply sensed a change in the air around them as Charlie launched herself across the table and directly into Benji. She didn’t take him to the ground, though. Instead, she forced him into the wall that was a solid fifty feet behind him.
Benji laughed and grabbed her upper arms, pushing her back. “I heard you’d be the problem here. The Group, Katzenhaus, BPC . . . they may all be scared of you. But I’m not, freak. Now get her out of my sight,” he ordered his team.
A male grizzly grabbed Charlie’s left arm and a She-grizzly grabbed her right; together they led her back toward the door.
“Now,” Benji continued on, “where were we?”
Charlie stopped halfway across the room, pulled her arms free, and spun around to face Benji again.
“What?” Benji asked. “What are you going to say, Miss MacKilligan, that I could possibly give a fuck about?”
It seemed that Charlie was trying to say something. She kept opening her mouth to speak but nothing was coming out. Max had never seen her like this. Charlie almost always had something to say. Usually something precise, brutal, and definitely threatening. Yet this time . . . she kept trying but there was nothing. Not a word.
Fed up, Benji simply flicked his hand toward Charlie, and the bears again grabbed her arms. This time, instead of leading, they began to drag her from the room. They got a few feet but abruptly stopped again. It took a second, but Max realized that the reason the bears had stopped was because Charlie had stopped.
With her head down and her entire body shaking, she refused to move.
Each bear took an even stronger grip on her arms with both hands and again tried to drag her from the room. It should have been easy. They were grizzlies. Max, herself, was once sent flying about a mile through trees when she’d startled a grizzly female camping in the Alps with her family. But no matter how hard those two pulled, Charlie wasn’t moving.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Benji demanded. “Get her out of here.”
“We’re trying,” one of the grizzlies snarled.
When Charlie finally lifted her head, her eyes hadn’t shifted to wolf gold, the way they sometimes did during a firefight or fistfight. Instead, they were . . . bloodred. Like all the capillaries had broken at the same time.
The muscles in her neck bulged, her shoulders seemed to extend so that they were even bigger, and her combination of badger fangs and wolf fangs extended but the canines also seemed to grow thicker and longer than usual.
Max thought for sure her sister was finally going to shift. Maybe not into a badger or a wolf, but into something else. Something amazing.
But no. She didn’t shift. God knows, she didn’t need to.
Charlie turned her hands so that she could grip the forearms of the bears holding her and then, with a roar that shook all that surrounding glass, Charlie lifted her arms—and the bears. She lifted the motherfucking bears!—and crossed her arms, sending the grizzlies hurtling in opposite directions.
“Down!” Max screamed to her teammates as a grizzly flew over them and crashed into the glass walls, nearly shattering them. The people in the office next door jumped to their feet in shock.
Weapons were drawn but Benji quickly threw up his hands. “No! Don’t shoot her!”
Because he knew that if he killed Max’s sister, the only thing he’d be doing would be running for the rest of his life. Max wouldn’t stop until she killed him. And if he killed her, her teammates wouldn’t stop until they’d killed him.
Benji and his crew would need to manage Charlie without killing her and, Max had to admit . . . she couldn’t wait for them to try.
* * *
Mace and Smitty both jumped up, ready to move. Both males were former Navy SEALs and were used to taking action as soon as there was trouble. That was just the way they were.
“Stop!” Dez yelled before they could go out the door.
Mace gawked at her. “You’re not going to do anything?”
Dez went to the door herself, opened it, and ordered her people: “Stand down! Now! You do nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Dez!”
She faced her husband. “I was told to observe. Nothing more. The kid said he can handle it.”
“That kid can’t handle shit!”
“Don’t get in the middle,” Dee-Ann told them.