Breaking Badger

Book 4: Honey Badger Chronicles

by Shelly Laurenston

Genres: Multicultural & Interracial Romance; Shifters

Synopsis

It's instinct that drives Finn Malone to rescue a bunch of hard battling honey badgers. The Siberian tiger shifter just can't bear to see his fellow shifters harmed. But no way can Finn have a houseful of honey badgers when he also has two brothers with no patience. Things just go from bad to worse when the badgers rudely ejected from his home turn out to be the only ones who can help him solve a family tragedy. He's just not sure he can even get back into the badgers' good graces. Since badgers lack graces of any kind . . .



Mads knows her teammates aren't about to forgive the cats that were so rude to them, but moody Finn isn't so bad. And he's cute! The badger part of her understands Finn's burning need to avenge his father's death—after all, vengeance is her favorite pastime. So Mads sets about helping Finn settle his family's score, which has its perks, since she gets to avoid her own family drama. Besides, fighting side by side with Finn is her kind of fun—especially when she can get in a hot and heavy snuggle with her very own growling, eye-rolling, and utterly irresistible kitty-cat . . .



Contains mature themes.

Release date: August 31, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Fourteen years later . . .

The paws landed on her, hitting her upper chest. The legs they were attached to wrapped around her, and a thousand pounds of Siberian tiger flipped her over and took her to the ground.

She’d have been angry and put up a fight if machine-gun fire hadn’t lit up the sky moments later, bullets tearing across the ground inches from where they’d landed. The tiger rolled them away from the danger but the bullets came closer.

The cat pulled her in tight and used his thousand-pound body to shield her.

For a brief, panicky moment, Mads almost giggled. Because she felt like she was being shielded by a giant stuffed toy.

Refusing to become a giggling psychotic, Mads pulled herself out of his arms and climbed his body until she could look over his shoulder. She was a nocturnal shifter and she could see deep into the darkness. She caught sight of a good target and resting her bullpup assault rifle against the black-and-white fur—where was the orange?—she took aim with her weapon and opened fire. Her rifle made little noise because her team always used suppressors. They were supposed to get in and out without being seen, but that hadn’t happened today.

Because, Mads now realized, they’d been expected.

How the big cat figured into this, she had no clue and absolutely no time to consider.

She sought out another target and opened fire again. She heard her team also returning fire, as well as the tongue clicks and tiny throat growls that told her they were alive and well. It didn’t mean they hadn’t been shot, just that they were going strong. She wasn’t too worried. Honey badgers were hard to kill.

Just as she had that thought, though, something small and metal landed a few feet away from her and the cat. Mads had only a brief second to wonder what it was before her teammate Tock charged past her, grabbed her arm and yanked her up. As she moved, she screamed out, “Five! Four!”

Tock was counting down. It was never good when Tock was counting down. She’d gotten her nickname because of her obsession with time. A “nightmarish gift” Tock’s father always joked, which had made itself evident when she was still in the “goo-goo, gaa-gaa” phase of babyhood.

But organizing everyone’s time wasn’t Tock’s only area of expertise. She also had a gift for explosive devices. She knew them all. From the lowest kind, made in some mad bomber’s basement, to the kind developed by an entire array of scientists run by a government entity. And because Tock was a true info junky, she didn’t just know how to build, detonate, and disarm the world’s explosives, she’d also forced herself to learn the damage those bombs did. She wanted to understand so she never used them lightly. She never used them just because a boyfriend broke up with her or some cheerleader made her cry.

Which meant that when Tock began counting down out of nowhere, it was for one reason and one reason only.

“Run!” Mads yelled, not sure the tiger understood her team’s vocal codes.

But he was tiger. Short sprints were their way. He was nearly past them when he abruptly shifted to human and his arms reached out to scoop Mads and Tock up by the waist. She didn’t know why. They were two of the fastest girls on their pro basketball team. And even with the extra weight of their equip—

The cat jumped, taking her and Tock straight up. Tock kept counting.

“Three! Two!”

Near them, also making the insane straight-up leap, were two more Siberian tigers. One held a screeching Cass, now nicknamed Streep due to her dramatic antics on and off the courts. And an even larger one gripped both Nelle and Max.

“One! Brace for impact!”

The blast was so bright, it blinded Mads and sent the cat holding her flipping wildly and freely through the air. Something Mads did not like one bit. Even though she should be used to it by now. She’d been battered by enough predatory players over the years to have experienced this sort of thing before but still . . . she was not enjoying it at all.

At some point, the arm around her turned from human to cat as the man shifted, so when they came screaming back to the ground several million miles away—okay, it wasn’t that far—he landed like a cat. That allowed him to flip head over tail over ass so that he landed safely on all four paws. Alive and pissed. Roaring and spitting.

Mads, however, stayed human because it wouldn’t matter either way. So when she hit the ground, she hit it hard. On her back. Staring up at the stars.

In all honesty, she should be crushed by the impact. All broken bones and destroyed insides. Brains nothing but pudding. The back of her head something not even a puzzle master could put back together.

But, again, she was honey badger. So her ass was a little singed from the explosion and a couple of her fingers were broken, but they’d been broken before by rough basketball games on street courts. One eye did pop out, but Streep, of all people, crawled over to her, let out a loud, disgusted, “Ewwwww! Madsssss! That is sooooooo grossssssss!” and popped the eye back in, then used a bandana from her pocket to wrap her head.

Max stumbled over to them. Her right arm hung at a weird angle, as did her jaw, but she was alive, too.

She gave them orders but they couldn’t understand a word because, again, her jaw . . . weird angle.

“What?” Tock asked.

Max repeated her orders.

Nelle approached but seemed unable to figure out where or how to put Max’s jaw back into place.

Mads had just decided to take a shot at fixing her teammate when she was roughly pushed aside and a giant of a man stormed over. Two other men were with him and she now recognized all of them. The Malone brothers. Or, as they were called on the streets, The Black Malones.

The oldest, Keane, was also the largest. And the most terrifying. She could see him living his life in Siberia among the few remaining cats of the region. Killing any and all human hunters that came into his territory.

So Mads wasn’t exactly shocked when Keane grabbed Max’s head between his big hands and slammed her jaw back into place as if he was working on an old carburetor for free. The sound of bone being forced back into place had all the badgers bark-hissing in surprise and poor Max swinging her fists and ready for a life-or-death fight.

Nelle stepped in to calm everything down, quickly moving a livid Max away from the naked Keane before their team leader could rip his cock off with her claws.

Instead of Keane being grateful for their earlier assistance, he bellowed, “Why are you here?”

“Should we be running away?” Tock asked, but everyone ignored her. “I feel like we should be running away.”

“You—” Max paused, taking a brief second to twist her head one way, then the other with her hands. Finishing the job that Keane had started. “You seem tense,” she finally got out without any further difficulty. “You okay, sweetie?”

Mads cringed. Because she knew that Max’s friendly, solicitous tone was antagonistic at its core. A tone that caused a brave Nelle to quickly step between the tiger and honey badger. Although ecologists would call only one of these two an apex predator, Mads strongly felt the need to correct the entire field of study. Because Max MacKilligan was an apex predator in her own right.

She could change an entire ecosystem in a night if she set her mind to it. And she would do it all with a smile.

The same smile she was wearing now as she gazed up, wide-eyed, at the Siberian tiger glaring down at her.

“I’m going to go find out if we should be running,” Tock told Mads before heading back where they’d come from, motioning Streep to accompany her. The pair skirted the giant crater the explosives had opened up and disappeared into what remained of the surrounding tree line.

“You need to tell me why you’re here,” the eldest Malone brother ordered, folding his massive arms over his massive chest and then having the nerve to wait for Max to actually answer him.

Mads watched as Max’s smile grew wider. She knew a smile like that, coming from Max, would not end well and felt the need to intervene—she had no idea why. As Tock had said, they probably should all be running. She looked at the brother on her left. But he had his mouth open wide, his eyes tightly closed, and his tongue hanging out, as if he was tasting the air. It was weird to look at, so Mads turned to the tiger on her right.

“Your brother is being rude,” she said. “And if he expects to get anywhere with Max MacKilligan, he’d better back the fuck up.”

Slowly, the cat’s head turned her way and bright gold eyes gazed at her, blinking slowly before he replied, “My brother’s rude? She had her fangs dug into his balls not too long ago.”

It took a moment for Mads to remember that particular fight. There had been so many over the years with so many shifters and humans, it was honestly hard to keep them all straight. But once the memory returned in all its vicious, honey badger glory, she fought the urge to grimace and instead shrugged and warned, “Then he may want to take a few steps back. You know, so we don’t have a repeat incident.”

Finn smirked a little. Almost chuckled. A surprising response when just a few seconds ago, he was ready to wipe this entire island from the map.

And he was considered the “calm one” of his three brothers. The “rational brother” when others needed to bring something up with the family.

In all honestly, though, they weren’t doing too badly.

So far his eldest brother hadn’t bitten off Max MacKilligan’s head. Something he could easily do in his tiger form. Her head was really tiny, too, and would take just one bite. But Keane had been working hard over the last few years not to be as angry-tiger as he could be. A request from their mother.

“You keep it up,” she’d warned a few years back, “and we’ll end up having to send you to my cousins. And there are very few MacDonalds on the steppes, my son.”

While their father was “Irish down to his toes,” as he’d always liked to say, their mother’s people were from the Mongolian tribes of the steppes. Tiger shifters whose ancestors had been there long before Genghis Khan had even been born, much less a terror to all the tribes. And although both their parents were several generations American, they’d never lost their connection to the place they’d come from or who they were. And who they were was big cats.

Sure. They were human, too. But in their bones, they felt like tigers first and humans second. An attitude that they’d passed down to their three eldest sons. Which meant that Finn couldn’t help but see everyone around him as some form of prey. Not necessarily to be eaten but definitely in his way. An irritant. An annoyance. A pest.

He studied the honey badger next to him. He normally would think of the badgers the same way, except for two things. The first was his baby sister, the light of his life and the lives of his two brothers. True, she’d been a surprise to their mother. A result of that drunken night she’d spent with a honey badger male while mourning the loss of her husband. Yet none of them could regret that it had given them Natalie. Or The Nat, as her big brothers all called her.

Yeah. She was a pain in the ass. And she always found a way to start shit. And when she wasn’t starting shit, she was getting into shit. But she was amazing. Smart, funny, beautiful, and too good for the world they all lived in. But she was half honey badger and hardly a pest.

The second reason? The way honey badger shifters fought. The rest of the shifter world had its rules. When fighting your own kind, you kept it to fangs and claws. A rule that worked out for everyone in the end. Wolves and dogs might not have the strength of tigers and jaguars, but they usually had a pack of their own kind right at their back. Smaller cats might not want to go up against lions and hyenas but they were faster than the bigger shifters, and with a tree or building nearby, no She-lion could get near them.

Then there were the bears . . .

Honestly, no one really wanted to mess with the bears.

So it all worked out in the end.

Except for the outliers. The ones the rest of them forgot about. The foxes. The wolverines. The honey badgers.

The foxes were smart. They kept their enemies close, using the bears and wolves as their protection. The wolverines could disappear, making many in the shifter world believe they didn’t even exist. But they did. Happily.

The honey badgers, however, they didn’t play games. They didn’t hide. They were in your face, urging you to just try something. Go ahead! Try it! And rules, apparently, were for suckers. If you came at them with bigger claws and fangs, then they had guns and knives and bombs and the willingness to not only use all that, but to wipe out several blocks around their prey, if that’s what it came to.

Nothing stopped a honey badger because they were just so fucking mean.

And despite that smile on Max MacKilligan’s face, this particular badger was starting to get a reputation as one of the meanest of them all.

So, yeah, maybe Keane should back up a few hundred feet. He did hope to have children one day. Couldn’t do that without his balls.

“Why are you here?” Max asked Finn’s brother.

That’s when he heard the badger beside him mutter, “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“She’s answering a question with a question.”

“So?”

“That’s never a good sign.”

“What is at the moment?” Finn glanced at the badger beside him and tried something. “Why are you guys here?”

And, to his eternal surprise, she answered his calmly asked question. “We heard prey was being moved through here. We came to get them out.”

Finn frowned. “That’s a lot of firepower to free some monkeys or rabbits used for lipstick testing.”

She let out a very soft snort. “Human prey. For shifters.”

Finn’s muscles tightened in surprise and his jaw clenched. He admitted he didn’t like a lot of things in this world, but using humans like Cape buffalo irritated him. And he definitely had his problems with full-humans. He found most of them something to be swatted out of his way like fleas. But just as he didn’t want his kind shot down by big-game hunters and left stuffed in their living rooms, he felt the same should not happen to full-humans.

“Keane,” Finn called out.

His brother didn’t turn around or take his eyes off Max MacKilligan—not that he blamed his brother—but his head tilted a bit so he could hear Finn better.

“They’re not here for us. Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Let’s—”

Finn stopped talking. He’d heard something come up from behind him and turned to see the two honey badgers who’d walked off earlier now charging back. The one who had counted down to the explosion was chanting something new.

“Run! Run, run, run, run, run!”

Finn shifted back to tiger and ran into the nearby trees. When he stopped and looked back, his brothers had done the same.

The honey badgers, however, didn’t run.

They reloaded their weapons.

The cats had shifted and disappeared before Mads could even bother to tell them to do so. Good, she wouldn’t have to worry about them.

Streep went underground, literally. The rest of them reloaded and got ready for . . .

A man suddenly appeared from behind a tree. He wore all-black tactical gear, including a helmet and night-vision goggles. All of that for them? Did he know they were honey badgers? No. No way.

Whatever the reason for such heavy gear, he put it to full use, raising his weapon and immediately locking on Max and Mads. He was fast, but Mads’s team was faster.

Streep launched herself from the dirt onto the gunman’s back. With her legs wrapped around his waist, she raised her arms and unleashed her claws. Growling, she rammed them into the top of the man’s shoulders. He let out a muted scream; his knees trembled, but he managed to stay standing. Streep’s attack did lock his arms, but his trigger finger was still free. Nelle caught the weapon by its muzzle and lifted up a half second before it started firing. She jerked her head to the side to avoid getting shot and wrenched the gun away.

As Nelle turned, Tock slashed her claws and blood spurted from the gunman’s torn throat.

Just as he dropped face-first into the dirt, Mads scented more human males. She saw ten of them racing their way, weapons raised. She sucked her tongue against her teeth and dropped to one knee. Her team lined up beside her, about to start firing, but they had to pause for a moment. Their plan had been to spray the ten men running toward them. Until several of them went down and were dragged off screaming into the darkness.

The military-trained attackers immediately faced the other way with their weapons raised. Max motioned her team to move away from the line of fire. Just as they did, they saw the big cats ease out of the trees again. They’d moved around so that they were again behind the attacking males.

Tigers preferred to attack their prey from behind. So all those men facing in the opposite direction were vulnerable. The cats picked their victims and pounced . . . literally. Each brother grabbed a man by the back of the neck and ran off into the trees like a dog running off with his favorite stuffed toy.

The remaining men began shooting wildly and screaming out for their comrades. But it was too late. There were only four of them left, and Max wanted information.

Mads followed Max to the hysterical men, and when she got to the one she figured was the leader of the group, she nodded. Mads slapped his helmet off and pressed a .45 to the back of his head.

The other men spun around, ready to fire, but Max simply wagged her finger. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she said.

The men still didn’t give up their weapons . . . until they saw the rest of Mads’s team surrounding them, a weapon locked on each one of them. Without another word, the men gave up.

Getting them on their knees, Tock and Streep zip-tied the men’s wrists and ankles and Max crouched in front of the leader. She held one of her knives in front of his face but he didn’t even see it. None of the men did. They were too busy looking all around them, out into the darkness with wide, panicked eyes.

That was pure terror. Because they still didn’t know what had grabbed and dragged off their teammates. They just knew whatever it had been had not been human.

“Listen,” Max said, and when the man she was talking to ignored her, she snapped her fingers in his face until he turned those panicked eyes directly to her. She raised one of her blades. She was an expert at handling edge weapons. So she wasn’t exaggerating when she told him, “I can cut off pieces of you and be chewing on them like an old cigar before you even know they’re missing. Or you can simply tell me what I want to—”

Blood splashed across Max’s face as white fangs bit down on the head of the man she’d been threatening and tore it off his shoulders.

The remaining men screamed and desperately tried to move away, knocking into each other in their panic.

Max, however, simply wiped the blood and gore from her eyes and sighed deeply as the top of the man’s head was spit out and rolled past her.

“That seems aggressive,” she muttered.

But now the last of the men were ready to talk. In fact, they were ready to reveal anything her team wanted to know.

“The Malones!” one of them yelled. “We’re here for the Malones!”

Max looked off into the darkness and Mads knew she was staring directly into the gold eyes of the Malone brothers. After a brief moment, she nodded and re-focused on the full-humans.

“Why?” Max pushed, grabbing one of the hysterical men and dragging him back by the leg. “Why?” she bellowed when he started to scream.

“We were just told to put them down! I don’t know why!”

“For how much?”

“Three million.”

“For the entire job?” He nodded and Max released his leg so he could continue to drag himself away. It wasn’t like he could get far.

She stood and faced the team.

“So why were the rest of us lured here?” Tock asked.

Max shrugged. “Somebody’s fuckup?”

“Weird fuckup,” Mads remarked. She didn’t like weird fuckups. Then again, she was naturally paranoid. It was in her bones. She wouldn’t say she was born paranoid, but her family situation had made her paranoid. It was the only way she’d managed to survive her early years.

“True, but it’s not like we’ll figure anything out here. Let’s get back and regroup.”

They all nodded in agreement but before they could start moving toward the other side of the island, Mads heard something coming from the nearby beach. She halted her teammates with a raised hand. All of them had enhanced hearing. The benefit of being honey badgers who needed to hear prey underground. But her auditory senses were further enhanced by her hyena hearing and she could hear even the slightest sound if she focused. The turn of a bird’s head. A squirrel asleep in a tree. Or rubber rafts easing up to a coastline and men wordlessly jumping out.

“What?” Max asked.

These men, the ones who’d already been wiped out and the ones still trying to drag themselves away, were nothing more than a distraction. Something to keep the Malones and maybe Mads and her team busy until the real forces showed up.

“We need to go,” Mads said. “Now.”

“What do you want to do about them?” Tock asked, gesturing at the three remaining men with her weapon. They were still trying to crawl away, but they were so busy looking around for whatever had killed their teammates that they weren’t getting very far.

“You guys go,” Max ordered. She still had her blade in her hand. She pulled out another because she worked faster with two. Stretching her shoulders, she faced the three men, but she’d only taken one step toward them when a paw reached out from the darkness and slammed onto the head of one man, crushing it.

Another paw lashed out, ripping the face off the second. And the third was dragged into the darkness screaming. His screams ended within seconds.

Moments later, the cats trotted toward them.

“Those were my toys,” Max complained as the brothers passed her.

“Let’s move out,” Mads pushed, heading toward the location where the copter was waiting to take them back to the city.

They quickly cut through the trees but when they made it to the other side of the small island, they found no copter.

Max walked to where the copter had dropped them off only twenty minutes before. She stood there for long seconds, then faced the rest of her team and the cats, a confused look on her face. “I don’t understand. Did those bitches leave us?”

“Do you see them?” Nelle asked.

“But . . . they’re our transport team. How could they just leave us? No one just leaves.”

“Max—”

“I mean . . . I’ve never been deserted before. Ever.”

“Didn’t your mother desert you?” Tock asked.

“That was different. She was thrown in prison against her will.”

“And your father?”

“He was never there in the first place. I learned never to count on him. But it’s the transport team’s job to be here. To get us out. Who just leaves?”

Mads watched their team leader and finally noted to the others, “I think we may have lost her.”

“She seems so confused by this,” Nelle agreed.

“Look!” Max pointed at the cats now loping by her, heading toward the water. “Now they’re deserting us.”

“They’re tigers. They can swim back to Jersey from here,” Mads pointed out. “Almost five miles with no problem. We do not have that luxury. So we’d better come up with something quick.”

“We can tunnel,” Streep suggested.

“Tunnel where?” Mads asked. “We don’t know what’s between us and the city. Or even Jersey.” She shuddered at the thought of ending up in that hellscape. “Jersey.”

“Fine.” Tock pulled her weapon off her shoulder. “Then we kill everybody.”

“I scented a lot of sweaty men,” Nelle remarked, also readying her weapon. “Enough to accidentally get a good headshot on any one of us.”

“And don’t forget that we do have a game coming up.”

The entire team stopped what they were doing and looked at Mads. Even Max finally returned to the moment at hand to gawk at her.

“What?” Mads demanded. “We’re in the playoffs. We are this close to getting into the championships. But not if we’re dead.”

“Okay, okay, okay.” Max shook her head and focused on Tock. “What have you got on you?”

Tock shrugged. “Enough to take out the whole island.”

“And bring down every government organization looking for terrorists,” Nelle noted.

“Especially if you start blowing up islands near New York and Jersey.”

“You’re not even trying to help,” Max admonished Mads.

Max wasn’t wrong. Mads was known for being a bit of a Negative Nancy when it came to Max’s “Let’s kill everyone now and worry about ramifications later”-type plans. Though in truth, Mads often preferred Nelle’s “In, out, no one knew we were there until they realized their shit was missing” plans a little better because Nelle’s plans meant that Mads never had to limp onto the basketball court at the beginning of a game. Or have bullets removed from her back and neck.

When it came to Max’s plans, Mads never knew how she’d end up when the night was over. Simply black and blue? Or riddled with bullet holes that required some backroom shifter doc to yank the fragments out of her ass?

“Well, they’re coming,” Streep said, dropping to one knee and aiming her weapon. “So whatever we’re going to do . . .”

With a shrug, they all took positions behind trees or an abandoned boat. Nelle, their best sniper, climbed a tree and hid among the leaves so she could take out the best shooters first.

“Get ready!” Tock called out. “They’ll be here in five, four, three—”

The sound of an outboard motor had them all turning, their weapons still raised. The speedboat made a wide arc and pulled to a stop near the shore.

“Get in!” ordered one of the big cats, now in his human form and wearing black sweatpants.

“Huh,” Max observed softly next to Mads. “They didn’t run.”

“Why are you staring?” the cat snarled. “Move those asses!”

“Go!” Mads pushed her teammates, her gaze still locked on the men she could see moving through the trees toward them.

Nelle scrambled down the tree and ran toward the speedboat. Tock and Streep had begun to follow her when the gunfire started.

Mads heard a muffled roar and knew one of her teammates had been hit. And knew it was Streep when that muffled roar was followed by, “Dear God! I’m dying! I’m dying!”

“Get that ass up, drama queen!” Max bellowed.

Mads returned fire, mowing down a few men who weren’t fast enough to take cover.

“Mads, let’s go!”

She knew better than to turn away, so she started to walk backward, shooting as she went. Hoping to keep the men off her until she could at least reach the shore. If nothing else, she could dive under the water and come up on the other side of the boat. Or meet the others out in the middle of the water somewhere. Moving backward, however, was not easy and she started to stumble in the sand. She caught herself before hitting the ground, steadied her weapon, and was about to unleash more bullets, when screaming from the men stopped her. Two of the tigers had attacked from opposite sides, ripping into the men. They tore off arms and legs, tossing bodies and body parts through the air.

Mads was so fascinated by it all, she froze and simply watched until Max grabbed her from behind and dragged her to the boat by her collar. They were moving so fast that when they jumped into the boat, they landed on their backs and were unable to scramble out of the way before the two cats leaped in moments later. The tigers’ big, black tails slapped both Max and Mads in the face.

As the boat powered off across the water, Mads let out three loud sneezes, and one of the cats turned to glare at her with his wide gold eyes.

“What do you expect?” she snapped at him, again vainly pushing away his tail. “It’s your cat dander!”

While the rest of the team scoured the island, he stared down at the full-humans dead at his feet.

“Where are they?” the team leader who’d been hired to handle this asked.

“Not here, which is a problem.”

“This should have worked.”

“But it didn’t.”

The team leader looked around. “Let me pull everyone together, sir, and re-evaluate our—”

He had the one who had failed him by the throat, dragging him close so he could clearly understand every word. “Stop talking to me.”

When he felt the message had been properly received, he shoved the fool away and pulled his phone from his back pocket, speed-dialing a number.

“Pronto?”

“They’re still breathing,” he told his eldest brother and quickly lowered the phone from his ear when the rage-filled roaring began.

Nat slipped through the open window but she wasn’t as graceful as she’d hoped to be and ended up flipping head over ass and landing in a pile of her brother Dale’s dirty clothes, which was beyond disgusting but at least muffled any noise she might have made.

It was extremely late but her family was made up of tigers. They were nocturnal. Her brothers were probably out, but her mother was undoubtedly