time he didn’t even have a towel. It was just all him . . . hanging out for the universe to see. “I’ll get down on my own.”
“Great.” She took a step away from the cabinet but then stopped, looked back at him. “By the way . . . did you know it’s been forty-eight hours since our last conversation?”
Zé blinked. “Wait . . . what?”
“My sister tranq’d you so you wouldn’t be torn apart by bears. She also tranq’d a bear, but he was only out for, like, ten minutes. But he’s a thousand pounds, compared to your two-hundred-and sixty, so that’s a substantial difference, right? Anyway . . . thought you’d want to know.”
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