Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,100

of paint on his shiny exterior could change that.

Surprise, surprise: he had orchestrated Ewan’s death. Only a year older than me, the middle child, the second Fox son, my brother had drowned on a hot July afternoon at our family’s cottage. Back then, Jackson had been all about kayaking. Dad had been obsessed with chopping wood and making the best bonfires after sunset. I used to enjoy flitting around between all of them, going wherever the wind would blow me.

And Ewan was usually in the lake from morning until dusk, swimming and leaping off the tire swing and cannonballing from the edge of the dock.

Lloyd had hired a shifter assassin—a seal shifter, different from a selkie in that they could shift from man to beast and back again at will. The assassin chased my brother around the lake, herding him away from the shoreline, exhausting him, then grabbed his ankle, dragged him to the murky, mushy bottom… and drowned him. Just like that, this piece of shit with all his money and his grudge and his bruised ego stole my best friend from me.

I’d been eight at the time.

While I remembered the aftermath, Dad finding Ewan’s pale, limp body washed up on the shore, the hours before were a haze. At some point, I’d been in the lake with him—then climbed on Jackson’s kayak and took a tour of the smaller inlets. Back to the cabin for lunch. Watermelon slices in the hot afternoon. A book in my hands, bathed in sunlight, my hair drying into tight red ringlets that I’d since outgrown.

But beyond that—

“Kitten.” Lloyd snapped his fingers as another bolt of lightning cut over the black, a gust of wind splattering the windows with rain. Seriously, could he have chosen a more ominous day? The warden—gangster, kingpin, villain, bastard—cleared his throat and tapped the mahogany top of his desk. “I asked you a question. It’s rude to ignore a superior.”

My teeth sank into my cheeks, but I unclenched when the pain became too sharp, on the verge of flooding my mouth with a metallic tang. Was he my superior? As far as I was concerned, Lloyd Guthrie was no better than the dirt—a step below the sludge on the shower walls. Slowly, I forced my gaze in his direction, and I let him know precisely what I thought about him with a glare…

Which only seemed to delight him.

“Well?”

Still angled away from him, body language reading loud and clear that if I wasn’t trapped in this chair with thinly veiled threats, I’d be all the way across the room plastered against the windows. Grey light spilled in through the huge panes, the room lit only by Lloyd’s twin desk lamps and the odd blast of lightning. He cocked a greying eyebrow, then fished out a pack of cigarettes from the inside of his jacket.

“No,” I croaked tersely. The first time I sat in this chair, I’d ended our little meeting by vomiting all over the hardwood. Today, I had a better grasp on my anxiety, months of prison time bolstering my confidence—but not enough to quell the churn of my gut and the pounding of my heart. Being in the same room as him, even if Lloyd and I didn’t exchange a single word, made me wish the ground would just open up and swallow me whole. Palms slick with a nervous sweat, adrenaline had been stabbing through me for the last half hour, my body primed to bolt. It left me light-headed and nauseous, all that fight or flight wasted while I was stuck in this damn chair. “I don’t remember hearing his screams.”

Lloyd clucked his tongue at me, then lit his cigarette with the end of his wand. A flicker of flame preceded the pungent waft of burning herbs that only made my queasiness worse.

“Pity,” he murmured after his first puff, easing back in his huge, intimidating chair in that pristine suit, sporting the same perfectly side-swept salt-and-pepper hair, clean-shaven and leering. I attempted to gulp down the lump in my throat again to no avail; while not a single tear had fallen since Cooper marched me into the warden’s den, the floodwaters had been rising ever since he dragged me out of the cellblock and away from the three men who made me brave in Xargi. Frightened as I was of the gangster seated across from me, I refused to let him see me cry this time. Refused to allow him any power over me—refused to