Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,105

all. Someone had stunned him, his fury subdued, and Thompson waited until the hoard of footsteps shuffled away before helping me limp out.

“Boss’s orders,” Cooper drawled when we happened upon him leaning against the opposite wall, a cigarette in hand and a smirk on that smarmy mouth. “And no, you can’t take her to the infirmary. He wants her to sit in it and rethink some of her life choices. It’s a teaching moment.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Thompson demanded, his sturdy frame the only thing keeping me up. The edges of my vision darkened, unconsciousness tickling at me, beckoning me into its arms.

“You want to go ask him?”

“I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

“Yeah you did.” Cooper flicked his cigarette butt at me with a snort. “We all did. So, fall in line or get out.”

Scowling, Thompson eased me away, guiding me on the most direct route back to the cellblock. He let me take my time, every step an ordeal, my jumpsuit hanging open, my face and hands bloodied, my cracked rib slicing at my insides.

But I did it.

As soon as I spotted the door to Cellblock C, victory swelled from the well deep inside me, the place that housed all my magic. I fucking did it. I made it back to my guys, my bed, my familiar—this hadn’t broken me, and it wouldn’t. I refused to let it, refused to give in to him.

If he thought this would drive me into his arms like they were some bobbing buoy in the stormy seas, Lloyd Guthrie was the dumbest man alive. Bones healed. Bruises faded. Scabs eventually fell off. Scars became memories. I would recover from this, an hour at a time, and come out the other side stronger—just to spite him. It would be a cold day in Hell before I accepted his offer, let him own me, no matter what he did to me.

Give it your best shot.

Thompson unlocked the cellblock door and let me shuffle in ahead of him. Elijah shot up from his spot at our usual table with a roar, his shadow exploding into the silhouette of his inner dragon.

Show me the whole iceberg, Guthrie.

With a panicked Fintan hot on his heels, he sprinted toward me, and I collapsed in his burly arms with a wail, groping behind him for Fintan—for someone else to cling to as a few tenuous threads held my world together, thin enough to snap at any moment but still holding strong for now.

I can take it.

20

Rafe

“I can’t believe that piece of filth is still here.” Standing sentry alongside Fintan outside Katja’s cell, I crossed my arms and scowled at a smirking Deimos. The demon sat on his usual throne in the middle of the block, surrounded by his cronies, untouchable. His lot had been neck-deep in a game of cards for ages—someone had stolen the deck from my cell during my trip to the shop and subsequent near-murder of a demonic gnat who deserved to be ground into shark chum—and now their overlord got a big kick out of throwing smug looks our way. If I didn’t intentionally plant my feet, I would have flown across the block and ripped him apart as soon as he’d returned from the library. “He should be in solitary. All of them should—”

“I can’t believe you aren’t in solitary,” Fintan muttered, shooting me a look that demanded I just drop it already—that he was sick of me going round and round about Deimos. Hypocritical shit. I arched an eyebrow at the fae, who still had flour dusted across his green jumpsuit and a burn on his sharp cheekbone.

“What?”

“Well, obviously Cooper and Katja didn’t just happen upon that cheery bunch yesterday,” he remarked with a roll of his eyes. “Obviously it was orchestrated, and with the way things run in here, you could have easily been blamed for all of it. They could still very well shove you in one of those holes and throw away the key.”

Tully’s purring spiked inside his mistress’s cell, and I glanced over my shoulder with a clenched jaw, irritated that Fintan, for all his pompous talk, was right. What had happened to our girl had been a planned hit—how else would Deimos and the others all be out of the cellblock at the same time? One by one, they had been pulled out before supper yesterday, around the time I too had requested a trip to the shop to stock up on supplies that I didn’t need but