Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,117

stay up all night, exhausting himself, hurting himself, chitchatting with the witch responsible for maiming him.

Curled around Tully, I muffled my sorrow in his fur and let the guilt drown me, let the loss stab me, let the heartache scar me—because I deserved nothing less. I’d planned to navigate Xargi Penitentiary alone from the beginning, and it was time to get back to that.

No matter how it made me feel.

No one else was going to suffer on my behalf.

I’d make damn sure of that.

23

Fintan

I cocked my head to the side, the sludge on the tray in front of me forgotten, and then let out a little chuckle of disbelief.

“What the fuck is she doing?”

We four were a tribe—me, Katja, Elijah, and Rafe. It was known. When we had the chance, we did everything together. Moved everywhere together. My time in Xargi thus far had been a lot of long conversations about nothing and everything with these three supernatural creatures—beings I wouldn’t have stooped to associate with before I’d been pinched, but now couldn’t fathom going the day without. It was why I pushed for patience with Elijah even when the battle lust shone so brilliantly in his dragon gaze. I too longed to tear Deimos apart, behead a guard or two—flip this whole fucking system on its head and then burn it to ash.

Fae were warriors.

Impulsive, reckless, petty warmongers who were never content with peace for long.

Had a moment of impulsive, petty recklessness not guaranteed I would lose the witch, shifter, and vampire I had come to consider my own, I would have lashed out long ago.

For I had already spent far longer inside these grim walls than anticipated, and I was getting antsy. Bored. Annoyed.

Now they’d gone and beaten my girl.

Deformed my vampire.

Enraged my dragon.

I craved vengeance just as much as the next jumpsuit.

But patience, control, and calculation would carry us so much further in here.

This morning, however, had started different than all the rest: Katja wouldn’t look me in the eye—and I knew she so adored my eyes. She lost herself in their sheen frequently, and I let her, smitten with the woman who saw me for me and not my wealth, status, or ranking relative to a fucking chair that my father had roosted in for centuries.

Yet today this treasure who saw me for me refused to so much as glance at any of us. She put herself at the front of the line, ahead of Deimos’s gang, for the dull march to the cafeteria, purposefully separating herself from the tribe, and then plopped down all by her lonesome at a table far, far away.

Not even that little rabbit shifter kept her company…

I did a quick sweep of the dining hall, frowning. The little rabbit shifter was nowhere to be found, actually. Curious. And a bit unsettling, given what had happened to Rafe.

Katja sat with her back to us, hunched over, slowly and methodically shoveling this morning’s gruel into her mouth. A few moments later, a scrawny inmate in a green jumpsuit settled across from her—a new elf from the greenhouse, if I wasn’t mistaken—and they ate in silence.

Peculiar.

“She’s doing what she thinks is right,” Elijah muttered. We three sat side by side today, Rafe in the middle—as if Elijah and I had subconsciously decided to protect our disabled vampire while he stared glumly at his test tube of blood, deep in a full-blown existential crisis. Ripping open my carton of lukewarm apple juice, I peered around the brooding vampire and arched an eyebrow.

“Yeah? And how do you know that?”

Breakfast completely abandoned, Elijah carried on burning a hole into the back of Katja’s skull, jaw clenched, his cheeks tinting a dull dark pink the longer I waited.

“She and I…” He shook his head as he snatched up his spork. “I… It’s just a thought.”

Right. I’d always thought alphas were better liars when it came to their mates.

It was a percolating theory these last few weeks, born just after I fucked her in the shower and saw nirvana in my climax. Although Elijah struck me as protective by nature, he also seemed to give very few shits about anyone else in here. But Katja? The rage in his eyes, the loss of all logic and self-preservation, suggested he would give his life for her. Possibly even for Rafe too. I’d seen it all play out one too many times, a soapy production of a shifter guarding his mate, and, in turn, roping the rest of us into the