Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,118

drama.

“You’re fated,” I said casually before slurping down some of the syrupy sweet juice, so sugary I felt it in my molars. Disgraceful. For a prince accustomed to the finest life had to offer, the prison’s food alone was torture. Meanwhile, Rafe finally tossed back his vial with a shudder and a scowl, swallowing blood we all assumed was frozen and thawed for each meal.

“What makes you say that?” Elijah rumbled, somehow sounding both gruff and nonchalant as he poked at his sunny-side-up eggs. Overcooked, of course, without any semblance of delicious golden yolk to be seen. Always eggs in the morning—always shitty, burnt, expired, shitty eggs for breakfast. My pair curled around the edges and somehow managed to look both slimily raw and grossly chewy. Fantastic. I turned my nose up at them, opting to focus on Elijah instead. Between us, Rafe slowly spun his empty blood vial around on the table, chin on his fist, utterly miserable.

Not that I could blame him.

A vampire losing his fangs was like a man having his dick lobbed off.

Catastrophic.

“Let’s skip this, shall we?” I motioned between myself and the dragon with a thin smile. “The part where you deny and I lay out all the obvious. You and Katja Fox are fated mates. Fate brought you together here, of all places, which is quite the fuck-you in my opinion, but I doubt you would have found each other otherwise.”

Jaw muscles rippling through a clench, Elijah dropped his spork and turned his full attention on me, those golden eyes—dragon eyes, I had come to realize—just daring me to continue prying into his personal business. And I would. With pleasure.

“It’s why you protect her without question when there are smaller and more pathetic female inmates in this place—even in our own cellblock.” Not that any of us bothered with Constance and Helen; although under different circumstances, the maenad would have been a blast on a night out. “And it’s why you know her intentions time and time again. You’re linked. I mean, I have a pair of fucking eyes…” I plopped my chin into both hands, head tipped and eyelashes fluttering. “Are you two hopelessly in love yet?”

The terse silence that followed was answer enough, both Rafe and Elijah glowering at me out of the corner of their eyes as the dining hall carried on operating at its usual dull roar. Dozens of conversations raged all around us, yet ours flatlined. Perfect. Just as I’d thought too.

“Fair enough.” Thank fuck they weren’t all moony over each other; that would have been most intolerable. “I always thought the instant and overwhelming love was bullshit. In my opinion, it’s an act—like you lot think you have to be besotted from the word go.”

Not that I had encountered many fated mates in my lifetime, but I’d heard the stories, and the few pairs of shifter couples who couldn’t keep their hands off each other from the second they realized they were fated were just sickening, honestly. Just because you sensed a soulmate hardly meant you knew a damn thing about them. While nowhere near a paragon of wisdom and virtue when it came to matters of the heart, I had a brain. And a sizeable cock. And if my fated mate chewed with their mouth open… there would be issues.

“Look, you care for her at the very least—”

“Obviously,” Elijah growled. Probably more than cared for her. Katja was easy to like—harder to bed—and they seemed to share an unspoken bond that the rest of us could never touch. Nor did I want to. What they had belonged to them, just as what she and Rafe shared was hardly my business. Let him bite her all he wanted—

Oh.

Wait.

Too soon.

“And you care for her as well,” I added, nudging Rafe’s arm with my elbow, on high alert to quell any fangless vampire puns before they left my lips. The glass tube stopped spinning, and Rafe tossed his head side to side, noisily cracking his neck.

“Obviously.”

“Excellent. All our cards on the table, then.” I chugged the last of my apple juice with some difficulty, tossing the empty carton aside as a dramatic sugar-induced shiver bolted through me. “My working theory, therefore, is that your fate has extended to Rafe and me. You’re fated, and now we are all fated too.”

How else could anyone explain why I, Prince Fintan of the Midnight Court, had been picked up by a bunch of supernatural bounty hunters and tossed in prison? This was hardly