Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,130

down at the pistol in Katja’s left hand. No one else had a gun. Fintan had the thin blade that most guards carried on their belts a breath away from slitting his hostage’s throat, and then Elijah had… himself, nothing but a metal shield at his side.

So. Katja had shot Williams. Bang, bang. One in the leg, the other in the shoulder—if the blood pooling around the fallen, moaning, sniveling guard suggested anything. My mouth watered, but I forced myself to ignore the buffet—for now.

“What the hell are you doing?” was the best I could manage under the circumstances. Elijah, Fintan, and I had discussed whisking Katja away from Xargi, but we hadn’t gone beyond a general agreement that it was absolutely critical to get her as far from Guthrie as possible before he went full psycho and killed her.

“Escape attempt,” Fintan told me, his eyes brighter than usual, his tone suggesting he rather enjoyed the unfolding carnage. Typical fae. Must have been Unseelie as I’d always suspected. “Get with the program, Rafe.”

“What?” I stabbed both hands through my hair, frustration on the rise. “Now?”

Looming over the group, Elijah just shook his head when our eyes met, his expression twisting into something that said he understood my feelings—and to just go with it. Let it happen. Right. Sure. Totally logical and not going to fail at all.

Another explosion rocked the prison, and I braced on the doorway while Katja did the same on Elijah’s arm, more dust shuddering from the ceiling and coating the block’s common area in white—like falling ash. Like the blitz. I pinched the bridge of my nose, pushing a lifetime of memories aside, my gums still sore from the extraction. The holes had healed over, but they would never be filled.

“We aren’t leaving without you,” Katja said when the structure around us stopped shivering through the aftershocks. She studied me with wide, imploring eyes, begging for forgiveness. I’d seen that look many times in my long life, and I’d never been more inclined to accept an unspoken apology before. Only now wasn’t the time or place for this—not when the prison was probably literally on fire.

Seconds later, Tully shot out of my cell and went straight for his witch, those squeaky kittenish chirps making her whole face light up. While thrilled that we were all back on speaking terms, this wasn’t exactly the scenario I had in mind for a reunion. Watching her scoop up Tully and hug him tight, I wanted to do the same, to drag them both into my arms and whisper that I would never let her go.

That I didn’t blame her for what Guthrie had done to me.

That I would also forever possess the memory, hazy as it was, of one of my fangs plopped into a vial of acid—just so the researchers could see if it would fizzle away.

It hadn’t.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t strong enough to say any of that. So soon after the extraction, I still battled many unwelcome feelings, struggling to come to terms with the loss. Rather traumatic for a vampire to lose his fangs; we could be a stoic bunch, steeped in tradition and ancient rites, but we had all once been human—and that never quite disappeared, even for the vamps who had gone full bloodlust. Feeling was a sickness we carried from man to creature, vampirism and emotion two diseases for which there was no cure.

So. Basically I was still traumatized and needed a minute to process.

But I’d rather process with her than apart.

After all, I wasn’t the only one suffering. Katja carried her own trauma, and the thought of her trudging through all that misery alone made me ache. We needn’t talk, needn’t whisper a word through the mousehole, for us to champion the other’s path to recovery.

“Okay, so, right…” I strolled out of my cell, mindful of the sunbeams streaking out of the ones around me, and then folded my arms. “Is there a plan, or…?”

Or were we just making it up as we went along?

“This little darling is going to take us out the front door,” Fintan insisted, giving his captive a jostling for good measure. The warlock shut his eyes tight and flinched away from the knife tip poking into the soft underbelly of his chin. “They have charms to open and close the ward issued exclusively for the guards.” Hooking an arm around the warlock’s neck, Fintan used the other to jerk up his black sleeve from the cuff to the