my tongue.
He was right, of course. By overreacting, I’d encouraged Deimos to go for Katja—I’d stoked his interest in her.
But that didn’t matter. If he tried anything, I would rip him into bite-sized pieces and feed him to the wolves that patrolled the prison grounds.
We were all in here together. I could watch her day and night. Even if my fated was a witch and not the fragile human I had always envisioned, I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
That was a promise.
Dragons kept their promises.
And if Deimos didn’t back the fuck off, he was going to learn that the hard way.
4
Rafe
What a day.
Ordinarily that phrase never crossed my mind—what a day—because I slept all day, like any regular vampire. But in this hellhole, the bastards in charge were trying to change my base programming, turning the few of us in red jumpsuits diurnal rather than nocturnal. Up all day, locked in all night. At first, I hadn’t been able to sleep a wink come nightfall, body alert after a day of hiding in the shadows, determined to avoid every sunbeam possible throughout the penitentiary. Elijah assisted with that, of course, using his massive shifter body to shield me if I couldn’t scamper into a corner fast enough.
Contrary to popular belief, vampires did, in fact, need sleep. Not much, but if blood was in short supply or we hadn’t fed in a few weeks, our bodies started to shut down. After all, fueling such a powerful machine came at a cost, and sometimes sleep was the only way to top up the battery. The first few months in prison had been a never-ending nightmare while I’d adjusted to the new sleep schedule—and never mind the new feeding regime. Vampires were allotted five tablespoons of blood a day. No choice in the type. Always served cold. Utterly ridiculous.
Just another tactic to control us. The collars around our necks were designed to cull magical ability. Specific runes stopped shifters from shifting, ensured gargoyles didn’t turn to stone come sunrise, and kept that one phoenix in Cellblock A from bursting into flame and regenerating. But vampires weren’t magical beings. We were organic—blood and bone and teeth, we were animals, much like humans. The collar around my neck dulled my strength to a degree, and I couldn’t zip around at lightning speed anymore, but otherwise I was a fully intact being—more so than any other inmate in here.
They couldn’t fully control me with this ridiculous strip of leather, no matter how many runes they carved into it.
Probably why there were so few red jumpsuits roaming the halls.
But that meant the twats running this facility relied on other means of control—cue the sleep and blood deprivation. Fortunately, by month six, halfway through year one of twelve, I’d figured out how to doze off once the sun dipped below the horizon. By keeping to myself, by sticking with Elijah, the least confrontational super I’d ever met despite his alpha status, I kept my energy reserves in check. At this point, I was practically in hibernation mode. Twelve years was just a blip to an immortal, but if I wanted to survive, if I wanted to walk out of here one day a fully formed man and not a shuffling corpse, then I had to lie low and conserve.
And sleep.
Sleep as often as I could, for as long as I could.
A task made infinitely more difficult tonight—because my new neighbor wouldn’t stop crying. The witch was on hour two at this point after the guards had bolted us in our cells at curfew, and I was surprised she had any tears left to shed.
Her breath suddenly hitched, and my eyebrows shot up in the snippet of silence that followed, but I sighed curtly at the sound of her hand clapping to her mouth, followed by muffled sobs that, to my sensitive hearing, especially when I had nothing better to concentrate on, weren’t really all that muffled.
For God’s sake.
Lying flat on my back on the slip of paper the prison dared label a bed, I recrossed my ankles and picked at nonexistent cuticles. With the blackout window covering removed, starlight filtered into my private cell, no more than a six-by-twelve rectangle with a single bed, a wooden table to hold any supplies the guards hadn’t swiped yet, and a toilet by its most basic definition in the corner. Not much to look at in here, the walls, floor, and ceiling constructed of dusty stones—it would have made me