Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,153

lying: the three of us barely fit, the square footage made even smaller when Tully came prowling in. Lit by a single soft orange light hanging somewhere way up high, the room was narrow but exceedingly tall, magicked to fit the narrow shelves creeping up three of the four walls. Free-floating and less than a foot in length, hundreds of little wooden blocks dotted the walls, and on each sat glowing crystals of all colors and sizes, the shelves stamped with a small copper plate.

Etched into the copper: a number.

Identification for each inmate.

A crystal assigned to a number… powering the collars.

Magic vibrated in the air, unseen but present, foul enough to make my stomach turn.

“Oh, gods,” I whispered, a hand over my mouth, eyes watering. Every trip to the cafeteria was a reminder of just how many supers and shifters the Guthrie empire had kidnapped since Xargi Penitentiary opened, but seeing it all now, dozens upon dozens of crystals pulsing with power and color in the shadowy room like we were standing in some screwed-up nightclub…

It hurt.

And it put things into a painful perspective. I hadn’t seen Willow in almost a month; was she one of these crystals, or had she tried to remove her collar? Did the color dim when an inmate died? Were the unused crystals then tossed outside, just a bit of useless rock, lost in the pebbles that guards and wolves stomped all over without a care in the world?

“What was my number, you bastard?” I demanded, voice wavering for the first time since I climbed on top of him and slashed at his throat. The warlock peered around Rollo with a sneer.

“You were unassigned, kitten,” Lloyd purred, totally unfazed when Rollo slammed him into one of the walls, a handful of crystals tumbling to the floor around him. “Never officially an inmate—just a guest of the warden… I kept you safe in my pocket most days.”

He patted at his chest, at the hidden pocket my crystal must have sat in.

Close to his heart.

Ugh gross.

“Enough,” Rollo barked, his voice like a cracking whip. “Give me my brother’s crystal—I assume its destruction will remove his shackles?”

“That’s the basic premise, yes.” Lloyd squirmed in the fae’s grasp, his shirt collar stained red as his neck wounds continued to ooze. “Unfortunately, I can’t recall Fintan of the Midnight Court’s inmate number off the top of my head… If you’d let me peruse the records, then maybe—”

Rollo went off like a bomb, detonating a blast of primal fae magic that knocked me back into the door and shattered every crystal in the room. Like the east wind exhaling across a grassy plain, power whooshed through the tiny space, whipping our hair around, the tassels hanging off his helmet dancing. Crystals reduced to powder, the room came alive with color, grains flying up my nose and in my ears. Tully lost his footing, swept up in the mini-tornado, and I threw an arm over my eyes against the raging dust storm.

And as quickly as it started, it stopped. I yelped as all the floating particles poured down, blanketing my shoulders, my hair, piling at my feet. Slowly, I lowered my arm, blinking the bits from my lashes, resisting the urge to dig a knuckle in there and rub away the itch.

“Right,” the fae prince muttered, wiping the dust from his armor with a frown, “sorted.”

In the storm, there was distraction. Rollo had released Lloyd at some point—and made no move to cuff him again. After all, the warlock’s usefulness had run out, the task completed, which left him free to—

“Ah, ah, ah,” Lloyd sneered, snatching up a disoriented Tully by the scruff of his neck. My familiar yowled, flailing, claws out, and my heart pitched into my gut as Lloyd wrapped a hand around his head. Wild grey eyes darted to Rollo, and he clutched Tully tighter when I scrambled toward them, my familiar’s neck so vulnerable, so easily broken with one sharp jerk. “Move and I snap his neck, kitten.”

Fucker. I stilled, the tiny room made even more claustrophobic by the panic clawing up my throat, the mounds of shattered crystals at our feet.

“I have no quarrel with you, fae,” Lloyd insisted tersely. “Take your brother and go, but the girl comes with me. By a blood deal, she is my property.”

Rollo said nothing, did nothing, just looked back to me with a slightly quirked brow. Shit. Fae respected contracts; they dealt in them regularly. If I nodded, I was