Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,16

sob uncontrollably too, I suppose, if I hadn’t slept in something worse below deck during my human years.

Through the two-foot-thick wall separating us, the witch’s breath came faster suddenly, descending into panic, perhaps even hyperventilation. I scrubbed my face with a groan, both hands fluffing, then smoothing my coarse black scruff.

This was supposed to be a dragon’s fated mate? Her?

I rolled my eyes when she sniffed, long and deep, sucking back two full nostrils of snot.

Yeah, she was beautiful, all petite and porcelain and freckled, her hair like fire and her eyes like sapphires. That fit the mental image of a dragon’s mate, what with their penchant for all things shiny. Back in Britain, Elijah’s countryside manor dripped with wealth courtesy of his innate urge to hoard treasures, and witch Katja was pretty enough to warrant a place on his wall.

Yet from what I’d seen today, both in the cellblock and the dining hall, she was also quiet and standoffish, distant and dour. And now she was sobbing, probably on the verge of passing out if she didn’t get her breathing under control.

Honestly. Her? Fated to Elijah?

I just couldn’t see it.

But he was one hundred percent certain—and he should know. Shifters just felt… so… deeply. I couldn’t imagine existing with so much swirling around inside me, all this feeling—both human and animal—and never mind that literal other creature, not metaphorical in the slightest, always desperate to get out. Even during my moodiest stint as a starving human poet, I had never gone that deep. What a nightmare.

But Elijah was a nightmare I had put up with for eight years—my first and only real friend in six centuries. When he’d told me over supper that he and this Katja woman were fated, I’d believed him because I owed him that much, but my God did it piss me off, because now I would have to babysit him. His reaction anytime they were in the same space, anytime he could see or smell her, was totally unacceptable in our current environment. If he acted out, a guard would notice.

And they’d have a grand old time making him pay for it.

Sadistic cunts.

For six long months, he and I had flown under the radar. We didn’t get involved with other inmates. We let bad shit happen because it wasn’t our job to stop it. Trapped inside a highly warded prison, with warlock guards strutting about flashing their wands—compensation for the smallest cocks on the planet, probably—every two seconds, wearing collars that kept Elijah from shifting into the magnificent and downright brutal dragon he could be—we were fucked. No sense in making a bad situation worse by involving ourselves in drama.

Katja brought drama.

A lot of it.

Because Elijah couldn’t keep his shit together, and after eight years of living in a cottage on his property, writing and thriving and living my best life with a friend, I gave a damn about him. Unfortunately.

So, even if I didn’t think this mewling witch deserved to be the fated mate of one of the most decent shifters I knew, the only one who didn’t play the political games, Elijah believed it. He had connected with her in an instant—and it was biological, something he couldn’t help, couldn’t avoid even if he tried. So. Fine. If fate had selected her for him, for my best friend, my shifter brother, then perhaps I owed it to him to make her shut up.

Er. I mean. Calm her down.

And then maybe, just maybe, I could get an hour or two of sleep tonight to replenish my wasting body.

Shrouded in darkness and speckles of unfettered starlight, I finally—begrudgingly—rolled off my bed. The springs creaked and groaned, and my bare feet touched down on cool stone as soon as I was upright.

I waited a moment, listening, not needing to strain—

Still crying.

Damn it.

Scratching at the back of my neck, I stood, then dropped to my knees and crawled to the little mousehole that stretched between my cell and hers. The place was full of cracks and holes, vermin alive and well—just another means to torture innocent supers, all so the warden could show off the first supernatural prison in the world.

Not that we needed one, but obviously someone was in the mood to make money. Prick.

Humans had been doing it for decades—for-profit prisons—so why not us? Why not punish a community that already had to hide in the shadows, a community full of its own regimented laws, a community at war with itself half the time