Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,18

fucking warden still inside, she burst out crying again. Again. Sobbing, probably beneath both hands, she sounded like she was trying her best to keep it in as much as possible.

For my sake?

Christ.

Her breath hitched, and something strangled and deeply sad shuddered from what I remembered to be a pair of rather full lips. Strange detail to recall in the heat of the moment, but I was desperately starved in here. Starved for blood and sane women. I mean, all the ones in here were beautiful; supernatural men and women were usually attractive. Predatory advantage to be lovely.

But Jesus, she was still going.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I despised a wailing woman.

And not because the sounds grated on me, or that all the emotion irked me—I wasn’t a heartless bastard, no matter the stigma surrounding vampires—I just never knew what to say. As a man who prided himself for his words, my vast vocabulary shriveled up to single syllables in the face of a crying woman—especially one I was determined to make stop.

So, without thinking, I launched into one of my originals. A poem from two centuries back, one that had beguiled crowds at pubs and sailors in bunks. I’d written it about the Wild Atlantic Way, the stretch of cruel, breathtaking coastline that ran the full length of my darling Éire. It was a land I knew well, savage in its splendor where the sea met the land, home to selkies and merfolk. Passages to fae realms dotted the shoreline, which turned the Atlantic bitter. The poem came out of nowhere, a limerick I hadn’t thought of in centuries, yet it flowed seamlessly from my lips now, lines about the sea and the storm, the calm and the tempest, the beauty and the terror.

And when I finished, my voice soft as it always was for poetry, Katja had fallen silent. Briefly, we experienced a quiet unknown to me during my stint in prison so far—and it was magnificent. Surrounded by stone and starlight, we both lay there on either side of the mousehole, my words slowly fading into the ether—

My eyes snapped open.

What—the fuck did I just do? Panic-recited poetry to make a woman stop crying?

Aghast, I licked my lips, mouth suddenly too dry. “I just thought—”

“That was beautiful,” she whispered through the hole, full lips right there—like she had murmured her praise into my ear. Heat flared in my chest, but as I lay there on my back, stiff and still, I was suddenly acutely aware it was no longer embarrassment that ripened inside me.

But something else entirely.

Something—strange.

Unwelcome, especially in a place like this. I’d already decided months ago that no one could affect me. No one could move me to pity. No friends. No flirtations. No nothing. Just me and Elijah and our survival.

Then along came a witch, fated to my best friend, her voice like silk, like the gentlest mist of the first spring rain, and I—

“Thank you,” I gritted out, only because I should. No one had admired my poetry in decades, my current work erring toward a blend of tabloid journalism and hard-hitting news, depending on the publication and the pen name. Occasionally I put out the odd fiction—one psychosexual thriller had recently been optioned for a TV series. “I, er, used to be a poet… in another life.”

“I run a café in Seattle,” she told me, her voice thick and tired—exhausted, really, every word laced with a weariness I knew well, the sort that settled into your bones. I felt it here with the lack of blood, the isolation, the injustice of being ripped from my life and brutalized by warlocks in uniforms. She cleared her throat, and I blinked the flash of rage away. A quick peek through the hole showed she had rolled onto her side, one beautiful blue eye gazing at me again. “I don’t have any pretty words to describe it though.”

I too lolled onto my side, my cheek to the dusty stone, same as her.

“It’s nice to meet you, Katja.”

A tear careened down her pale flesh and plopped onto the floor. “It’s nice to meet you too…”

We stared at one another for a beat, that blue orb suddenly dancing about, and I bit back a grin.

“Rafe.”

“It’s nice to meet you…” She shuffled closer. “Rafe.”

Excitement fluttered about in my chest at the sound of my name on her tongue. Abort. Abort!

“Good night, Katja.”

She blinked back at me. “Good night, Rafe.”

Another unsettling tingle, my dead heart skipping a beat despite the fact it had been