Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,21

first month. They made you give bank details, right?” My nod had her rolling her eyes, the clear one a warm dark brown. “You can only have a max of twenty dollars in your account at a time so nobody cleans out the shop, but you can expect they’re already charging you rent for your stay in paradise.”

Fantastic. In five years, I’d probably walk out of here with nothing—especially if someone seized Café Crowley in my absence. Hopefully—please—Annalise would start a search for me as soon as she realized I wasn’t there. Because if I hadn’t opened the café, she had to know I was either kidnapped or dead.

“First day here?” the shifter asked as I glowered at my disgusting eggs, which, after a taste test, proved to be overcooked, a little dry, and… well, exactly how I imagined greyish eggs would taste: downright terrible.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I muttered, moving on to the orange juice carton. It might have been lukewarm to the touch, but after peeling the plastic lid and taking the tiniest sip, it at least tasted like fresh oranges, albeit almost too tangy for my liking.

“Innocent?”

I glanced across the round table at her, eyebrows shooting up. “Uh, yeah. You?”

“Figured. You’ve got the look.” She popped another miniscule piece in her mouth, delicate and deliberate in the way she ate this crap. “They said I trafficked kids.” Her eyes watered, and she busied herself with her muffin, sniffling. “Because apparently the only reason for a rabbit shifter to have so many kids in their home is because I, I dunno, trafficked them in.” She looked up helplessly, her lower lip trembling, and it was then I noted the faint rings around her eyes. Not sleeping all that well in here either. Another sniffle prompted her to swipe the back of her hand under her nose, and she shrugged. “I just… We have a lot of kids.”

Rabbit shifter with a whole gaggle of kids? Yeah, that checked out. Many shifters reflected their animal counterparts in their everyday lives, and rabbits were said to have a boatload of offspring. Rabbit shifters, meanwhile, were rumored to have harems, usually consisting of a single female and multiple males. As I did a quick sweep of the pretty shifter across from me, I wondered just how many husbands she had waiting for her on the outside—and just how many kids was a lot. She didn’t look much older than me, and at twenty-nine, I was still in the “thank the gods I’m not pregnant” phase. Thank you, magically brewed birth control. The stuff lasted a whole year when done correctly, and despite my abysmal love life, I still had needs—needs that I scratched every few months to mediocre results.

No babies yet.

But the shifter across from me looked like it killed her not to have her babies by her side. Her whole face had fallen, and she picked miserably at her muffin in silence. My heart almost broke for her, but I swallowed hard and steeled myself. After all, this was prison. Innocent as she looked, nice as she sounded, this rabbit shifter could be a psychopath. Maybe that was why no one was sitting with her.

“I… I’m sorry,” I said at last. While I wasn’t about to accept everything that came out of her mouth, she’d have to be an A-list actress to pull off the pain in her eyes right now. Well. Eye. “That’s so awful—to be a mom accused of that.” Her slight nod and a much louder sniffle tugged at my heartstrings, and I cleared my throat, pushing through. “They said I… sold love potions to humans.”

She snorted, blinking back what looked like a sudden rush of tears. “Oh. Wow. That’s embarrassing. Don’t go around telling people that if you want any sort of reputation in here.”

“I’m sure I can jazz it up,” I mused, a barely there grin stretching across my lips for the first time since I’d arrived as she chuckled. “I’m Katja.”

“Willow,” she offered with a bob of her head. I still wasn’t sure about the policies on physical contact in here, but I figured neither of us wanted to attract a guard’s attention by shaking hands. Willow stabbed her spoon at her eggs, her little half-smile faltering before she went back to picking at her English muffin. “I wish they had, like, a speck of green on here.”

“I bet it’d be wilted.”

We swapped smirks again; nothing bonded two complete strangers like complaining about the same horrible