Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,26

He loitered at the end of the dividing wall, leaning against the corner and peering around it. Teeth gritted, I glowered at the back of his head as I wrenched on the shower, blasted immediately with a chilly, underwhelming spray.

Seconds later, Cooper and Phillips—the latter hidden on the other side of the wall—erupted in fits of echoey laughter.

“Always nice to have a new pair of tits in this place,” Cooper mused, his voice carrying. Fire ignited in my chest, a fucking inferno engulfing me from head to toe in an instant. A new pair of tits obviously referred to Katja. She—

They—

My inner dragon roared, his fury like a nuclear explosion, and I planted a hand on the tiled wall, a surface I vowed never to touch if I could help it, just to keep from losing my balance.

“Baby, I know you don’t have soap, but you should try to clean everything,” Phillips sneered from the other side of the divider, his nasally intonation a fucking assault—and fuel to the fire. “You need help reaching your ass?” I pushed off the wall, my vision tunneled and the edges flaring red when that piece of shit laughed again. “How about the kitty cat between your legs? Looks like you keep it groomed…”

Furious, I shifted into pure predator mode, stalking toward the fuckers in absolute silence. As soon as I was within reach, I grabbed a fistful of Cooper’s blond hair and slammed his head into the corner of the divider. Blood spurted across the tile, and I tossed the guard’s unconscious body aside, peeling around the wall in a flash and knocking Phillips’s wand away as soon as he ripped it from his belt. Snarling, I drove an open hand to his chest, and the blow sent him stumbling back and sputtering for air.

Sure enough, there she was—my mate, mine—cowering beneath the showerhead. Soaked and trembling, her arms folded up to cover her chest, her back to what had seconds ago been a pair of leering guards.

This wasn’t how I imagined my first time seeing her naked. In my head, there had been passion and flame and privacy. Not this. Never this. Never the look on her face, the fear in her eyes as she peered over her shoulder.

“Greystone, calm down,” Phillips barked, hopping to his feet—nimble for a warlock who so obviously enhanced those muscles with magic. All flash, no fucking substance. I closed in on him, fuming, my inner dragon turning my insides to magma at the injustice of it all—at the very idea of two strange males ogling our mate. The guard’s hands sparked, magic crackling in the humid air, but I just shouldered him up against the tiled wall, pools of water sloshing at our feet. His eyes widened. “Back down, inmate!”

“Have you no fucking respect?” I roared, the question so beyond rhetorical it was laughable. At the second shimmer of magic in the warlock’s fingertips, I locked onto his throat with one hand and squeezed tight. His cheeks darkened as he slapped at my forearm, eyes like saucers.

“I-inmate,” he choked, and I hoisted him off the ground so that his fucking militant boots dangled.

“If you look at her like that again, if you speak to her like that again…” I growled, my inner dragon snapping and bellowing inside so loud that I was lost to the rest of the world, unable to hear a damn thing beyond the gnashing of razor-sharp teeth and the thunder of my pounding heart. I ducked closer to Phillips, to his purpling face, his bulging eyes, his gasping mouth so that the message really hit home—so that he didn’t miss a word. “I swear, James Bartholomew Phillips, I’ll rip out your fucking tongue and feed it to the wolves. Then I’ll come for your eyes, you pathetic creature, you insidious worm!”

More beast than man, I was lost. Done for. Gone. Blind with rage, I snapped my other hand around his throat, determined to throttle the life out of him, to really make him suffer…

“Elijah?”

Until she said my name.

Then the world came screaming back into focus. Shaking, I looked over my shoulder, needing to lock eyes with my mate, to gaze into the startling blue and find some semblance of clarity—

Something clocked me upside the head, sharp and stinging of offensive magic. I tumbled back in what felt like slow motion, unable to focus, seeing triple of Phillips as he doubled over and sucked down air at my feet, a hand to his