Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,27

bruised throat. As shadows replaced the red shrouding my vision, the vague, nonsensical shouts of men trickled into the scene, followed swiftly by countless boots on tile, all of it muffled…

And then finally—all of it gone.

7

Rafe

After our first week inside Xargi Penitentiary, Elijah and I made a number of rules to ensure our survival, though they all had a central theme.

Don’t get thrown into solitary. Don’t look at a guard funny so that they put you in solitary. Don’t pick fights with other inmates. Don’t slack on work duty—Elijah, not me—and don’t give any bastard out there an excuse to lock you in the hole.

Because that was what solitary was: a hole. A pit in the ground, quite literally, two floors beneath the cafeteria. From what I’d heard, each hole was twelve feet deep, all twenty of them, with barred tops where guards would drop slop through for your once-a-day feeding.

Having spent the last four days in solitary, the dragon shifter moron across the table from me could confirm all of that was true. The holes dug into the earth. The bugs. The manhole coverings. The food that dripped down the dirt walls. The guards patrolling, stomping over your cell. One had even pissed into Elijah’s pit on the third night—Phillips, of course, just to even things out. The guard Elijah had nearly throttled to death had been reassigned to a new cellblock in the wake of my friend’s bathroom heroics; everyone knew the story within an hour of it happening, gossip carrying like wildfire through this place. Naturally, the warlock had to reassert his dominance, and now patrolling Cellblock E, he had apparently been the biggest gobshite out there.

Inmate beatings.

Unlawful use of magic to subdue supers who, as far as I could tell when I saw it, were just going about their business.

A lot of barking and shouting, throwing his weight around like he had a cock the size of the Empire State Building. Downright ridiculous, but hardly surprising: all the guards were petty. At least Cooper had been unconscious for most of Elijah’s ranting, which meant he was still in our cellblock, totally unaware of the specifics of what happened.

Yet he bore the scar on his forehead from where Elijah had slammed it into a corner like a badge of honor. Like he had fought in an actual war when shifters in here had been fighting amongst themselves, against other packs or clans, for centuries.

“So, I assume that garbage doesn’t seem too bad now by comparison,” I mused, thrusting my chin toward Elijah’s dinner tray with a smirk. Stringy green beans. Overcooked steak strips. Watery mashed potatoes. A pathetic effort, sure, but a step above licking blended sludge off a dirt wall—definitely. The dragon shot me a look, his heavy eyes the one giveaway that said he had spent the last four days suffering.

It didn’t surprise me one bit that he’d been beaten every night of his stay in solitary; he had attacked two guards, and the goons who patrolled this place took quite the offense to that. My friend might have been physically stronger than just about anyone in here, but he was no match for eight wands and the sixteen fists and steel-toed boots that went with them. Not with the collar on, anyway. Let him shift and then attack—that was a fight I’d pay to watch. Rumor had it magic bounced clean off dragon scales, just like everything else.

Dark golden hair thick and noticeably greasy, Elijah stabbed his spork into his mash, then scooped a giant heaping into his mouth before the watery potatoes spilled over the sides. He’d only been back in the block an hour, spending most of it resting in his cell before we had been lined up for dinner. Not a bruise in sight. No split lips or eyebrows. No broken nose. No fingernails missing.

All of that would have healed in an instant for him, same as me.

Vampires and shifters really were the ideal targets of torture. We could suffer a lot, endure the unspeakable, heal up over the course of an hour or two, and then the sadist holding the whip could get right back to it.

But what didn’t heal was the soul. I’d always assumed mine had gone as soon as my maker turned me, but I saw the stain of four long days and nights in solitary in Elijah’s tawny gaze, in the sluggish way he moved. That would cling to him, possibly well into his afterlife. We