Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,33

dough from my fingers and dipping them into the little bowl of flour. A good coating should stop things from sticking—I knew that much, at least.

“What?”

“For how I reacted to you,” I told him, distracted enough by the dough, by trying to match the bit in my hands to his so that the buns would all be uniform, that I didn’t completely notice what had just fallen off the tip of my tongue. “In the…” When I finally did, my mouth dried up, and suddenly the dough between my palms looked more like a flattened penny than a ball. Great. A quick peek his way showed that I’d caught his attention, and I cleared my throat, the fire in my belly exploding across my cheeks. “That day in the shower was mortifying and scary and I just—”

“It’s okay,” Elijah said gruffly, adding a third and fourth ball to the tray, miles ahead of me already. “I get it.”

“No.” I pursed my lips, some of that curious fire sharpening to frustration. “I don’t think you do.”

Elijah’s hands stilled, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him frowning. Yeah, hadn’t expected that, huh? While I so appreciated him standing up for me in front of Cooper and Phillips, it just wasn’t that simple. I glanced over my shoulder and found the guard studying us, the glare from his phone giving off an unattractive underlighting that made it look like he had a serious double chin. Clamping down on the inside of my cheek, I hurriedly formed a dough ball, nowhere near as neat and smooth as Elijah’s, and plopped it on the tray just to look busy.

“You made people look at me,” I insisted under my breath, knowing that despite the ever-present grumble of the ovens across the room, the spark and hiss of their flames, Elijah could hear every last word. “Deimos, the guards… I’m a woman in a co-ed prison. I’m a witch surrounded by criminals and strangers, and I don’t have my magic or my wand or my familiar.” My throat tightened, breath catching, just the thought of Tully—where he was, what had happened to him, was he still mine—throwing me for a loop. But I steeled myself, getting better at shaking off the panic every day I was stuck in here; show no weakness, not even to Elijah. Just another one of the new rules I had to live by. “Look, I want to fly under the radar. I don’t belong here, and I just want to find a way out, and you drawing attention to—”

Elijah’s snort cut me off, and I found him grinning at me with dead eyes.

“Find a way out?” he said, eyebrows shooting up, hands rolling dough like they were on autopilot. “Good luck with that. Have you seen the ward?”

My cheeks warmed again, and I dropped my second dough ball a little too hard onto the tray between us. Before I could fix its flattened bottom, Elijah scooped it up and rerolled it for me.

“Through the windows, yes,” I told him. The faintest rainbow shimmer stretching over this place, from the horizon to the sky and over, was a given. I’d expected wards from the second they shoved me into a cell, but as a spellcaster myself, someone who had produced a ward or two in her lifetime, I figured that was just one step to work around to freedom.

But…

Wards were impenetrable, and only the caster could break them. Yes, there were certain spells to weaken them, specific sigils designed by the caster that could temporarily open and close a ward like a key, and I’d heard of some witches who could dismantle them like hackers breaching computer security systems…

But I wasn’t one of those witches.

So, the grin that didn’t quite reach Elijah’s eyes, while a touch patronizing, was warranted.

“Well, even if you somehow get outside, past the wolves and the guards with wands, you’re not breaking through that ward,” Elijah remarked. My heart skipped a beat, the pair of us riding an unnervingly similar train of thought. He dipped his hands in the flour bowl, then clapped them to remove the excess dust. “I heard the warden himself cast it… He’s the only one who can break it, and supers here say he’s incorruptible. He can’t be bought—either that or the price is way, way too high.”

Fantastic. Not that I had anything to barter with—Café Crowley did well, but I wasn’t rolling in disposable millions by any means—nor had