Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,36
While I hadn’t met many alphas in my twenty-nine years, as I understood it, most had beta underlings to do the menial stuff for them.
“So,” he started, his voice clear and booming in what had been a pensive silence for the better part of the last half hour, “what did you do, Katja Fox?”
I smirked, picking off the bits of sticky dough from between my fingers. “Isn’t that a taboo question in prison, Elijah Greystone?”
Not that I had any real-world experience to back that up—just what I’d gathered from TV, honestly.
Elijah chuckled again, the whispery rasps echoing between my thighs. “Only if you did it.”
“Fair.” I pushed my hair over my shoulders with the backs of my hands, the bakery’s heat sweltering, sweat dribbling down my neck, my back, my ass. “Apparently I sold love potions to humans.”
Love potions were iffy in the witch community anyway, but it was absolutely forbidden to brew them for humans who had no idea what kind of forces they were playing with. Even the odd human ushered into the secret supernatural world knew better than to tangle with love—because the results you dreamed of were never a guarantee.
Elijah pressed a hand to his chest with a mock gasp. “My word, Miss Fox, love potions… How utterly scandalous.”
“Very,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “And you?”
“Don’t you know that’s a rude question to ask in a place like this?”
My heart plummeted. If it was only taboo to ask if the prisoner actually committed the crime… Had I read him wrong? Had he tricked me into believing—
“Only joking,” Elijah said with a soft chuckle. He wiggled his brows at me as I scowled, then ducked out of the way when I flicked flour at him.
“Not funny.”
“Right, right, noted.” He fell straight back into his work, grabbing at Dough Mountain with both hands. “I ran the village jeweler’s shop… Buying and selling pieces sort of satiates my hoarding instinct.”
A dragon working in gold and diamonds? Yeah, that sounded about right.
“So, naturally, I’ve been dubbed a jewel thief,” Elijah remarked dryly, tossing two perfectly round balls onto the tray. “Supposedly I swiped some huge ruby from a Russian coven… I dunno, usual nonsense.” His voice dropped as he added, “Like I can’t find a fucking ruby without stealing it.”
I studied him for a moment, wondering how he talked about this without breaking—how he could make light of the injustice.
“How do you do it?” I pressed my lips shut tight; the question had just slipped out. Asking what an inmate had done to send them to Xargi Penitentiary may not have been rude, especially if they were guilty, but asking how they survived in here, the implication that this place didn’t weigh on them as heavily as it did me, felt wrong.
“Hmm?”
But I went with it anyway. “How do you just… accept this? I want to… to… scream at the top of my lungs. I want to freak out and hide in a dark corner, and I want to cry and curse and hit someone as hard as I can. I want to fight and…” My lips wobbled, and I paused for a calming breath, emotion threatening to bubble up and boil over if I didn’t. “And I feel like I can’t do any of those things. You always imagine what you’d do in this situation when you have to fight and be brave, and then it happens… and I feel like a coward.”
I had always thought that when faced with the worst possible circumstances, I would go down swinging—that I would be this badass heroine who took no prisoners, who knocked a guard out and stole his wand, who crept through the shadows and struck like a viper.
Xargi had shone a spotlight on reality: I wasn’t a badass. I was barely a heroine. I was just a witch without her magic who cried a lot—who hadn’t the courage to tell two pervy guards to screw off that day Elijah had stepped in.
Not only did I feel like a coward, but most of the time, I just felt pathetic. After the loss of my brothers, then my dad, mourning all their deaths and coming out the other side a somewhat normal, relatively stable adult, I thought I could handle anything life had to throw at me.
But…
“You’re not a coward, Katja.”
I closed my eyes and sucked down another deep breath. A little voice sneered that I didn’t need his pity, but nothing about Elijah said pity.