out of those instances smelling like roses despite being Xargi’s king of contraband, his empire slowly expanding to the smaller cellblocks. He’d even offered me a place by his side—with the implication that I would be equal to Constance, which meant offering new recruits blowjobs. Flattering. My response back then was a straight-as-an-arrow middle finger, and paired with a glowering dragon shifter and his vampire bestie as backup, Deimos had gone after easier targets in the last few weeks, only occasionally tossing lewd gestures my way if the guys weren’t around.
So, yeah. This was my life now. Almost every second of the day controlled by warlock guards. Two meals that seldom met standard nutritional requirements. Three to six shifts a week in the bakery, sometimes alone, sometimes with hours spent alongside Elijah, prepping dough and proofing it and baking buns so fresh and golden—buns that never made it to the inmate cafeteria. Where they disappeared to was anyone’s guess. We had caught the bakery guard munching on one once, so maybe the staff quarters, but we bakery drones made enough in a day to feed a small army, worked to the bone and exhausted come the late afternoon.
Well, I was exhausted. Elijah had shifter resilience to fall back on, which meant he usually picked up the slack by hour nine, neither of us allowed a break at any point. Unfortunately, sometimes I had to handle the workload alone if Elijah was scheduled in the metal shop.
Those days sucked especially hard.
“You know, if you held the deck like so—”
“Piss off, Rafe,” I warned in a singsong voice, fluttering my lashes at him. “I know how to shuffle a deck of cards.”
The vampire’s black brows shot up, the corners of his mouth twitching. “That remains to be seen.”
I sucked in and then let out a dramatic Darth Vader-esque breath, then dropped my voice to its lowest octave. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
The vampire rolled his aquamarine gaze. “Have you always been the world’s biggest dork, or is it a recent development?”
“Always and forever,” I remarked with a slight lift of my chin. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Elijah’s features shifting from wry amusement to outright affection. My belly looped and tightened, secretly thrilled with the way he watched me, but I did my best to ignore him; if I looked his way, even fleetingly, he would school his features like it had never happened.
Just as I started to deal the next hand, an alarm screamed bloody murder from the center of the cellblock’s conical ceiling. Almost instantaneously, the resident afternoon guards who liked to loiter all day and do absolutely nothing to combat Deimos’s douchebaggery hopped to like they were some elite militant squad. In rushed six additional guards, the scene painfully familiar, and I tossed the deck down with a huff.
The dramatics could only mean one thing: new prisoner incoming.
“On your feet, inmates,” one of the guards bellowed—a new warlock who I’d seen around the halls, stalking to and fro like he was lording over the scum of the supernatural world’s underbelly. Bald head, steely stare, a mouth that never smiled; the guy was a little much, even for Xargi. Wand at the ready, he leveled it at all nine of us, jerking from one inmate to the next. “At your posts!”
“Small dick complex, in the flesh,” Rafe mused, to which Elijah snorted. While our dragon companion meandered to the left, Rafe and I hurried right, headed to our neighboring cells together. Whether he was aware of it or not, the vampire always positioned himself between me and the other inmates, his hand hovering over my lower back. After weeks of the behavior, I still wasn’t sure why he did it—or who he did it for.
Elijah? The two were close, obvious friends who had each other’s backs. Elijah and I had some weird innate connection that, while neither of us had explored, had probably been shared with Rafe at some point.
Or did he do it for me? Was it purposeful or just instinctual for a man born almost six centuries ago to protect a defenseless woman?
And if it was the latter, should I be insulted?
I still couldn’t get a good read on him despite our bedtime chats on the nights when neither of us could nod off. We would lie together on the floor, whispering through the grimy, dusty, filthy little mousehole that connected our cells, talking about nothing important—and nothing to do with our