Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,54
a handsome smile before shining it on the warlock. Even men fought for my attentions—it seemed cruel to deny him.
“Surely, good sir, you could allow her a visit to my cell…” I fiddled with my nails, then shrugged a shoulder innocently. “Perhaps for a price—”
“Shut your fucking mouth, inmate,” Thompson snapped, his words whip-sharp and promising today’s third beating if I wasn’t careful. In an instant, my expression soured, and I glared back at him, hands in fists. No one dared address a prince like that. Never in my life had some lowly warlock raised his voice to me. I ought to whip him for his—oh, wait, she was coming back.
My whole being brightened the nearer the witch drew, but as soon as she realized I was watching her—something that had made her blush beautifully only an hour prior—she changed course and beelined as far from me as the cellblock would allow. She stalked along the outer walls of the circular room, determined to ignore me, and her cheeks remained a deathly white even when our eyes met.
As soon as she disappeared inside her cell, I returned to the table in a huff.
Curious. This had never happened before. Women never refused me, be they fae or human or any other sort of creature. Another first.
I… wasn’t all that sure what to do with myself now.
Rejection—for other things, never a bedmate—always put me in a mood.
Tonight, it only made me want her more. Not because she was a lovely specimen, a pretty witch with plump lips that would look exceptional around my cock, but because she had refused me. Because she had been unmoved by my smile, my words, my presence.
And, shockingly, I rather liked that.
A challenge. For the first time in my long life, a true and honest challenge.
At last, someone who didn’t immediately bore me to tears.
Perhaps Xargi Penitentiary would be a great deal more interesting than I initially thought…
12
Rafe
“Something’s wrong.”
I slapped down the next card in my pile—six of clubs—and swept that and Elijah’s two of spades back to me. “Just because I’m winning doesn’t mean something is wrong—”
The dragon chuckled halfheartedly, tossing his next card on the table. Jack of hearts. “Right, let’s get one thing straight. You can’t win at War. There’s no skill. It’s all luck.”
“You only say that because you’re losing.” I pursed my lips when I flipped over my card and discovered a three of clubs. Damn it.
Elijah drew the two cards back to him. “Rafe, you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Of course I did. Almost everything in our world revolved around her lately, and it wasn’t one-sided either. One short month had passed since Elijah coaxed Katja into our little clique, turning our duo into a trio, a move that came with unnerving ease—like she had been the missing piece all along, like we’d been waiting for her to show up and make the puzzle whole. Unfortunately, that came with a lot of other nonsense, drama from the supernatural world that both Elijah and I made a point in our real lives to avoid. We had bonded all those years back because we preferred humanity to our own kind. No games with humans. No innate struggles, no primal clashes. Humans were so simple.
Katja made things complicated.
For the both of us—though I refused to admit that, barely even to myself.
Elijah, meanwhile, still struggled with the fated mate bond. At this point, I had no clue if the witch understood why they were connected—because the stubborn git across the table from me, shuffling his cards and staring at her open cell door, refused to explain it—but she had to have an inkling. The tether between them was obvious. They lit up around each other.
And it infuriated me that I… I was jealous of that. Not intensely or anything. I just…
She was a lovely witch.
Beautiful. Sarcastic. Relatively drama free—except when she decided to involve herself in Deimos’s nonsense, taking a page out of Elijah’s book to rescue that new fae. She smelled like primroses and sunshine. Occasionally, should our hands brush in passing, she felt like fire, though her skin was nowhere near the inferno of her dragon mate. Intriguing, that one. Slowly, we had gone from the occasional midnight chat to consistent nightly conversations, sometimes for hours, both of us lying on the dusty floor and whispering through the mousehole before bed.
Last night, after her visit with the warden, was the first time in weeks she hadn’t answered me.