Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,56

for its opponent with an irritable sigh. “Can we drop the pretense? My inner dragon senses it and he hasn’t been out of the cage in months.” He worked his jaw, cracking it noisily, and then flicked his card onto the table. “Neither of us want to rip your skull open, so… just tell me.”

My king of spades beat his three of hearts. I snatched the cards and added them to my deck, shuffling it absentmindedly. Anxiety was so strange as a vampire: an unwelcome prickle in the middle of our chests where our dead heart lay dormant, like a set of slow fingers with clawed tips stroked at our bones. Odd—unsettling. Difficult to focus on anything without a proper meal in months.

“I…” The prickling intensified as if one of the claws had chipped away at a rib, and I dug my knuckles into my breastbone with a scowl. “It’s nothing. She’s good company, that’s all, and I suppose is becoming a good friend… A prison friend, of course. I mean, she’s your… your… fated.” Why was that such a struggle to say, my throat locking around the word? “I would never dream of coming between—”

“I can’t say I like it,” Elijah growled, setting his deck aside—as if that would pause the game. Stubbornly I refused him, tossing a card toward the middle of the table, flipping it over when it turned midair and landed face-side down. Two of clubs. Damn it. The dragon shifter just stared at me again, through me, his eyes more gold than brown, sharpening, burning. “But she looks at you differently than she does anyone else.”

I scoffed. “Please. The way she looks at me pales in comparison to how she looks at you—”

“We’re complicated.”

It was the first time I’d heard him admit it, that his connection with his fated mate was more tangled and messy than clear-cut and clandestine. Shifters grew up on stories of fated mates, soulmates bound together by fate, destined for a life in the stars. They never heard the other side, the tales of fated sweethearts who loathed each other from first glance, who despised the way some divine source had woven their lives together, free will a thing of the past.

Katja and Elijah certainly didn’t loathe each other. They meshed well, emboldened in each other’s presence, a strong team in the bakery, him protective of her and her nurturing of him—she always gave him her leftovers. Always. Even if her stomach roared an hour after dinner, she did it, seemingly without thinking. But Elijah had never wanted a supernatural mate. He wanted a human: a simple, uncomplicated, beautiful human girl, preferably one from the village back home, who would give him an easy life free of otherworldly nonsense. Instead, he got a witch.

A witch who clearly didn’t understand what was going on between them—possibly even resented the fact that he made her feel without her consent.

“Anyway, that’s not what I’m talking about,” he pressed. “I’m not talking about her and me right now, and you know that.”

“Elijah, don’t think for a second I would do that to you.” No surprise I couldn’t look him in the eye as I said it; I just… She made me—feel. Not love or anything quite so over-the-top. But comfort. Affection. Attraction. The beginnings of something that I didn’t want in the slightest.

“Anyone out there looking for you, Rafe?” Katja had asked a few nights back through the mousehole, whispering it after a stretch of silence so long that I’d worried she had drifted off to sleep on the floor. “Your coven, maybe?”

“No coven. I’m… an orphaned vampire. It’s just me and Elijah now.”

I’d heard her rustling about, shifting onto her side to peek through the hole at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s old news.”

“Still though.”

“What about you? Anyone looking for a prison that shouldn’t exist? That, you know, doesn’t exist in our world?”

Her quiet had been answer enough, but in a soft, sad voice she’d murmured, “Humans.”

That night, we were both orphans, two supers without a coven, without anyone out there looking for us in the right places. I’d felt close to her, even if only for a moment, as if the rest of this shithole didn’t exist. We had ended up just lying there, both of us right next to the hole, so close yet so painfully far apart, until eventually she wandered to bed and I did the same.

I still couldn’t explain it, the bond percolating between us, but it wasn’t welcome.