Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,60

to himself, Elijah and I would just rip them off.

13

Katja

“I know something’s bothering you.”

“For goodness’ sake, Elijah.”

“It’s been bothering you all week, ever since you—”

“Can you just drop it?”

“I wish I could, but you know I can’t—”

“Stop.” I slammed my recently packed plastic bag down and glowered at him from across the table. Sweat glistened on his brow, his handsome features flushed, his golden-brown waves extra fluffy in the bakery’s humidity today. He was so damn gorgeous, every girl’s type, but it seriously pissed me off that he was using our weird, unspoken, steadily growing bond against me. Maybe he could sense that I had been off since my meeting with Lloyd Guthrie—and rightly so—or maybe he just saw it on my face, had learned to read my expressions because we spent almost every free second together if we weren’t forced apart…

Whatever the case may be, whether he actually felt my distress over learning that my dad’s lifelong paranoia had been justified and that a psycho now thought he literally owned me, or if he was just adept at reading torment on the face of a fellow inmate—I hated it. No matter the source, no matter his reasoning, I hated that he was capitalizing on our connection to wheedle me for information.

Did I think he planned to use the information against me? No.

Did I think he was doing this to hurt me? No.

Elijah was a good guy. Sweet, sometimes stoic, annoyingly protective, and seriously good at every card game we played, he and Rafe were two of the best men I’d ever met, and that was saying a lot. Prison offered perspective, I guess. Fintan, on the other hand, was still a wild card, but besides the fact that I couldn’t look him in the eye without blushing bright crimson still, a week after his arrival, the fae didn’t factor into this.

Rafe and his melancholy poems didn’t either, his velvety baritone that whispered into my cell every night, smooth as liquid gold, rich as dark chocolate. It also wasn’t about him. This was about me and Elijah and the fact that he was driving me up the fucking wall this afternoon.

It was my first bakery shift with Elijah in three days courtesy of the rotating schedule, and whoever had been in here before had left the place a mess. Jensen, the guard who constantly Snapchatted and played games on his phone, didn’t seem to notice or care that dough hadn’t been proofed, that a few buns from a recent batch were burnt on the bottom, that no one had bagged any of the loafs—that no one had even precut the loafs to begin with. Instead, Elijah and I had arrived to a buttload of work—seriously, what had those jerks even done for nine hours?—and I so wasn’t in the mood.

For any of this.

For bakery duty with double the work.

For Xargi Penitentiary and its rigid routine.

For Williams—nose-picker guard—who openly leered at me in the shower this morning.

For the looming threat of Lloyd Guthrie.

And for Elijah—who wouldn’t stop pushing.

“I’m not trying to be nosy,” the dragon shifter huffed, spinning a full plastic bag of perfectly sliced rye and tacking a plastic clip on the end. Why was he so good at this? I ran a café; my baked goods should dominate his. Instead, I had a pile of slightly smooshed bread loaves to my left from when I’d manhandled them into their plastic bags and the beginnings of a headache that would probably split into a migraine by the end of our shift.

“Yeah, well, I really don’t want to discuss it.”

“I know. I’m not a fucking idiot, Katja.” Elijah set his packaged loaf aside, handling it so carefully with those huge hands—delicately, same as he treated me most days, even more so since my mood nosedived after meeting with Guthrie. “I can just… feel something is upsetting you, and my inner dragon—”

“Can mind his own business,” I snapped. Seriously. Just because he had an inner beast who could, I don’t know, smell misery didn’t give him the right to pry like this. Fuming, I piled all the loaves I’d packaged onto a metal tray, then stalked away from our worktable.

What bothered me the most wasn’t his poking and coaxing. In fact, most inmates would probably kill to have someone like Elijah on their side, innately connected to them, concerned about their well-being enough to fight for an answer, to not be deterred by a grumpy attitude and a few withering glares. I