Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,70
in weeks, and then shoved me forward. Right. Fair enough. None of the guards had fallen for my charms yet, but once I had real money to barter with, their tune would change; it always did.
Pain throbbed in my temple as one of the greenhouse guards lurched forward and grabbed my arm.
“Take him before I fucking kill him,” Williams growled. I flashed him a flirtatious smile, lips come-hither but eyes murderous. The warlock had the nerve to gulp, his hand flitting for the wand on his belt, but he beelined back to the main building before either of us could get another word in. Coward. Rolling my shoulders back, I massaged the ache away as a new set of steely-eyed, hard-as-stone, boring as fuck guards led me into the greenhouse—which turned out to be even larger on the inside than the outside let on.
Magically enhanced, the air thick with enchantments that gave off a slight fruity odor, the interior stretched on for miles. Met with rows upon rows of greenery, I let out a huff. Maybe this wasn’t the cushy gig everyone had expected. Inmates peppered the long metal tables, fussing over herbs and perennial blooms and periwinkle-blue hydrangeas and for fuck’s sake, not a hint of either wolfsbane—a killer to wolf shifters, but it gave a hell of a high to the rest of us—or marijuana in sight. Boring.
Fans whirred softly overhead, the humidity making the spell-tainted air even more pungent, and an alarm suddenly buzzzzzed throughout the entire greenhouses. Inmates leapt back from their leafy charges as sprinklers misted the lot, then got back to work as soon as it was over. Purple, grey, green, orange—a vast array of supernatural folk littered the rows, but it was one purple jumpsuit in particular that caught my eye.
Wily little minx. My grin sharpened. She hadn’t told any of us she’d gotten a new work assignment, but it positively tickled me that I finally had some alone time with the witch Elijah and Rafe guarded like the realm’s most precious stone.
The dragon had become even more intense about her since they’d wandered back into the cellblock last week positively stinking of sex. Rather a tense supper with the vampire after, but I had found a way to keep it light, as always.
Honestly, what would this bunch of misfits do without me?
“On second thought, I would be thrilled to devote my time to, er, shrubs and whatnot,” I announced, gesturing to the expansive greenhouse with a flourish, and as soon as the guard loosened his hold, I was off like a shot.
“Wait,” he called, footsteps trailing after me over a dirt floor. “You need your shift assignment—”
“Oh, I’ve found it.” I lobbed him an easy grin, hands up innocently. “Not to worry!”
Six rows over, fifteen feet down the table, Katja stood harvesting roses. Gloves hiding her delicate hands, luscious red hair braided and tossed over her shoulder, she attacked the task with a furrowed brow, so careful, so precise with each clip of her pruning scissors, until—
“Well, hello, darling girl,” I purred, sidling right up beside her, swift and silent enough in my approach that she jumped and mangled the stem of the stalk in hand. She stilled with a curt breath, glowering at me out of the corner of her eye, and I leaned a hip on the metal table, the air thick with rose-scented blooms.
How fitting: Katja’s scent reminded me of primroses.
“I thought you were a bakery mouse,” I mused as she got to work trimming the thorns from her recent acquisition, bushes upon bushes stretching down this row, roses of all colors and sizes awaiting her tender touch. No other inmate assigned to roses; clearly she needed an assistant.
“They’re putting anyone with any floral skills in here. I just found out this morning they wanted me,” she muttered, shooting me another narrowed look before plopping her de-thorned rose into a white plastic bucket of water alongside six other red blooms, this one slightly shorter than the rest.
“Ah.” I spied a cart a little ways away with jars of fertilizer and spray bottles of lavender liquid, none of which called my name. Alongside them, however, sat a pair of gloves far larger than the ones Katja wore—although even they were too big for her—and another set of pruners. After jogging over and grabbing the tools of the trade, I returned to her side and cocked a hip back against the table. “I’d be delighted to work under your tutelage, Miss