Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,74
details of Café Crowley to one of the fair folk, to the sort of creature who hoarded information and used it to their advantage, who trapped unsuspecting mortals and supers alike in their web all because their prey had been foolish enough to talk.
She had shared—and trust was a two-way street, especially in here.
“I’m afraid prison isn’t as fun as I’d originally hoped,” I muttered, picking at a frayed string on my left glove, coiling it around my finger and yanking it free. “It’s really menial and boring, and most of the creatures here are fucking prats who—”
“Wow, imagine that…” Katja smirked up at me, equally patronizing and breathtaking, then patted my arm. Her touch lingered, annoyingly firm, painfully present, even when she withdrew. “Welcome to the club, Fintan. We all hate it here. We all want to go home. Prison isn’t supposed to be fun.”
“Hmm. Yes, well…” Well, what the fuck had I been thinking, sharing something so unbelievably naïve and ridiculous with her. I want to go home. Hardly sexy, that comment. Not brooding and masculine, so far from alpha male territory that I was practically on a different planet. Heat tingled in my cheeks, shame ripening and rearing its ugly, uncomfortably familiar head—
Until she touched me again. Featherlight at first, she pressed her hand to my arm just above my elbow. My eyes flashed to hers, but she didn’t meet them, staring at the middle of my chest instead. And then her touch turned firm. She held me as few ever had, empathetic and comforting and soothing—nothing I’d ever experienced from my father, rarely from my mother, and only occasionally from my sisters. It wasn’t pity either. Just a squeeze to tell me that she understood, there one moment and gone the next. She then turned and grabbed the bucket of clipped roses, heading for the rear of the greenhouse, and I trailed after her like a good little dog, smitten, utterly in need of her attention.
Both when she was mean and when she was kind.
We must have walked at least a half mile inside the magically enhanced greenhouse, headed for a section with cement floors and a flurry of activity. Produce and flowers and dried, ground herbs were counted, stocked, and loaded into shipment crates, all this hard work headed elsewhere. An elvish inmate in green mused that the funds acquired from the sales must go back into the prison, which made me snort cruelly. Back into the prison? Really? Nothing about this shithole suggested any real funding went into its upkeep, the main building just some basic stone fort with warlock muscle keeping the workforce in check.
Right then and there, the penitentiary’s purpose became so glaringly obvious. It wasn’t a stronghold for supernatural criminals, but a forced labor institute thinly disguised as a, what, a rehabilitation center?
Katja refused to join in the hushed conversations, the speculation about where the flowers were headed, which country we were feeding with the produce grown by magic rather than pesticides or genetic modifications. She just loitered at my side, silent, arms crossed and expression distant. I much preferred her being mean to me, but before I could poke the bear, stir her up with my back to the others, a shrill alarm blared throughout the greenhouse, so sharp and screeching that every super present, with or without my exceptional hearing ability, clapped their hands over their ears and cowered.
As soon as the siren ceased, guards rushed in, wand-happy and probably sporting hard-ons now that they finally had the chance to do something. Really, greenhouse duty must have been as mind-numbingly boring for them as it was for us. Barking orders and shoving inmates, the few guards assigned to monitor the sprawling space herded all of us to the front, where two more stood waiting alongside a pack of men in smart suits and leather shoes. All but one radiated a supernatural aura, though beyond the obvious human in our midst, a rare one in the know about the supernatural world, the rest were more difficult to discern who was what without the jumpsuit colors. The fellow on the far left, however, had the chaotic shimmer of a demon, handsome and beaming as he surveyed us with bright blue eyes that twinkled like starlight and thin lips stretched into a great white’s smile.
Maybe one of the fallen? He had an air of loveliness to him that not all demons possessed.
In the center of it all, a warlock who radiated authority,