Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,76

pay for that, one way or another. Negotiating my freedom would be more difficult because of what I’d done, but that hardly mattered.

And as I strolled along after Katja, back to the roses and the clippers and the cheap gardening gloves, I realized that would have mattered before. With anyone else, I would have weighed my options more carefully—not dove into a fight that wasn’t my own without meticulously assessing the pros and cons.

Without determining my gain.

We stopped in front of the same handful of rosebushes we had spent the better part of an hour picking through already, only as I suited up, Katja just stared at the blooms. A pinprick of color warmed her cheeks, but overall, still deathly pale, white enough to give Rafe a run for his money.

“Thank you,” she whispered, fidgeting with her gloves. I shrugged, unaccustomed to thanks that I had actually earned.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Right.” She swallowed hard, the collar bobbing at the midway point of her throat. The base of her braid had started to loosen, and her fingers jumped there next, as if in need of something to fiddle with. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”

I plucked a leaf from a stem, folding it over and over again before tossing it on the floor. Ordinarily I’d pry, pick and poke and prod for information that might be useful to me in the future. Instead, I yanked on my gloves with a sigh, then rolled my eyes.

“About what? About what a disaster the warden’s tie was?” I wiggled my brows when Katja’s head snapped my way, her eyes round, her full lips parted with a sharp inhale. Good. She needed the distraction, and I was more than happy to provide one. After all, that tie might have been the finest silk, but it was horribly knotted, all bulbous and uncouth. “I mean, really… You call that a fucking Windsor knot? Pathetic—”

She snatched my hand almost desperately, clawing at the flimsy glove that I wished wasn’t there. Cheeks hollow, the little witch clung to me, gripped my fingers with bone-crushing intensity, as her breath hitched and then fell faster, faster, faster—

Until our eyes met. Until her sapphire blues found my garnet greens. I gawked down at her like a simpleton, like a man who had never felt the touch of a woman before, transfixed, enraptured… caught in a spell. Her spell.

In time, her breathing evened out, chest rising and falling more steadily beneath the purple fabric. When she finally let go of my fingers, the blood came prickling back into each digit, and I ignored the burn, still lost in her.

Katja’s lips twitched in a grateful smile, fleeting but there, beautiful enough that any smile I’d seen before paled in comparison. And then, as the storm clouds crept back in, she returned to the roses.

Strange—to be enchanted by a witch without magic.

I had never protected anyone before. Never stepped up, never stepped in. Never rushed to the defense of another.

But pride flared in my chest, bright as the sun and ten times more powerful.

It felt… good.

It felt right to throw myself in front of the fire.

And I felt like I… maybe wanted to do it again.

For her.

Only for her.

…

Wait—what?

15

Katja

Everything hurt.

My back, my feet, my hips, my thighs, my arms, my neck, my head—every-damn-thing.

The new work regime at Xargi Penitentiary had kicked off right around the start of my second month inside. Non-shifters had a schedule of one week on, one day off, whereas shifters had work assignments each and every day. Apparently, the higher-ups thought shifters could withstand the daily grind, but I knew the higher-ups a little too intimately; Lloyd did it because he was a bastard, a sadist who lived for the suffering of others.

Wincing, I rolled onto my back, my shoulder and hip unable to take my body’s weight a second longer. Sixty-six days in prison and at no point was there even a whiff of an offer to replace the paper-thin mattress that covered my wire cot. After a week of work either in the bakery with Elijah—or totally alone for nine hours, like yesterday—or out in the greenhouse with Fintan, all I wanted was a real bed. Nothing fancy. No foam topper three inches thick. Just a plain old box spring mattress—just something to support my aching body with a little more structural integrity than this.

But even if the prison did somehow find it in their budget to shell out for cot replacements every six months or