Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,9

to be sick,” I mumbled, clutching at my stomach with my one free hand, thumb still bleeding from the prick of her pen.

“On your feet, inmate,” Gabriella ordered as if she hadn’t even heard me—or, more likely, didn’t care. Another lazy flick of her hand had the rest of my restraints falling away, a whoosh of cold magic slithering across my body, but I just sat there. If I got up, it was over: I’d surrendered to the process. And… if I got up, I had serious doubts I’d stay up. Gabriella sneered down her nose at me, wrenching her jacket sleeves up to her elbows. In a flash, a pair of white gloves molded to her hands, and she shot me a cutting smile.

“Stand up against the wall, inmate… It’s time to strip, squat, and cough.”

3

Elijah

“Done.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. With twelve cards still in hand, I looked up and across the table, only to find my vampire counterpart was, in fact, finished.

“All right, new game,” I grumbled, tossing my leftover cards next to our twin piles, his substantially neater and taller than mine. “This is the last time I play Speed against a fucking vampire.”

“I told you,” Rafe mused. He grinned as he gathered the scattered deck into a single pile, organizing them for a reshuffle, so accustomed to winning that it made me want to clock him right in that stupidly square jaw all the ladies swooned over. “I think you’re a masochist, old friend.”

“And I think it’s cheating to use vamp speed—”

“Hardly.”

My eyes narrowed. While he was wearing one of the prison’s charmed collars around his neck, same as me, vampires were a little different in their abilities. From what I could tell, the sigils diminished a vampire’s speed, but most of the warlock guards at Xargi Penitentiary were still required to use magic to tame the fanged inmates. That and the sun, which streamed through the windows for most of the day, even in this godforsaken territory—wherever the fuck we were. Rafe and I had spent the last six months guessing, ever since they’d hauled us in here together, nicked from my property just outside the cozy English village that had been my home for the last decade.

Although the sun could be the death of my friend here, the one supernatural being who, in my opinion, wasn’t a jumped-up asshole hell-bent on ascending the ranks of his clan or coven or pack or whatever, that great glowing orb was also a giveaway as to where we were in the world. Somewhere north, close to the poles. Xargi had an eastern European twang to it, possibly Russian, maybe Mongolian. When we’d first arrived, there had been about an hour of sunlight each day, and the vampires inside this hellhole practically ran the show. Now, six months later, we had a good nine to ten hours of sunlight a day, which, for the most part, kept vampires in their blackout cells.

Northern Russia, perhaps.

Siberia was also a possibility.

No confirmation from the guards whenever I floated the options. Not a professional amongst them—just former criminals given a pinch of power over the rest of us. It was like Christmas came early for these fucks every goddamn day.

As Rafe shuffled the deck, mulling over a few other games we could play for the thousandth time, my inner dragon snored softly inside, constrained and confined for six long months. At this point, I was desperate to let him out, to stretch our wings and take to the skies. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch with this collar in place, the runes designed to prevent shifting of any kind. Me, I understood. A dragon could destroy every brick of this place ten times over, our fire the hottest in any realm. But there were plenty lesser shifters in other cellblocks—Willow, a rabbit shifter in Cellblock B for instance, posed zero threat, but she couldn’t stretch her legs either, couldn’t shift and zoom around.

Torture.

Absolute torture for a shifter to be cut off from their inner beast.

But that was the point of this place: torture. Why, I still had no clue. Most of us were innocent… Rafe insisted that was just the way of the world, and some days I almost believed him. After all, he had four long centuries on top of my two. Six hundred years on this planet, living amongst humans and supers alike, was bound to make anyone jaded.

“Gin rummy?” Rafe floated, scrubbing at his cheek stubble with a sigh.