by Rhea Watson
I let it go, ignoring the thought as best I could, hating the bitter stab of loss in my chest. Because I hadn’t lost anything. The sex had been spectacular—best I’d ever had, despite the circumstances.
So…
Why did I feel like something was missing?
We untangled slowly, neither of us ready to stop touching the other just yet, all lingering caresses and brushing hands and bodies hovering in personal bubbles. A heavy, tangible silence hung over the pantry, one that surprisingly didn’t make me nervous. Sure, I wasn’t smiling like an idiot after a phenomenal orgasm or anything, and neither was Elijah, but it wasn’t guilt thickening the air. That didn’t slow my movements or make my mind sluggish.
As soon as I straightened, panties on, something oozed out of me—something hot and sticky. Elijah glanced my way, eyes dipping down to my thighs, and then offered an apologetic look that I just nodded at. Thankfully, I was beyond diligent about taking my potion at the start of each year. The brew to both prevent pregnancy and protect against sexually transmitted diseases was the most annoyingly complicated in my arsenal. The ingredients cost thousands to acquire, and I had spent the entire month of December, every December, babying a temperamental, constantly simmering cauldron since I had turned sixteen. I always took it on the second of January, without fail, and then had to weather the unpleasant side effects—a wave of sickness similar to the human flu—for a full two weeks after. But then I was safe for the rest of the year, protected and secure and never needing to worry about having a baby when I wasn’t ready.
So, we were covered, Elijah and me, but…
What if I was still in Xargi come next January? What then?
The thought brought a fresh batch of tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back as fast as I could. Without knowing the details, Elijah was bound to misread the situation—take my upset for regret and self-loathing and guilt and all the other crap that came with spur-of-the-moment sex. I didn’t feel any of that, and as I buttoned up my jumpsuit, fingers trembling again, I hoped he didn’t either.
But… I felt something.
When I looked up at him scrubbing his face, dressed and ready to go back to work like this had never happened, I felt…
Longing.
Need.
Not for another round. Not for his mouth on mine or his hand between my thighs. Not for teeth or fire or punishing caresses that would leave me bruised in all the right places.
I couldn’t explain it, but the flood of feeling struck hard, pounding into me with all the savagery that Elijah had, and I slapped a hand to my mouth to muffle a sudden and very unwelcome sob.
The dragon shifter stilled, eyes snapping to me and shimmering with panic. I shook my head, hoping to dispel the fears, and then sucked in a heaving breath, throat thick as I said, “I don’t understand it…”
Elijah exhaled softly, reaching out for my arm even as I retreated into the door. He gently cupped my elbow, steadying me, supporting me as hot, cruel tears streaked down my cheeks. Great. Just what every guy wanted after a quickie in a prison pantry.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, shuddering through the apology and wiping at my face. “I’m sorry. I just don’t get it. I don’t get us—this… It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m so sick of wondering—”
“Katja, we’re fated.”
Three little words, and my brain short-circuited. Arms falling limply to my side, I gawked up at him as the static between my ears reached a deafening roar. We… Fated?
“I don’t get it either,” Elijah admitted with a nervous chuckle, scratching at the back of his neck, that good-guy persona shining through those warm eyes, those full pupils, the faint rose flush in his cheeks. No more animal. No more brutality, all carnal need and pleasure and base instincts… Back to the man, back to two people forced into a life-altering conversation that made my head spin. Elijah shrugged as I continued to stare blankly up at him, my mouth seconds away from just falling open, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. “But, you know, here we are, so… yeah.”
Anger raged when my brain finally rebooted—anger and hurt and shock and outrage that he had kept me in the dark for the last month and a half. Because he would have sensed it right away, wouldn’t he? I had felt it from the second we first made eye contact, but I didn’t get it. I just floundered around in a mess of feelings, confused and alone and upset, needing him and not understanding why. Wrongful incarceration was bad enough, but throw in the fact that my body was responding without my consent, drawn to this stranger, and he had just let me go on feeling like that for weeks…
Teeth gritted, I reared back and smacked him as hard as I could, slashing across his broad chest and nearly taking a button with me.
“If you knew, why didn’t you say something?” I demanded—yelled, almost, voice rising well above an acceptable level for where we were. No telling if Jensen had come back yet, but if he had, he definitely would have heard that.
Elijah and I glanced at the door together, holding our collective breaths, and when no guard came trundling through to investigate, he let his out in an exasperated hiss.
I’d… never heard him exasperated before. Annoyed. Frustrated.
Not with me, anyway.
But there it was, plain as day, etched so deep into every feature that there was no missing it.
“Maybe I’m trying to process it all too.” He took a step back deeper into the pantry’s narrow corridor, walls lined with shelves of proofing buns and loaves. “Maybe I don’t understand it. Maybe I didn’t expect to be fated to a witch… Did you ever consider that?” He shook his head with a wince, then pressed his knuckles to the middle of his chest like he was fighting a rush of heartburn. “Did you ever consider that I don’t have all the answers? That I can’t fix every fucking problem that comes up?”
I honestly hadn’t, and that was ridiculous of me. Childish. Selfish. Ever since I agreed to join a prison clique, I had looked to Elijah and Rafe for everything: comfort, security, and support. They had been here longer than me and both had centuries of life lived on my twenty-nine years. Instinctively, I deferred to them both, hid behind them and stayed resolute in my decision to not make waves. To survive.
I should have been giving back.
Fated mates was huge in the shifter community. While I wasn’t an expert on the subject, I knew from gossip and general supernatural lore that shifters were raised on stories of finding their soulmates, the ones destined to walk forever by their side. Some never did, but those who found their fated were whole. Fate had selected me for him, apparently, and him for me.
And instead of smacking him, I should have…
Shoving all my feelings aside, I padded after him and pressed a hand to his chest. It then slid up to his shoulder, and even as he turned away, expression terse, jaw hard, mouth in a thin line, I moved closer.
Eventually, I hugged him. Just a hug—nothing more salacious than that. Nothing that would lead us anywhere. I stood up on my tippiest tiptoes and wrapped my arms around his neck, holding him as a tremor ripped through his body. Elijah took it almost as if he had to, standing there with his hulking arms at his sides, his huge hands in fists again. His heart thundered, the beat drumming from his chest to mine, and I just held tighter.
I’m so sorry, Elijah.
Here I was, thinking I was the only one struggling.
But to him, he had just found his soulmate. In prison. And she wasn’t who he had always pictured. She was surly and withdrawn and broken, terrified, prone to lashing out when things got hard or tense or confusing.
She was damaged goods with baggage a mile long.
“Thank you for telling me,” I murmured, threading one hand into his hair, the other stroking the back of his neck. He radiated heat, my body sweltering against him, but I didn’t back down. “I’m sorry I… Now I understand.”
Finally, finally, he hugged me back. Bundled me up in his arms and embraced me like it was the first time, maybe even the last time, he wou
ld ever hold me. His grip threatened to crush all the air out of my lungs, but I said nothing, did nothing, just let him take what he needed for once. All this time, he had been protecting the woman he perceived as his mate. He couldn’t help it. He hadn’t been trying to draw attention to me…
He had been doing what he was programmed to do, same as me. I was drawn to him, if I really was his fated mate, because that was how destiny arranged it.
But if that was the case, why was I still confused?
Why was I infatuated with Rafe? Why did I lust after Fintan—physically, of course, his impish man-boy shtick so not my thing. If I was fated to a dragon shifter, a good man who had been thoughtful and patient and protective of me from the beginning, shouldn’t other men fall to the wayside? Shouldn’t they not even enter my radar?
I mean, even as I hugged Elijah, a little part of my mind remembered that tonight, I’d lie on the floor and whisper through a mousehole with Rafe. That sometimes those conversations were the highlight of my day.
And that wasn’t fair.
I exhaled softly and closed my eyes, trying desperately to block it all out.
One question answered, a thousand more to go.
But at least I knew a few things for certain.
One: I owed Elijah a ton of patience and a lot more leeway.
Two: I needed to figure out what it meant to be a shifter’s fated mate—and thankfully had a rabbit shifter friend in Cellblock B who could lend a hand with that.
Lastly, three: sex with Elijah made me feel alive. Yes, my back and hips were destroyed. My toes ached the longer I stood on them in this hug. My pussy had taken a beating and would be feeling it for days. But I felt like a person again, not just a number, not just an inmate, not just a purple jumpsuit with a godsdamn collar around my neck.
And I intended to chase that feeling.
No matter where it might lead me.
14
Fintan
“You know I’m one of the fae, right? Not a fucking wood elf?”
Honestly—assigning me to the greenhouse for work duty… Like I had any real experience with plants beyond smoking them. Inmates might have been clamoring for the position, desperate to work something cushy outside the main building, but I was a motherfucking prince of the Midnight Court. You’d never find me clamoring for any paid position that didn’t involve judging scantily clad ladies or taste-testing fae wine.
Mind you, I currently had zero access to my vast wealth given it was still my first month, and I was getting sick of begging off Elijah, Rafe, and Katja for goods. They had pennies to spare, which I appreciated whenever they tossed a few my way, but pennies barely bought me a single cigarette from the prison storefront. So, perhaps a job would be temporarily beneficial, but for how long I could endure some uppity warlock fuck telling me to water and fertilize shit was anyone’s guess.
A little over two and a half weeks in this pit and still no rescue. The wards likely put a dampener on my brother’s efforts, but really. Surely someone in our kingdom was adept at breaking them. They were only witch’s wards of this realm, after all. How difficult could it be to crack them? Fae magic was far stronger; the cavalry ought to be charging through by now.
“Did you hear me? I said—”
“Oh my gods, just shut the fuck up, Fintan,” Williams barked, groaning out my name as his grip tightened on my arm. Gravel crunched underfoot as he hauled me across the outer yards of the penitentiary, the sky a hazy blue overhead, the air thick and still inside the confines of the ward, a sea of grasslands stretching out to the horizon beyond it, dotted occasionally by a mountain or six.
Ahead, the greenhouse spanned long and narrow along a bit of unnecessary chain-link fencing—pure aesthetic, the dramatic fucks—its panels opaque glass, two unfamiliar guards stationed in front of the lone door. Xargi Penitentiary soared over my shoulder, looking oddly ancient for its recent construction, an imposing stone structure two levels tall with sentry towers in all the corners, warlocks positioned there to take out any runners.
You know, if the wolves didn’t get them first.
I’d spotted four since Williams had marched me out the doors, the process of stepping foot outside beyond tedious. So many checks, as if I’d had time to shove contraband up my arse from the moment this fucker had dragged me out of the cellblock and shoved me through winding corridors. And now here we were, on a brisk, forced walk to my new work duty.
A grey shadow whizzed along the base of the greenhouse, bypassing the guards and disappearing around the far corner. Five wolves, then. Shifters, most likely, given the militaristic precision with which they patrolled the grounds. A few wore identical leather collars to the inmates, and although Williams wouldn’t even entertain the conversation, I for one suspected that the security pack had a few prisoners of their own, only the collars kept them in their huge wolf forms. Meanwhile, poor bastards like Elijah were in a constant state of blue balls, desperate to shift but unable to let the beast free.
Really. I felt for him. Of all the creatures in this realm, a dragon shifter came closest to my kind in terms of raw, unhinged power.
Cruel, to keep him caged.
“Surely we can come up with something,” I drawled as we neared the greenhouse door, one of the guards unbolting it from the outside. “I mean, if you find a way for me to access my fortune, I’ll pay you what I’d earn here—”
Williams cracked me upside the head with his elbow, the first display of physical violence 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—”
“O
h, 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 Fox.”
“Any experience with gardening?” she asked as I slipped on the gloves—perfect fit—and then twirled the pruning scissors.
“Not even a little.”
“Potions?”
I shrugged. “Drinking them, sure.”