Caged Kitten

by Rhea Watson

  Along with Katja, if I could swing it.

  Maybe her brooding guards too, but I wasn’t about to push my luck for them.

  Without bothering to address us, Guthrie launched into a big speech about the innovation of the greenhouse—the prison’s newest and brightest program, apparently inspired by one of its inmates. He sang its praises, about the rehabilitative properties of working with plants, about the benefits it could offer all us lowly criminals, and the profit it would bring the prison from trade agreements—marked-up prices and all.

  Prick. The bastard was a businessman through and through, a warlock I could crush under my boot without this collar. Swallowing a chuckle, I leaned back to whisper the sentiment to Katja, my arms crossed and my mouth sporting the shit-eater grin that had already gotten me punched in here.

  Only my words died on the tip of my tongue.

  Katja was sheet-white and trembling, her arms folded over her chest like they were snared in an invisible straight jacket. Eyes on the floor, she seemed to be concentrating on her breathing, and a strange, unfamiliar panic skittered down my spine.

  What…?

  I poked her with my elbow, but she only withdrew further, not daring to lift her gaze from the dirt floor. Confusion ripened in my gut, but when I faced the warden droning on and on again, it vanished. Poof—gone, the reality of the situation painfully clear. Guthrie might have been addressing the suits, gesturing with his arms, his wand, rambling in an aged rasp that probably did it for those lusting after a daddy—but his eyes never left Katja.

  Not once.

  Master of the ceremony, he conducted this show confidently, yet he couldn’t tear his gaze from her. The other inmates around me shuffled, picked their nails, wiped at their sweaty faces. Most refused to look at Guthrie, but no one shook. No one quivered in their prison-issued flats. No one looked like they wanted to disappear into the earth and never come back.

  Without thinking—and without hesitation—I moved. Ever so slightly, I adjusted my stance so that I was right in his line of sight, blocking Katja entirely. Guthrie’s next word might have hitched, but he carried on smoothly, chortling about the price markups of our perfect succulents. Those searching greys tried to dart around me, peer through me, but I made a better door than a fucking window.

  At no point did I glare. Fleeting images of my first afternoon came to mind, ones of Katja returning from her meeting with the warden so distraught that she had hid in her cell for an entire day after. Something had happened between them, and obviously the predator wasn’t ready to discard his prey just yet. He wanted to toy with her a little longer before the kill, truly relish the fear.

  But he couldn’t have her. Not here. Not on my watch.

  And that made me grin. Bold as sin, I stared back, tuning out his bullshit and peering straight into the slate. No fear. No intimidation. I lacked power in this place, but old Warden Guthrie was more breakable than any of the fair folk—and no slip of leather could ever make either of us forget it.

  When the show ended, the caged animals were sent back to work. The suits filed out, Guthrie lingering, searching for her in the crowd, but I made it my mission to block his view from every angle. Eventually, he turned away with a scowl; I’d 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 so, I wouldn’t get one. Lloyd Guthrie had made that perfectly clear when we met for coffee last week. He drank his—three cups’ worth, actually, like they were fueling his mania. I had let mine go cold, then “accidentally” spilled it across his desk when I got up to leave. How I’d managed that was beyond me, especially after being forced to sit there and li
sten to him rant about how brilliantly he had orchestrated my mom’s death.

  How he had ensured a witch died in childbirth.

  Witches didn’t die in childbirth. Not only were we physically stronger than humans, our bones denser, our bodies tougher, but we had magic at our disposal. We had midwives with a good century or so of experience behind them, all our lives prolonged with a touch of ancient power.

  Some stretched theirs on even longer with potions way too complicated for me to consider.

  But Lloyd had found a way. Furious at her betrayal, he had made his own fetish doll, complete with a chunk of her hair that he ripped out during their last meeting and the necklace he had torn from her neck. Then, as she gave birth to me, he had stuck pins in the doll. One by one, starting with the least vital spots and working his way inward. Unaware that an effigy was in place, Mom’s midwives had set charms and fed her potions to ease the pain—but they couldn’t save her.

  The last pin had pierced her heart.

  And then it was done.

  He had stolen her from me seconds after I drew my first breath, as I wailed in my sobbing dad’s arms.

  The sole victory I could claim from that session was that I hadn’t anxiety-vomited—not in front of him, at least. Had I sprinted to my cell as soon as Thompson delivered me back to the block to empty my guts into the pathetic metal toilet? Yup. Was said toilet so small that I missed during one heave, splashing the floor and myself? Yup.

  We had three more scheduled meetings—with no set date, all at random so that I was always at peak anxiety if a guard called my name—where Lloyd Guthrie would share in excruciating detail how he orchestrated the death of my entire family. Up next was Ewan, the middle child and my best friend until he drowned at our lake cottage when I was eight. Then Jackson, my oldest brother, my protector, who had died instantly when his wand somehow backfired at school. Lloyd had promised to save my dad for last, the freshest tragedy in my mind.

  Or I could accept his offer.

  Leave Xargi with him. Acknowledge the contract. Recognize that he owned me.

  Screw him.

  I could take it—all his talk. Pigs would grow wings and dive-bomb this prison like kamikaze pilots before I went anywhere with him.

  Eyes shut, I wriggled around on the half inch of bedding at my back, trying to find the comfy groove I’d worn into it over the weeks. Everyone else would get a replacement before me; Lloyd seemed determined to make my experience here both horrendously uncomfortable—cue the mattress—and backbreakingly exhausting. He had, however, insisted that he assigned me to the greenhouse personally, that he figured I would find joy in the flowers, like he had done me a favor.

  I hated that I liked greenhouse duty. Absolutely despised the fact that I did find peace in the natural world, but I was a witch… I couldn’t help that.

  What the bastard probably hadn’t anticipated was that putting Fintan in there with me meant Lloyd Guthrie and his disgusting history lessons were the furthest things from my mind. Not only was the fae eye candy beyond belief, but he occasionally made me laugh.

  In a hellhole like this, that counted for a lot.

  And then there was Elijah. Lloyd had insisted he put me in the bakery to appease my love of baking, as if running a café involved spending a lot of time in the kitchen slaving away over proofed dough. I enjoyed potions, which could equate to cooking in some respects, so the bakery wasn’t the worst work option out there, but it was Elijah who got me through those shifts—when he was there, of course. Lately our overlords had been shoving him in the metal shop most of the week, which meant I was on my own more often than not.

  But we had plenty of time to ourselves. Two weeks after the discovery that I was supposedly fated to a dragon shifter and the world felt a whole lot clearer. Things had become much easier between us now that I understood why my body responded as it did—why my heart yearned to be near him. In a sense, it was biological, just a quirk of the supernatural world. That didn’t mean I liked that an unseen deity had chosen someone for me, prearranged my love story in the stars, took away my right to choose—our right to choose. Fortunately, Elijah was a gem, and now that we were both on the same page, it was just easier to breathe around him. We were less combative with each other, the group dynamic noticeably calmer now that our mounting sexual tension had finally exploded, and the fallout was good.

  Because it could have been bad. Sex could have ruined everything, but it only made us stronger—more in sync. Not that that made the guilt inside me any less prickly. I mean, if I was fated to one man, why was I still interested—to varying degrees—in two others? Elijah hadn’t once commented on the fact that I blushed around Fintan, or that Rafe and I connected in a way I hadn’t with him. Still, I was desperate for another round with the dragon, starving for the best sex I’d ever had, but finding time alone in a prison was next to impossible with a legion of warlocks eyeing your every move.

  Under the table, we struggled to not touch—feet, thighs, hands. Now that we’d had a taste, physical distance was torture.

  Speaking of torture… Poor Rafe. Even though work kicked the absolute crap out of me for seven days straight, it was better than waiting around in the cellblock, twiddling your thumbs, because you couldn’t risk going out in the sunlight. While the rest of us left most days, able to stretch our legs and breathe some fresh air, Rafe and the other vampires were trapped in the cellblocks, hiding in shadows, only taking the risk to venture out to the cafeteria for meals. At the very least, our cellblock guards marched us down windowless corridors, but not every hallway was without. No telling if they did it for Rafe’s sake, or if that was just the established route for Cellblock C.

  Besides my ever-present physical attraction, I just felt bad for the guy, which explained why, despite the ever-present exhaustion, I made myself to stay awake as late as I could for our nightly chats.

  They were a staple now, our usual routine excluding the day Elijah and I had first, er, mated. Rafe had been silent that night, distant, but he’d whispered an apology as we lined up for breakfast the following morning, and I had let it slide. I refused to admit that I got it, his mood, his refusal to talk, but I maybe, sort of, almost did.

  Thankfully, there hadn’t been any further nights of silence. As soon as lockdown started, we waited ten minutes before meeting on opposite ends of the mousehole to chat about anything and everything not prison related. Even though I had been absolutely wiped after yesterday’s bakery shift, the last in my seven-day stint, I stayed up discussing the merits of each Star Wars movie with him until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. Two hours of space opera dissection with no awkward pauses; people paid for that sort of companionship in Xargi.

  I craved our conversations.

  With Elijah and Fintan, I had the opportunity to leave the group dynamic. We hung out for the entirety of our work shifts. Rafe didn’t get that chance, and while lying on the floor hurt at the end of a long day, it was our alone time, and I coveted it, protected it, like it was precious.

  Because… it was precious.

  “Try the other side,” my favorite vampire called from his cell. My eyes peeled open just long enough to glare at the wall, and I wiggled in place again, searching for the comfy spot that I knew was there if I just worked hard enough to find it. A brief bout of silence followed, and then: “Your left shoulder is shit, witch.”

  “Stop eavesdropping on my naps,” I fired back, mouth stretched in a smile that, surprise surprise, also hurt. He was right though; I had screwed up my left shoulder sometime in the last week doing one of many physically demanding tasks required of me throughout the day, but at no point did I request a visit to the infirmary.

  If I did, I just knew a certain warden would come trailing along after me, and it wasn’t worth the risk.

  Even though Rafe and I had the entire day to ourselves when I was off, usually accompanied by one of Deimos’s assholes whose schedule lined up with mine, we both usually spent this time c
atching up on sleep. Only as we crept closer to the end of the workday, dinner about an hour and a half out, I felt more exhausted now than I had when I woke up this morning.

  Ugh.

  Something soft tickled my cheek, and I swiped at it, grimacing at the thought of some Xargi creepy-crawly skittering over my skin. It came back a few seconds later, followed by an oddly familiar sniff, sniff, sniff sound, then the ever so faint whoosh of a cat’s exhale.

  My eyes snapped open this time, no longer weighed down by the fatigue of the day. Heart in my throat, I stared up at the ceiling, refusing to believe it—Xargi played tricks on you when you were at your weakest. But then a mass of black swooped into my periphery, followed by a few more tentative sniffs and the graze of whiskers I’d known since I was thirteen—

  I shot up and scrambled across my bed, adrenaline spiking, breath coming out in panicked gasps.

  All prim and proper, Tully blinked back at me with eyes identical to mine, my big black floof of a familiar seated at the edge of the cot, the end of his tail flicking left and right.

  No.

  No, it couldn’t be—

  “T-Tully?”

  He responded to my croaky whisper with a purrrrrrrr, one that started low and then ramped up like a revving motorcycle engine. A sob snagged in my throat, and I lashed out expecting my arms to sail right through him—expecting to meet the cold air of an astral projection. What I got was a solid cat body, fur that I nuzzled into every morning back home when I woke up and every night as I was falling asleep.

  “Gods, Tully!” I scooped him up and hauled the thirty-pound furball to my chest with a strangled cry. Fear and relief mingled inside me, familiar bedfellows in Xargi, and I held as tight as I dared. While Tully’s bushy black tail swished harder and faster now, he rubbed whatever part of me he could reach with his cheeks, purring up a storm, those huge paws frantically kneading my bicep.

  “What are you doing here?” Tears spilled down my face and dribbled into his fur. Ordinarily the wet offended him, but my familiar took my emotions in stride, pulsing with a magical warmth that I felt in my bones. “I’ve missed you so much…”