by Rhea Watson
“You’re a good lad, Tully,” I muttered, risking a quick stroke of his sides, then a tentative scratch behind his ears. The feline perked up, arching into my cautious fingers, and closed his eyes. An unfamiliar calm settled over us, and I sank into the strangely soothing act of petting a cat, of listening to his constant purr and enduring the rhythmic clenching of his paws, claws poking through the jumpsuit and into my cold flesh in even beats.
But of course, peace never lasted in Xargi Penitentiary.
My cell door whizzed open, bolting in place along the wall with the usual clang, and Tully leapt off me with a hiss, fluffed up and furious, the force of his jump landing like a fucking crowbar to the chest. Knuckling at the dull ache, I sat up and exhaled softly at the same old sights and sounds of guards dragging Cellblock C’s inmates away for work duty. They had a blessed half hour after breakfast to collect themselves before the workday began, and what I wouldn’t do for a fucking job in here.
Everyone moaned about it, but little did any of them realize that sitting around in a vacant cellblock—occasionally with a friend, usually a foe—for nine grueling hours with very little to occupy oneself with was far worse than the aches and pains of labor. Boring as fuck, it felt akin to solitary if I didn’t have Katja or Elijah to keep me company. Hell, for all his posturing and absurdity, even Fintan sufficed to pass the time.
With my literary background, I should have been an obvious candidate for library duty, but no one would block out the windows for me. I’d excel amongst our underwhelming collection of books, and yet Deimos had been granted the opportunity to sit in a cool room surrounded by tomes and do absolutely nothing while the other inmates assigned to the same shift kept the catalogue organized.
Really, he didn’t deserve the library.
“Please…” Katja’s pleading tone rose above the standard hubbub, and I frowned as I crept to the end of my cot, on high alert should she need assistance. “It’s really bad this morning.”
Really bad? She hadn’t mentioned anything at breakfast about—
“Look, if it’s that bad, go to the infirmary.” Fucking Williams. Cellblock C’s dimmest guard came with an extreme prejudice of vampires not uncommon in the supernatural community; the other night he’d had the nerve to ram his elbow into me at just the right moment in the cafeteria. So engrossed in my evening fix of glorious type O, I’d actually stumbled, then fumbled, and my test tube crashed to the ground before I could catch it. Blood had splashed everywhere—and then the cunt stepped in it while lecturing me about clumsiness. Elijah had nearly ripped his massive caterpillar eyebrows off, but Katja kept the peace, urging us on to our usual table while I went without for a night.
Fucker.
“You’re assigned to the greenhouse today,” he carried on, and while I couldn’t see him, I could hear his smarmy expression. “So you can’t just—”
“I’ll take over her shift.” Ah, Fintan to the rescue. The fae had continued to sniff around Katja like he had every right to, despite referencing mine and Elijah’s interest in her anytime the urge struck. Quite shocking now that he had suddenly offered to do a lick of work; usually he spent his time in the greenhouse haunting Katja’s shadow—from what I’d heard, anyway—and only did the bare minimum to get through the day. “It seems like cruel and unusual punishment to force a female to work under such conditions.”
A beat of silence followed as other inmates were escorted out the main door, and I rolled my eyes. Another classic Fintan move: annoying his audience into an uncomfortable quiet.
He seemed to take great pleasure in doing so. Typical fae.
“Uh, yeah,” Katja said slowly. “Thanks, Fintan. It’s just really bad cramps, but I’m having a hard time standing upright. I’ll be fine by tomorrow, I’m sure of it, but today it’s coming out in chunks—like you should have seen my toilet. And then now that I’ve eaten, the period shits are coming—”
“Ugh, gods.” Williams groaned and I stifled a chuckle of my own, turning it into a cough. “Fine, fine. So long as Fintan picks up the slack, whatever. Just… go sit in your cell and never say period shits to me ever again.”
“Deal.” She sounded like she was smiling. They were few and far between, but Katja’s smiles were some of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. If these bastards would ever give me a proper writing utensil, even something as basic as a quill and inkpot, I could write whole sonnets about her mouth. About the shape of her lips, their color and fullness…
I blinked hard and shook my head, burying the thoughts deep down where they belonged, then readjusted my jumpsuit as my cock stirred with interest. Not now, you horny bastard. Pathetic that just the thought of her mouth got me going when I tried so damn hard to make everyone believe, myself included, that Katja and I were just friends.
Let’s chalk it up to nearly ten months of forced celibacy, shall we?
Sure. That was it. Any man would salivate over a stunning woman if they were in my shoes. It wasn’t… I wasn’t…
My thoughts were not a betrayal of my bond with Elijah.
They were natural and normal and completely expected from a male’s reptilian brain—
I glared up at my forehead, mentally warning the snide little voice at the back of my mind that if it whispered anything even remotely close to doth protest too much, I’d find something wooden and shove it through my eye.
End it all.
Yeah.
That would show you, conscience and self-doubt.
Pathetic, the voice sneered, and I rolled my eyes, then straightened at the sound of frantic footsteps shuffling toward my cell. They fell silent as the last of the workday migration drifted through the main door, which clanked shut a few moments later, locks snapping into place, barring Katja, myself, and a snoring Avery inside. We only had a precious forty minutes while the trio of cellblock guards dropped everyone off at their designated workspaces. Occasionally I had a blissful hour without anyone watching me if the idiots on duty opted for a smoke break.
I smelled her before I saw her, her natural odor dampened by the prison-issued deodorant. Baby powder—nowhere near as appealing as the faint floral that clung to her skin, but whatever made her most comfortable was all that mattered. She materialized in my doorway with a hitched breath, cheeks flushed, eyes slightly panicked.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” I assured her as Tully poked his head out from under my cot. Before I could get another word in, the feline issued an earth-shattering meow that made Katja launch herself into my cell. The witch collapsed to her knees and crawled the rest of the way, hauling her familiar into her arms the second he was barely within reach. Cooing softly like he was a spoiled baby and not the magical accessory he should be, Katja slowly drifted up and settled on the edge of my cot, a purring black bundle on her lap and tears in her eyes. Relief. It billowed off her in waves, her every limb relaxing, the anxious flush in her cheeks melting away.
We sat like that for some time, side by side with about two painful feet of distance between us. She fussed over her familiar as the temporary silence of an empty cellblock set in. Grating, all that nothingness. Quiet was a precious commodity in the penitentiary, yet I despised it during the day. It symbolized my weakness, my failing, my inability to contribute while Elijah worked my assigned duty—the bakery technically should have been mine—and his own in the smithy. Thanks to their pop culture, humans considered us apex predators, the pinnacle of evolution with our speed and dexterity, durable and fierce and powerful.
Among the supernatural, vampire shortcomings were obvious, shoved under a magnifying glass anytime magic came into play. Seated next to the witch who lingered in my dreams far more than she should, the two of us locked in a rare moment of solitude, truly alone, it struck me like a fucking freight train. Weakness. Failure. Flaws. The undeniable deficiencies of my kind—
“Thank you, Rafe,” Katja whispered, stroking Tully’s cheeks with her finger, one side and then the other. Her tongue
flicked out to wet her lips, and she cast me a shy sidelong glance. “I owe you everything.”
Oh. Those words stirred something dark within me, something dangerous and ancient—something that insisted if she owed me, then I ought to collect. Swallowing a mouthful of knives, my throat perpetually sandpapery these days, I bit the insides of my cheeks and shook my head.
“It’s, uh, fine.” My fingers longed to map her curves, to walk the swell of her hip, the dip of her lower back, the delicate hollow of her throat. I clenched my eyes shut for a moment, hoping she wouldn’t notice in the cell’s shadows, and then forced myself to focus on being normal and not some lusting, bloodthirsty fiend who wanted to ravish and devour her in equal measures. We had been at great odds lately, poet and monster, and I suddenly realized these precious moments alone only made things worse. “We were fine.” I choked it out, pointedly scanning the walls, the ceiling, like it was the first time—like I hadn’t memorized every damn brick months ago. “I didn’t really do anything.”
At this proximity, Katja’s natural scent had a slight upper hand over the deodorant, and I gritted my teeth, battling back the surge of displeasure and the rush of exhilaration at the fact that my linens now smelled like her. For Elijah’s sake, for hers—hell, maybe even for my own—I had battled my attraction to her for months. The last time the dragon shifter had brought it up, he seemed marginally accepting of my interest in her, but I couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t… covet his fated mate.
Even if she was lovely—Aphrodite reincarnate.
Even if I was a sucker for good conversation, and every single night we had that in spades.
Now here she was, sullying all my hard work, my resistance to her lure, her unwitting siren song, by shuffling down the cot and closing in on me as Tully meandered off her lap and sat his asshole down on my pillow.
While I longed to gaze into her eyes, I focused on my hands instead, fidgeting with the red fabric stretched over my thighs. No. I staunchly refused to be in a fucking love triangle with my best friend and a witch. I couldn’t. I had to—
Her hand suddenly found mine, her flesh an inferno only surpassed by her mate, and before I could stop it, her fingers wove us together. Desire surged, cock swelling with interest again, and my mouth watered as a delicious image danced through my mind…
Of her—naked, sprawled over a luxurious bed so vastly different from the one we found ourselves on.
Her creamy soft skin, her eyes burning with starlight, her crooked finger beckoning me home.
And me, ravenous, a monster, sinking my fangs into her inner thigh.
Fuck. I tugged my hand away, my attempt to be gentle—kind, even—failing miserably.
“Katja, maybe you should…” Go. Get the fuck out of my cell while I still clung to the tenuous strands of self-control. Everyone always talked about how shifters fought the beast within, the man trying desperately to quell the animal snarling in his chest. But they never mentioned how we struggled, how vampires faced temptation each and every night. How we were bound by laws, punishable by stake or sunlight should we break them, that forced us to keep our basic instincts in check.
To swallow the bloodlust.
The lust in general.
“No, please just…” Katja fiddled with her nails, cheeks flushed again at my rejection. “I need to… I… Thank you, Rafe.” She shuffled about on the cot, one leg bent and tucked under her, the other dangling over the side as she faced me. “Thank you so much for everything.”
“Er, like I said…” I scratched at the back of my neck, falling back on all the fake nonchalant gestures I had studied and perfected over the centuries. Tully’s eyes locked on mine for a beat, his tail swishing back and forth, my pillow officially his, and I cleared my throat. “It’s really nothing. He’s a good cat—”
“I’m not just talking about Tully,” she insisted. “I haven’t had the chance to say it, and I should have sooner, but thank you for… talking to me that first night. And every night since then.”
Except the night she returned from the bakery reeking of sweat and sex, of Elijah and sweet briar rose petals and so much more that it suffocated me. The memory hung between us, as unacknowledged now as it had been back then. Loath as I was to admit it, I’d sulked that night. I’d let weakness win and pouted in my cell like a child.
All was right the following night, but weeks later, I despised myself for reacting that way—for punishing her when she wasn’t at fault. Neither was Elijah. And, frankly, neither was I. The storm brewing between we three, featuring a lightning bolt of Fintan every now and again, was nobody’s fault.
But my responses were mine, and I owned the guilt of ignoring her that night.
Jaw briefly clenched, I glanced her way, hating how lovely she looked in the darkness, how the light trickling in from the common area really highlighted her beauty. “Katja—”
“No, let me say this.” The witch rolled her shoulders back, as if steeling herself—bracing herself, preparing herself, and I feared where this might be headed. “I need to… I wouldn’t have made it a week without you being there at night. You’ve been so good to me, and I feel like I’ve been taking and taking—”
“We’re all just trying to survive in here,” I muttered, my one-shouldered shrug halfhearted. She tucked her loose red waves behind her ears with a sigh, her breath the pungent spearmint of the prison toothpaste.
“You make it a lot easier.” She paused, only to gnaw at her lip—wholly unaware what that did to me, the flash of teeth a reminder that I longed to claim her with my own, to mark her up, to tear flesh with my fangs. I clenched my hands to fists, shoving those thoughts aside only for them to come back swinging, stronger than ever, when she tentatively touched my thigh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m taking advantage of your good nature… and your friendship with Elijah.”
“That’s ridiculous, Katja,” I said tightly, unable to tear my gaze away from her fingertips on my leg, her touch somehow both featherlight and bruising.
“Is it?”
The wobble of uncertainty had my head snapping up, and I found her studying me with such doubt, such disbelief, that it was like a stake to the fucking heart. “Maybe at first I-I volunteered because Elijah and you… He knew from the very beginning…” Fated mates. Why did the stars favor shifters? Why did they get soulmates while the rest of us were left to flounder about for eternity? “But now I…”
Now what?
What was I supposed to say?
Pour my heart out—not a chance in hell.
My body responded with a will of its own, ignoring my sluggish thoughts, my scattered mind, and reached out for her. I smoothed a few fallen bits of coppery-red back behind her ear, tending to the shorter layers that always refused to stay with the herd. Surprisingly soft, despite the frizzy ends. Her breath caught as my fingers slid down the curve of her mane, tracing it, then up the column of her neck, along her jaw. My thumb found her lower lip before I’d clued into its intention, plucking at it, tracing the fullness, the rosebud pucker. Victory sharpened in my chest when her lips parted for me, when the pink beneath my thumb trembled ever so slightly…
I reared back with a hiss like she had burned me—for she had. The lightest touch, torturously fleeting, and Katja Fox set me aflame.
And the fire reminded me that she belonged to another.
Their heat was meant for each other; my frost, my dead porcelain, had no role to play in this game.
I can’t.
“And now?” Katja whispered, hope twinkling in her sapphires, tenuous and paper-thin but there.
Christ. I stabbed my thumb into the would-be mattress beneath us, as if feeling the cot’s cruel springs would extinguish the fire. “What?”
“You said at first you—”
“Now we’re…” I swallowed hard again—only the knives were gone. My mouth watered for her as it never had before, and that should have been my cue to run. Take a walk around the cellblock. Pester Avery—something.
“We’re friends.”
The witch brushed her lower lip with a frown. “Just friends?”
“What the fuck are you doing, Katja?” I demanded roughly. My growl had her cheeks igniting and my cock shooting to attention. Damn it. I covered the traitorous bastard as best I could while I shuffled away, seconds from bolting… or I’d pounce. “You belong to—”
“I don’t belong to anyone,” she said fiercely, eyes glistening as she prowled after me. “I belong to me, and I decide my fate and my future and…”
We stilled at the end of the cot, me a breath away from toppling over and onto the floor, her on her knees—and her hands fisted in my jumpsuit, buttons straining under her grasp. The physical contact came so easily. After months of whispering through the wall, keeping our distance around the others, it felt so natural.
Felt like I never wanted her to stop touching me.
Vision slowly clouding over with a bloodlust haze, I snapped and slammed my mouth to hers in a brutal kiss that had her gasping. Before, Katja had been the aggressor, initiating every touch, every caress, stalking me across the cot, but in that moment, she tasted a true predator in all his violent glory. I kissed to claim, to conquer, hands in her hair and tongue between her lips. Her heart roared, her pulse a war drum pounding, pounding, pounding in my ears.
And then clarity struck.
My eyes shot open and I reared back, incensed at myself for indulging the beast within. For that was what this had been—just another weakness, another failing on my part.
On her knees, Katja sat trembling in my wake, her cheeks a brilliant rosy pink and her lips swollen…
Bleeding.
My fangs must have nicked that luscious lower lip at some point; a ruby dot plumed without the pressure holding it back, and Katja tentatively wiped it away, blinking down at her fingertip like she didn’t understand what had happened.