Caged Kitten

by Rhea Watson

  “Are you fucking serious?” Thompson demanded, his sturdy frame the only thing keeping me up. The edges of my vision darkened, unconsciousness tickling at me, beckoning me into its arms.

  “You want to go ask him?”

  “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

  “Yeah you did.” Cooper flicked his cigarette butt at me with a snort. “We all did. So, fall in line or get out.”

  Scowling, Thompson eased me away, guiding me on the most direct route back to the cellblock. He let me take my time, every step an ordeal, my jumpsuit hanging open, my face and hands bloodied, my cracked rib slicing at my insides.

  But I did it.

  As soon as I spotted the door to Cellblock C, victory swelled from the well deep inside me, the place that housed all my magic. I fucking did it. I made it back to my guys, my bed, my familiar—this hadn’t broken me, and it wouldn’t. I refused to let it, refused to give in to him.

  If he thought this would drive me into his arms like they were some bobbing buoy in the stormy seas, Lloyd Guthrie was the dumbest man alive. Bones healed. Bruises faded. Scabs eventually fell off. Scars became memories. I would recover from this, an hour at a time, and come out the other side stronger—just to spite him. It would be a cold day in Hell before I accepted his offer, let him own me, no matter what he did to me.

  Give it your best shot.

  Thompson unlocked the cellblock door and let me shuffle in ahead of him. Elijah shot up from his spot at our usual table with a roar, his shadow exploding into the silhouette of his inner dragon.

  Show me the whole iceberg, Guthrie.

  With a panicked Fintan hot on his heels, he sprinted toward me, and I collapsed in his burly arms with a wail, groping behind him for Fintan—for someone else to cling to as a few tenuous threads held my world together, thin enough to snap at any moment but still holding strong for now.

  I can take it.

  20

  Rafe

  “I can’t believe that piece of filth is still here.” Standing sentry alongside Fintan outside Katja’s cell, I crossed my arms and scowled at a smirking Deimos. The demon sat on his usual throne in the middle of the block, surrounded by his cronies, untouchable. His lot had been neck-deep in a game of cards for ages—someone had stolen the deck from my cell during my trip to the shop and subsequent near-murder of a demonic gnat who deserved to be ground into shark chum—and now their overlord got a big kick out of throwing smug looks our way. If I didn’t intentionally plant my feet, I would have flown across the block and ripped him apart as soon as he’d returned from the library. “He should be in solitary. All of them should—”

  “I can’t believe you aren’t in solitary,” Fintan muttered, shooting me a look that demanded I just drop it already—that he was sick of me going round and round about Deimos. Hypocritical shit. I arched an eyebrow at the fae, who still had flour dusted across his green jumpsuit and a burn on his sharp cheekbone.

  “What?”

  “Well, obviously Cooper and Katja didn’t just happen upon that cheery bunch yesterday,” he remarked with a roll of his eyes. “Obviously it was orchestrated, and with the way things run in here, you could have easily been blamed for all of it. They could still very well shove you in one of those holes and throw away the key.”

  Tully’s purring spiked inside his mistress’s cell, and I glanced over my shoulder with a clenched jaw, irritated that Fintan, for all his pompous talk, was right. What had happened to our girl had been a planned hit—how else would Deimos and the others all be out of the cellblock at the same time? One by one, they had been pulled out before supper yesterday, around the time I too had requested a trip to the shop to stock up on supplies that I didn’t need but liked to share with my group if they were lacking. Someone had it out for Katja, and while we three had speculated as she tried desperately to sleep through her injuries before lights-out, none of us were certain.

  Well. Save Fintan. He had a working theory that the warden had taken a special interest in our witch, tormenting her for reasons unknown.

  That remained unproven—and Katja hadn’t said more than five words since Elijah gently placed her in her cot yesterday afternoon. She should have been convalescing in the infirmary, but no guard would take her. Thompson disappeared immediately after he returned her to us, and we hadn’t seen him since, but the warlock seemed to possess a soft spot for her; if anyone could get her the medical care she needed, it was him.

  And Tully.

  Thank God that black cloud had snuck into the prison. Without him, she would still be wheezing through a broken rib. With him, it had healed, downgraded to a painful bruise that still made her wince and shiver, but at least she could breathe freely. He hadn’t left her side once, purring and nuzzling, fueling her body with his familiar magic, healing her one tiny stitch at a time. If she had been placed in hospital like she was supposed to, the prison healers could have fixed her in minutes.

  Instead, she was left to suffer.

  Couldn’t even stand long enough to get to the cafeteria for the three meals that had come and gone since her attack.

  Fortunately, for all his posturing about being fae royalty, Fintan was an exceptional little thief. He had managed to sneak something back to her every time, bread hunks and overcooked meat hidden in his jumpsuit, then volunteered on his day off to work her bakery shift. Her solo bakery shift, mind you. Poor bastard was rather grumpy about that. By a sheer stroke of luck, Elijah had the day off as well, and he hadn’t left her cot since the cell doors opened. While the guards glared and whispered, no one had tried to remove him.

  Perhaps they knew better by now.

  Or perhaps they remembered what he had done to Phillips in the shower all those months back.

  Add that to what had happened to Deimos yesterday, me slamming his head into the ground again and again until it splintered apart. So satisfying, the crack of his skull, the surge of black blood across my fingers—not that I’d been able to enjoy it for long. At the time, pure instinct drove my hand, guided me, turned me into an animal. As Thompson escorted me back from commissary, I had felt Katja’s pain, her panic, her terror. A vampire’s bite formed a connection between predator and prey. Ordinarily the tether faded with time, but mine and Katja’s lingered, her more visceral emotions and physical sensations shuddering through me no matter the distance.

  Nothing like feeling the woman you fancied orgasm when she was supposed to be showering.

  Yesterday, when I’d felt her, I just… reacted. Snapped. Accepted the violent, brutal beast I’d become centuries ago. Hunted down my girl and punished those who dared lay a hand on her.

  Naturally, Deimos had been taken to the prison hospital. Fucker looked shiny and new today, haughty as always and seemingly quite proud of himself for the blow he had delivered to a rival gang.

  Now the geniuses running the show had us all caged together—and they expected us not to fight?

  Or maybe they did.

  Maybe Fintan had a point—

  “Hello?” The fae poked me hard in the arm. “You still with me? I really can’t handle both of you flipping your shit today, okay?”

  I swatted his hand away when he went in for a second prod. “Fuck off, Fintan. I’m fine.”

  “I mean, I get it.” The fae cocked his head to the side, surveying Deimos with an uncharacteristic calm I’d never seen before from him. “I want to skin him alive, heal him, and then do it again. Scoop out his eyes with one of those human ice cream scooper things… All that. But if you lose it and they chuck you in solitary, I can’t hold Elijah back by myself.”

  “I fucking heard that,” the dragon shifter growled from inside Katja’s cell. Fintan and I looked back, sunset allowing us both to block the doorway, and the fae snorted.

  “Good. Hear it, dragon, and take heed.”

  Elijah stared Fintan down, pupils like slits, everything about him hard as stone. It was the sort of glare that would send lesser men fleeing into the shadows, yet Fi
ntan merely stared back, unfazed, and cocked his head again as if daring him to argue. The standoff lasted until Katja dragged in a deep, nourishing breath and shuffled about beneath the starchy linens. Then Elijah was lost to the both of us, back to his protective stance at the edge of the cot, lording over her fitfully slumbering figure like a gargoyle.

  If anyone managed to shoulder by me and Fintan, Elijah would absolutely destroy them. Never in the history of our friendship had I seen him so focused—and he ran a jeweler’s shop back home. The profession demanded absolute patience, precision, and skill, but Katja was his crown jewel, his prized possession, and every iota of concentration he possessed was dedicated to her.

  Same, friend. Same.

  Chuckling, Fintan shifted his weight between his legs, then leaned against the stone doorway with a huff. How he managed to get away with telling an alpha shifter what to do was beyond me, but at some point Elijah and I had just accepted him as a part of our group, this snarky, teasing, carefree fae who delighted in poking the bear time and time again, then hiding behind Elijah or me in the fallout. For his obscene age, he sometimes reminded me of a teenager, both in maturity and foresight, but here and there he had proven his worth to this…

  Pack.

  Clan?

  Clique?

  We were something, we four, and everyone—everyone—seemed to sense our bond stretched beyond that of a found family.

  Besides, even if Fintan hadn’t proven himself, his comment was fair. In a place of shifting schedules and guards ready to fuck us over at the drop of a hat, Katja needed all of us to recover. It did her no good if we ended up in a hole for the next week.

  So, we stood guard. No one would touch her under our watch—no one had access to her in this state. Hell, she was still waiting on a new jumpsuit to replace the one splattered with blood that Deimos had torn right down the back.

  Just the memory of the fabric cleaved in two ignited a fury deep inside. My fangs sunk into my lower lip and my hands coiled to impossibly tight fists. Because with that mental picture came Katja herself—the position I found her in, beaten and bloodied, on her belly, vulnerable and exposed.

  Although I envied Elijah’s innate connection with the witch, I wasn’t jealous of him, per se, and I didn’t want him to bow out of our dynamic. Nor had I felt inclined to attack Fintan the moment he and Katja were escorted back into the cellblock after their alone time in the shower, back when I had felt her numerous, pungent climaxes all the way in my cell, pleasure ripping through me like a tsunami.

  But Deimos?

  With his hand between her thighs? Knee on her back? That fucking smile?

  Then to add insult to injury: Blake and Avery loitering around like they were waiting their fucking turn to have at her.

  No.

  Fintan and Elijah had never once set me off over their separate and developing connections with Katja, but yesterday…

  Yesterday I had been this close to painting the walls with blood and guts. Had the guards not literally stunned me into submission, I would have torn all three of those twisted bastards limb from limb and accepted my fate. Simple as that.

  “O’Dwyer.”

  I started at the sound of my name barked by an unfamiliar guard. A trio loitered in the open main door to Cellblock C, and, so unaccustomed to being addressed, I just stared back. Most of the vampires in Xargi were shadows, shells of their former selves, unable to work and barely surviving on the pitiful daily dose of blood. We weren’t threats; the guards seldom paid us any attention.

  But now here was some beefy warlock beckoning me to him with his wand, and my eyes narrowed when he called for me again.

  “Come on,” his companion snapped, a second wand raised in my direction. “You’ve got an appointment.”

  A what? Appointments were coveted by inmates, as there was this secret universal hope that we were about to meet with a lawyer. Rarely were we so fortunate.

  If anything, appointment was code for solitary.

  Still as stone, I glanced at Fintan—which must have been laughable to the newcomers. After all, it wasn’t like the fae could do anything. Whether I wanted to leave the cellblock or not, I was going.

  “Stay on your toes,” he muttered under his breath, lips barely moving as he picked crusty bits of dough from his nails. Meanwhile, the rest of the cellblock cunts smirked and whispered to each other, guards and inmates included. Christ. None of it made me want to leave Katja, but so long as Elijah was still here, his strength unmatched and his resolution like steel, I could breathe a little easier.

  If I needed to breathe, of course.

  And Fintan had a few qualities I came to admire with each passing day. Tonight, when I reluctantly abandoned my post in front of her door, the fae shifted his stance so that his body—lean and wiry, made for swift movements, a warrior’s frame that delivered the killing blow like a dance—blocked the majority of the opening.

  As I marched over to the awaiting trio, three unnecessary wands trained on me, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had finally found me a work assignment. Sure, solitary seemed more likely given recent events, but Xargi Penitentiary worked its inmates to the bone. With vampires sequestered away from the sun, the small population in red jumpsuits were essentially useless—a drain on resources and manpower. They should have been looking for ways to put our strength, speed, and manual dexterity to work ages ago.

  Hands clasped in front of me, I let the warlocks lead me out. Through dim stony corridors, they marched me on a familiar path to the stairwell that brought us to the cafeteria. Intense fluorescents haunted my every step, bright and offensive to eyes so accustomed to the shadows. When we bypassed the dining hall and continued lower underground, my suspicions spiked, my hands gripped each other tighter, and the warlocks suddenly moved faster.

  Five floors beneath the earth we descended, going deeper than solitary; each guard had the nerve to point it out, to show me the door and tell me to consider myself fortunate that I wasn’t headed in there. Please. I spent just about all my time in solitary while the others worked. I was a creature of the night, an orphan vampire without the protection of a coven; I was accustomed to pits and holes and dark, depressing places.

  Until Elijah.

  Until his cottage and his company.

  Until fireside conversations and laughter and trips to the village pub.

  Until Katja and her smile, her blood glittering like starlit rubies—

  We stepped out of the final stairwell into a completely different world. Shock shivered down my spine at the bright white walls and glossy floors replacing familiar dusty stone blocks. Metal doors that gave off the faint scent and pulse of iron peppered the corridor, and all three warlocks really put their back into shoving me along when my feet dragged and my knees locked. Six doors down, one of the fuckers tapped his wand on the iron panel—which I noticed had no doorknob, accessible only by magic—and it opened soundlessly.

  Cold whooshed out just as hurriedly as I was shoved in, met by a sterile operating room with the brightest lights yet. Men in white lab coats puttered around, some with face masks, others preparing equipment with their backs to me. Seized by panic, my chest constricted with fear sharp enough to crack every rib. My mouth dried up. My fingertips went numb. My brain turned sluggish on the uptake, slowly digesting my new surroundings.

  And my eyes…

  My eyes locked on the metal operating table in the middle of it all, outfitted with spiked wooden cuffs just for vampires. Like iron incapacitated fae and silver poisoned shifters, shove a bit of wood into a vamp’s body and they were screwed.

  I shook my head and pushed back, only to have a wand jabbed into either side of my neck just below the collar. A good shove and a jolt of something fiery had me shuffling forward at a snail’s pace, driven toward the table by the three unknown guards. Fuck. Fuck. Outmanned and outgunned—not ideal, but maybe…

  As soon as I looked beyond the operating table, my brain short-circuited. Men in whi
te coats clustered around a flat-screen, and seconds later X-rays plastered across it—skulls. Skulls with fangs. One of the bastards even circled the fangs with his wand, tapping at the markings for emphasis, and the purpose of this room became abundantly clear. I reared back, fighting with earnest now, fear quashed deep down in favor of fire. For a bloodthirsty creature of the night, I rarely gave in to violence. In fact, Katja’s assault was the first instance where I had lost my shit and relied on my hands, not my words, to send a message.

  Tonight needed to be the same.

  And I tried.

  Damn it, I tried.

  As the panicked whitecoats lumbered toward the walls and out of the way, more warlocks in black uniforms poured in from various doors. Dozens of hands found me, wands shocked me, and inch by precious inch, they hauled me toward the operating table. Teeth gritted, I flailed and fought and snapped my fangs at anyone within reach.

  Overhead, mirrored panels slanted over the room—

  An observation deck.

  My torment was for public consumption, apparently.

  Against my best efforts, they forced me onto the table—strapped me down with cuffs spiked with wood on the insides. As soon as the little pinpricks broke skin, their sedative effects kicked in. My muscles relaxed. My head flopped onto cold, merciless metal. Restraints were added at my ankles too, shoes removed, and another wave of weakness washed over me as more teeny, tiny wood stakes pierced my flesh.

  Humans had loads of dumb mythos about vampires, but a wooden stake to the heart? Devastating. One of the few natural elements that could well and truly kill us.

  “W-what is this?” I forced out, tongue thick and heavy, my words slurred. All around me, the organized chaos resumed, masked men and women in scrubs wheeling trays to my bedside, one even dragging a punishingly bright light directly over my face.