Page 16 of Caged Kitten

“Sure,” she said, her accent suggesting bounty hunters had scooped her up from Australia. As she nodded at the spot in front of me, I sat in a hurry, and the shifter grabbed her own slightly burnt English muffin, slowly picking a little piece off. “And pro tip—don’t ask anyone for anything in here. Just take it.”

Yikes. Another prison faux pas. How on earth was I going to survive this? “Oh. Right.”

“It’s just…” She popped the sliver of bread into her mouth, chewing daintily with a grimace. “Some of the creeps in this place will take your manners and run with them, you know? Asking makes you weak.”

My stomach gurgled, looping and churning, desperate for sustenance. “Noted.”

We ate in silence for a little while. No one had offered me a utensil, but I noticed the shifter had a spoon.

“You can buy them in commissary,” she said tersely when she caught me staring. “No buying privileges until after your first month. They made you give bank details, right?” My nod had her rolling her eyes, the clear one a warm dark brown. “You can only have a max of twenty dollars in your account at a time so nobody cleans out the shop, but you can expect they’re already charging you rent for your stay in paradise.”

Fantastic. In five years, I’d probably walk out of here with nothing—especially if someone seized Café Crowley in my absence. Hopefully—please—Annalise would start a search for me as soon as she realized I wasn’t there. Because if I hadn’t opened the café, she had to know I was either kidnapped or dead.

“First day here?” the shifter asked as I glowered at my disgusting eggs, which, after a taste test, proved to be overcooked, a little dry, and… well, exactly how I imagined greyish eggs would taste: downright terrible.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I muttered, moving on to the orange juice carton. It might have been lukewarm to the touch, but after peeling the plastic lid and taking the tiniest sip, it at least tasted like fresh oranges, albeit almost too tangy for my liking.

“Innocent?”

I glanced across the round table at her, eyebrows shooting up. “Uh, yeah. You?”

“Figured. You’ve got the look.” She popped another miniscule piece in her mouth, delicate and deliberate in the way she ate this crap. “They said I trafficked kids.” Her eyes watered, and she busied herself with her muffin, sniffling. “Because apparently the only reason for a rabbit shifter to have so many kids in their home is because I, I dunno, trafficked them in.” She looked up helplessly, her lower lip trembling, and it was then I noted the faint rings around her eyes. Not sleeping all that well in here either. Another sniffle prompted her to swipe the back of her hand under her nose, and she shrugged. “I just… We have a lot of kids.”

Rabbit shifter with a whole gaggle of kids? Yeah, that checked out. Many shifters reflected their animal counterparts in their everyday lives, and rabbits were said to have a boatload of offspring. Rabbit shifters, meanwhile, were rumored to have harems, usually consisting of a single female and multiple males. As I did a quick sweep of the pretty shifter across from me, I wondered just how many husbands she had waiting for her on the outside—and just how many kids was a lot. She didn’t look much older than me, and at twenty-nine, I was still in the “thank the gods I’m not pregnant” phase. Thank you, magically brewed birth control. The stuff lasted a whole year when done correctly, and despite my abysmal love life, I still had needs—needs that I scratched every few months to mediocre results.

No babies yet.

But the shifter across from me looked like it killed her not to have her babies by her side. Her whole face had fallen, and she picked miserably at her muffin in silence. My heart almost broke for her, but I swallowed hard and steeled myself. After all, this was prison. Innocent as she looked, nice as she sounded, this rabbit shifter could be a psychopath. Maybe that was why no one was sitting with her.

“I… I’m sorry,” I said at last. While I wasn’t about to accept everything that came out of her mouth, she’d have to be an A-list actress to pull off the pain in her eyes right now. Well. Eye. “That’s so awful—to be a mom accused of that.” Her slight nod and a much louder sniffle tugged at my heartstrings, and I cleared my throat, pushing through. “They said I… sold love potions to humans.”

She snorted, blinking back what looked like a sudden rush of tears. “Oh. Wow. That’s embarrassing. Don’t go around telling people that if you want any sort of reputation in here.”

“I’m sure I can jazz it up,” I mused, a barely there grin stretching across my lips for the first time since I’d arrived as she chuckled. “I’m Katja.”

“Willow,” she offered with a bob of her head. I still wasn’t sure about the policies on physical contact in here, but I figured neither of us wanted to attract a guard’s attention by shaking hands. Willow stabbed her spoon at her eggs, her little half-smile faltering before she went back to picking at her English muffin. “I wish they had, like, a speck of green on here.”

“I bet it’d be wilted.”

We swapped smirks again; nothing bonded two complete strangers like complaining about the same horrible thing. As the breakfast chatter rose, all the cellblocks fed and seated, we finished the rest of our meal in silence. At one point, it seemed like a super in a grey jumpsuit was about to make a move and claim a stool at our table, but when we both glanced his way, he scuttled off and eventually ate standing up near one of the guards. Willow rolled her eyes as she ripped open her orange juice carton, watching him with a scowl.

“That will get you punched. Don’t hesitate. He should know better.”

“Speaking of, uhm, knowing…” I pushed my tray to the side, officially done with the scrambled eggs and their grey tinge. If you picked off the burnt bits, the plain muffin wasn’t half bad, and even though I still tasted the metallic tang with every swig of juice, at least the sugar would give me a boost for an hour or two. “You can totally say no, but… do you know anything about the supers in my cellblock?”

“They opened your block just after mine came close to capacity, so I know a bit.” Chin propped up on her fist, Willow pushed her untouched eggs around her plate with a sigh. “Anyone in particular?”

My mind flashed immediately to Elijah and Rafe. Two men with ridiculously sculpted bodies, obvious from the way their jumpsuits stretched across strong chests and taut arms and thick thighs. Elijah was broader than his vampire counterpart, the sunrise to Rafe’s sunset with a head full of sandy-gold waves that probably curled when they were long enough. Tanned skin. Caramel eyes. Worn hands, like he really worked with them outside of this place.

All that from a fleeting introduction yesterday. I had a feeling he stuck with me because not only was he handsome, but that huge shifter was like sunshine. Warm and alive, a little reminder that there was a big wide world out there. Rafe, meanwhile, had the whole gorgeous, brooding vampire thing going for him. Sharp jawline. Intense eyes. Black hair, brows, and stubble. Pale, but not in a sickly way. Like moonlight. The sun and the moon—Elijah and Rafe.

I blinked a few times when I realized Willow had been staring at me for… well, however long I’d been daydreaming about a pair of inmates—possible criminals. Yeesh. Not a good look on my part.

“Uh, no, no one in particular,” I babbled, cheeks hot and chest tight under Willow’s scrutiny. “All of them, I guess. I’m just not really sure what I’m in for…”

She studied me a few beats longer, the weight of her clouded eye pinned squarely on me more unnerving than I cared to admit. However, after a blink, it seemed like I’d passed the test, and she nodded. “Right, okay.”

I bit the insides of my cheeks, belly looping. Had she just spotted a weakness? A chink in my armor? Something told me I’d need to keep my physical attraction for Elijah and Rafe—and maybe my connection to anyone in here, including Willow—under wraps. No sense in giving any of the real criminals something to manipulate, and besides, I wasn’t here for connection. It was pathetic to get swept up in a pair of muscly male bodies and breathtakingly gruff good looks anyway, because just about every super out there was hot. It gave us an edge over humanity—and I ought to be used to it by now. There were attractive guys aplenty in my community; Elijah and Rafe were just two other smoke shows in a sea of smoke shows.

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