Page 18 of Caged Kitten

6

Elijah

Shockingly, showering was one of the few activities in this shithole that made you feel normal—like a free man, not a caged animal.

But only if you faced the wall, crouching slightly under the tepid spray, and kept your back to the warlock fucks loitering a few feet away.

And only if you didn’t pay too much attention to the gunk between the grout, the stalls in need of a serious deep clean.

Oh, and never mind that you were wearing ridiculous flimsy shoes that you bought in commissary, and that if you dared step onto the brown tile without them, you’d probably catch a foot fungus unlike any the world had ever seen.

Still. It was peaceful, in a way. Quiet. We were permitted to use the Cellblock C shower room every other day. The ordeal started two hours before breakfast: woken by a shrill alarm, inmates were required to stand in front of their cell doors, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, while two of our three permanent guards led inmates in pairs out for a brisk shower. If you didn’t have soap, couldn’t afford it, someone had stolen it from your cell—too fucking bad. Just stand under the terrible water pressure and soak it all in for five minutes.

Katja wouldn’t have soap yet. Only halfway through her first week in the scummiest place on Earth, she had no buying privileges. No funds in her account—whatever the penitentiary wasn’t siphoning from her already, anyway—and no access to the prison shop. Fortunately, she smelled fucking fantastic no matter what. Dirty. Clean. A little sweaty… Her body odor was intoxicating as hell, always rousing my inner dragon and getting him all riled up with just a whiff. Four days on and you’d think we would have adjusted to her presence, especially with Rafe digging his claws into my arm anytime I fixated on my mate, but nope. Seeing her now was like seeing her for the first time—every time.

A feeling I loved and loathed. No one had ever had this much power over me before, such sway. Not a human, not a super, and never another shifter. I’d spent centuries learning to control the beast within. My inner dragon and I—we operated on the same page, always. His moods were my moods and vice versa. We thought as one, rarely quarreled, and navigated this world as a team.

But around her, he was a beast and I was just a man, driven by lust and need and a desire to protect and hoard unlike anything I had ever experienced. Hoarding came with the dragon territory, and I usually exhausted that urge through my jewelry business. In Xargi, one of my workplace assignments was the smithy, forced to forge weapons and trinkets in front of a fire for hours. In the last six months, that had been enough.

No longer.

After all, I wasn’t allowed to keep anything I made, wasn’t permitted to squirrel it away in an underground safe like I did back home. Now that my fated mate had entered the scene, it was chaos. Unbridled, unfettered, absolute chaos.

And it had only been four fucking days.

I’d lose it by seven.

“Greystone—move your ass.”

I hopped to, nudging off the wall between my cell and Helen’s, headed for guard Cooper with a scowl. The fucker liked to flick lit matches at any poor bastard within range when he smoked in here, and it took everything in my power to not ram the pack of cigarettes he always carried down his throat. Beyond that, he was a sleezy warlock, one of many who had taken up Constance’s offer for head, which meant there was always the chance he had allied himself with Deimos.

Phillips, the other guard escorting inmates to the showers this morning, was still gone with his female charge, and as I headed for the main door and an awaiting Cooper, who looked bored out of his skull, a quick perusal of those left waiting showed a distinct lack of Katja.

My inner dragon rumbled at the thought of her naked and wet, close enough to touch.

Simmer down, you fuck. There’s a wall between us.

So, not quite close enough to touch, unfortunately. One of the few places not crafted entirely of dusty stone blocks, each cellblock had their own shower area. Much like a gym or a school, the tiled room had a metal showerhead jutting out from the wall—just the one. No partitions for privacy. No curtains. Just a stretch of space with a lone faucet bathed in artificial light. A tiled wall separated the women’s side from the men’s, and while I had never peeked around the divider, I assumed their side was the same as ours: sparse and grimy.

Towel in one hand and a thinning plastic bag hanging from my fingers in the other, I followed Cooper out of the cellblock and walked the familiar path down the hall. Ten paces, turn right. Four paces. Door. Not a thrilling venture, but any chance to stretch your legs was one you had to seize. The plastic bag swung into my knee when I stilled behind Cooper, who was in the process of stabbing his wand into the keyhole—which I assumed had been enchanted to only open the doors for guards.

Or inmates who paid the guards for favors.

I’d picked up a few new soap bars from the shop last week, and the gentleman in me insisted I should have given one to Katja. Unfortunately, I tended to lose my shit around her, which meant I, like her, had kept my distance. We hadn’t even had a proper conversation yet because I was such a fucking mess, but as the door swung open and humidity wafted into the corridor, I wondered if she felt as I did.

As a non-shifter, could she sense our bond? Feel that fate had entwined us together?

Did it frustrate her as well, the lack of self-control?

Rafe had told me she still wept each night, only quieter now, as if not wanting to disturb her neighbors.

That gutted me.

Absolutely destroyed me—that I couldn’t be there for my mate, that she was suffering in what was practically the same room and I had to stay in my cage and do nothing about it.

“You know the drill, Greystone.”

“Fuck off, Cooper,” I muttered, breezing by him through the door. The divider wall greeted me a few paces in, women’s area to the left, men’s to the right, and I veered right, dumping my shit on the floor and undoing the top few buttons of my jumpsuit. Whoever had been in here before me left a mess, water everywhere, and without a hook to hang my towel, it was probably already wet—useless.

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