Page 28 of Caged Kitten

9

Katja

“Okay, I’ll deal the next hand…”

“You sure about that?”

I shot Rafe a narrowed look as I gathered the deck to me, smoothing cards across the table and organizing them into a neat pile. We had just finished our thousandth round of gin rummy, and frankly I would have killed to be back in the bakery. But work shifts only lasted so long—and stuck in the cellblock, the library cart’s arrival still a few days away, there really wasn’t a hell of a lot to do.

Unless you were in Deimos’s posse.

Then there were games and groveling and shifting power dynamics to wade through, every day a new adventure in demonic mayhem. Fortunately, I had shifted my stance on being a part of a crew roughly a month ago.

Thirty days back to be precise.

Forty long ones since I’d woken up in the interrogation room, missing my skirt and my wand, terrified.

I was still terrified, but at least I had two less reasons to be afraid lately.

“Hey, we can’t all have a vampire’s dexterity,” I sneered when Rafe smirked. Across the table, Elijah watched the interaction with his chin on his fist, elbow planted on the table and a grin toying across his handsome mouth. One month after our first bakery shift together and I still blushed if we made extended eye contact, but no more than if Rafe and I accidentally knocked feet under the table or brushed hands on the way back to our cells.

Naturally, it was different with Rafe: he was just hot as hell. Gorgeous. Scrumptious. Beyond mouthwatering. I had a crush. Hard not to with a guy who looked like a brooding model capable of getting his hands dirty and reciting sonnets.

The connection wasn’t visceral with my neighbor—just physical. And probably one-sided. In all the time we spent together as a threesome, Rafe catered to Elijah and me, always volunteering to step back if we were in a situation that only allowed for a pair instead of a trio.

Not that he needed to often… Besides the occasional lingering glances across the cellblock during random spot checks, Elijah and I had done a great job ignoring the fact that we felt something—something unnatural but familiar, unwelcome but honest—in each other’s presence. He still set my body on fire. I’d never been so hot in all my life, wishing I could sleep naked at night but terrified of a guard bursting in for one stupid reason or another. It happened more times than I liked, and it was always over nothing. Hauled out of bed, we had all been forced to stand at the door for the better part of an hour while a few guards ripped our cells to pieces.

Somehow Deimos always came out of those instances smelling like roses despite being Xargi’s king of contraband, his empire slowly expanding to the smaller cellblocks. He’d even offered me a place by his side—with the implication that I would be equal to Constance, which meant offering new recruits blowjobs. Flattering. My response back then was a straight-as-an-arrow middle finger, and paired with a glowering dragon shifter and his vampire bestie as backup, Deimos had gone after easier targets in the last few weeks, only occasionally tossing lewd gestures my way if the guys weren’t around.

So, yeah. This was my life now. Almost every second of the day controlled by warlock guards. Two meals that seldom met standard nutritional requirements. Three to six shifts a week in the bakery, sometimes alone, sometimes with hours spent alongside Elijah, prepping dough and proofing it and baking buns so fresh and golden—buns that never made it to the inmate cafeteria. Where they disappeared to was anyone’s guess. We had caught the bakery guard munching on one once, so maybe the staff quarters, but we bakery drones made enough in a day to feed a small army, worked to the bone and exhausted come the late afternoon.

Well, I was exhausted. Elijah had shifter resilience to fall back on, which meant he usually picked up the slack by hour nine, neither of us allowed a break at any point. Unfortunately, sometimes I had to handle the workload alone if Elijah was scheduled in the metal shop.

Those days sucked especially hard.

“You know, if you held the deck like so—”

“Piss off, Rafe,” I warned in a singsong voice, fluttering my lashes at him. “I know how to shuffle a deck of cards.”

The vampire’s black brows shot up, the corners of his mouth twitching. “That remains to be seen.”

I sucked in and then let out a dramatic Darth Vader-esque breath, then dropped my voice to its lowest octave. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

The vampire rolled his aquamarine gaze. “Have you always been the world’s biggest dork, or is it a recent development?”

“Always and forever,” I remarked with a slight lift of my chin. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Elijah’s features shifting from wry amusement to outright affection. My belly looped and tightened, secretly thrilled with the way he watched me, but I did my best to ignore him; if I looked his way, even fleetingly, he would school his features like it had never happened.

Just as I started to deal the next hand, an alarm screamed bloody murder from the center of the cellblock’s conical ceiling. Almost instantaneously, the resident afternoon guards who liked to loiter all day and do absolutely nothing to combat Deimos’s douchebaggery hopped to like they were some elite militant squad. In rushed six additional guards, the scene painfully familiar, and I tossed the deck down with a huff.

The dramatics could only mean one thing: new prisoner incoming.

“On your feet, inmates,” one of the guards bellowed—a new warlock who I’d seen around the halls, stalking to and fro like he was lording over the scum of the supernatural world’s underbelly. Bald head, steely stare, a mouth that never smiled; the guy was a little much, even for Xargi. Wand at the ready, he leveled it at all nine of us, jerking from one inmate to the next. “At your posts!”

“Small dick complex, in the flesh,” Rafe mused, to which Elijah snorted. While our dragon companion meandered to the left, Rafe and I hurried right, headed to our neighboring cells together. Whether he was aware of it or not, the vampire always positioned himself between me and the other inmates, his hand hovering over my lower back. After weeks of the behavior, I still wasn’t sure why he did it—or who he did it for.

Elijah? The two were close, obvious friends who had each other’s backs. Elijah and I had some weird innate connection that, while neither of us had explored, had probably been shared with Rafe at some point.

Or did he do it for me? Was it purposeful or just instinctual for a man born almost six centuries ago to protect a defenseless woman?

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