Page 36 of Caged Kitten

“And if I don’t?” He fished his wand out of his suit jacket’s interior, placing it delicately, almost reverently on the desk. Ivory handle—shocker. Grey eyes flicked to mine, locked on, and the world blurred around us, the slate goading me to react. “Will you show me your claws, Katja? Come on, then… Take a swipe.”

My fingers twitched toward the wand, and a stupid part of my brain posed a theory that if I just moved fast enough, I could snatch it up and use it on its master. Never mind the collar. Never mind that wands had hearts and souls of their own, that they were major divas who sometimes freaked out hard if someone new used them without permission.

It would be worth the risk if I could wipe that smarmy smile off his face.

If I could never hear kitten coming out of his mouth ever again.

But that, like so many other half-baked plans of escape, was just a fantasy. Useless to dwell on. Depressing to consider. So, I sat there, stiff and silent, trembling, seething—seconds away from crying. Because I still wasn’t the badass heroine. I was a witch who missed her dad, set off by a nickname that didn’t belong to Lloyd Guthrie.

He ghosted his middle finger up and down his wand, the shaft a polished black wenge wood, and then let out a long, drawn-out sigh.

“Do you want to leave this place?”

My heart skipped a beat. Leave… Xargi? I had been waiting for those words, waiting for that offer, from the second I woke up cuffed to a chair. The penitentiary’s warden ran the show, and I had no doubt that he could snap his fingers and I’d be free.

But making a deal with Lloyd Guthrie was suicide. It had to be.

“I—”

“You’re mine, kitten,” he insisted, stroking his wand’s handle, gliding over the twin serpents etched into the ivory. I had to watch his hand, his fingers—because the you’re mine thing tickled my gag reflex, and if I met his eyes, I’d probably hurl all over his ridiculous desk. But his fingers stilled, and a sharp snap made me flinch and look up just as Lloyd flashed a thin smile. “Say the word and you can come home.”

I pressed onto the balls of my feet, seconds away from attempting the whole crashing-through-the-window thing. I’d take a broken ankle and prowling wolves over this conversation. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nobody ever told you?” His dark brows shot up, and he sat in suspended laughter, waiting for me to deny it—to spill the truth. Dad had told me a lot in his final hours, but it had all sounded so… so… implausible. The rantings of a sick, paranoid man. Guilt knotted in my gut, and I busied myself with my nails, my refusal to meet his eye answer enough. Lloyd’s face screwed victoriously, barking cackles bouncing around the office, and he slapped at the desk hard enough to make me jump again. “Ridiculous—but expected. An effort to protect you, most likely, but your father’s silence only left you unprepared, kitten. A fool to the end, Augustus Fox…”

Fury nudged aside the guilt, just for a moment, and I glowered up at him, at this mobster pretending to be a warden—pretending he had some moral superiority over all the inmates in here.

Pretending that he… owned me. That I belonged to him.

No.

Never.

“You see—” Lloyd wiped under his eyes as his obnoxious chuckles settled. “—your mother was a filthy junkie—”

“That’s a lie,” I snapped. This asshole had no right to tarnish her memory—none.

“How would you know? You never met her.” He sniffed as he snatched up his wand, twirling it between his fingers, those hawkish grey eyes never once leaving my face. “She died in childbirth.”

I sucked in a sharp breath, like I always did, to alleviate the stab of loss and longing. Growing up without my mom had left a huge hole in my heart, in my whole life. Irrational as it was, I had always feared Jackson and Ewan hated me for stealing her away from them, my brothers who had had five and three years with her respectively before I came around. Never once did they so much as hint at that. They died loving me just as fiercely as I loved them, missing her just as much as I missed a woman I’d never met but adored all the same.

Fuckhim. I gripped the chair’s armrests, nails gritting into the wood. Fuck Lloyd Guthrie for spewing such lies.

“She was addicted to wolfsbane—deeply,” he told me, his tone bored now, like he was going through the motions. “She ran up debts she couldn’t pay, and in the end, she came to me. She was from the neighborhood—only sixteen at the time. Getting her out of that hole would have cost me almost all I had, but she was the loveliest witch I’d ever seen… You know, once you looked past the ravages of wolfsbane.”

Wolfsbane addict—impossible. She couldn’t be… The woman I’d always imagined, who I had heard stories about all my life, was good. Strong. She wouldn’t succumb to something so petty. Cheeks hollow, I shot up, unable to listen to a second more of this, about to call Thompson back into the room when—

“Sit down, Katja.”

My knees buckled at the weight of his words, at the harsh rasp that would make grown men cry. He didn’t shout. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t curse or threaten. Didn’t level his wand at me. Just—ordered it. Issued a command that sent frost whispering across my skin, made the blood drain from my face. Numb, I slowly slouched back into the chair.

“Good girl,” Lloyd murmured, the threat lingering in his eyes, in the dangerous twist of his lips. “Now, to pay your mother’s arrears, to save her life from addiction and the debt hounds on her heels, I struck a bargain: my assistance for her thirdborn child.”

I blinked back at him, brain struggling to process all of it, never mind that. “W-what? Who are you—Rumpelstiltskin?”

Fae made deals like that, bartering tricks for children, but I’d never heard of a warlock doing it. And I…

I was the thirdborn.

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