Page 61 of Caged Kitten

He seemed to take great pleasure in doing so. Typical fae.

“Uh, yeah,” Katja said slowly. “Thanks, Fintan. It’s just really bad cramps, but I’m having a hard time standing upright. I’ll be fine by tomorrow, I’m sure of it, but today it’s coming out in chunks—like you should have seen my toilet. And then now that I’ve eaten, the period shits are coming—”

“Ugh, gods.” Williams groaned and I stifled a chuckle of my own, turning it into a cough. “Fine, fine. So long as Fintan picks up the slack, whatever. Just… go sit in your cell and never say period shits to me ever again.”

“Deal.” She sounded like she was smiling. They were few and far between, but Katja’s smiles were some of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. If these bastards would ever give me a proper writing utensil, even something as basic as a quill and inkpot, I could write whole sonnets about her mouth. About the shape of her lips, their color and fullness…

I blinked hard and shook my head, burying the thoughts deep down where they belonged, then readjusted my jumpsuit as my cock stirred with interest. Not now, you horny bastard. Pathetic that just the thought of her mouth got me going when I tried so damn hard to make everyone believe, myself included, that Katja and I were just friends.

Let’s chalk it up to nearly ten months of forced celibacy, shall we?

Sure. That was it. Any man would salivate over a stunning woman if they were in my shoes. It wasn’t… I wasn’t…

My thoughts were not a betrayal of my bond with Elijah.

They were natural and normal and completely expected from a male’s reptilian brain—

I glared up at my forehead, mentally warning the snide little voice at the back of my mind that if it whispered anything even remotely close to doth protest too much, I’d find something wooden and shove it through my eye.

End it all.

Yeah.

That would show you, conscience and self-doubt.

Pathetic, the voice sneered, and I rolled my eyes, then straightened at the sound of frantic footsteps shuffling toward my cell. They fell silent as the last of the workday migration drifted through the main door, which clanked shut a few moments later, locks snapping into place, barring Katja, myself, and a snoring Avery inside. We only had a precious forty minutes while the trio of cellblock guards dropped everyone off at their designated workspaces. Occasionally I had a blissful hour without anyone watching me if the idiots on duty opted for a smoke break.

I smelled her before I saw her, her natural odor dampened by the prison-issued deodorant. Baby powder—nowhere near as appealing as the faint floral that clung to her skin, but whatever made her most comfortable was all that mattered. She materialized in my doorway with a hitched breath, cheeks flushed, eyes slightly panicked.

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” I assured her as Tully poked his head out from under my cot. Before I could get another word in, the feline issued an earth-shattering meow that made Katja launch herself into my cell. The witch collapsed to her knees and crawled the rest of the way, hauling her familiar into her arms the second he was barely within reach. Cooing softly like he was a spoiled baby and not the magical accessory he should be, Katja slowly drifted up and settled on the edge of my cot, a purring black bundle on her lap and tears in her eyes. Relief. It billowed off her in waves, her every limb relaxing, the anxious flush in her cheeks melting away.

We sat like that for some time, side by side with about two painful feet of distance between us. She fussed over her familiar as the temporary silence of an empty cellblock set in. Grating, all that nothingness. Quiet was a precious commodity in the penitentiary, yet I despised it during the day. It symbolized my weakness, my failing, my inability to contribute while Elijah worked my assigned duty—the bakery technically should have been mine—and his own in the smithy. Thanks to their pop culture, humans considered us apex predators, the pinnacle of evolution with our speed and dexterity, durable and fierce and powerful.

Among the supernatural, vampire shortcomings were obvious, shoved under a magnifying glass anytime magic came into play. Seated next to the witch who lingered in my dreams far more than she should, the two of us locked in a rare moment of solitude, truly alone, it struck me like a fucking freight train. Weakness. Failure. Flaws. The undeniable deficiencies of my kind—

“Thank you, Rafe,” Katja whispered, stroking Tully’s cheeks with her finger, one side and then the other. Her tongue flicked out to wet her lips, and she cast me a shy sidelong glance. “I owe you everything.”

Oh. Those words stirred something dark within me, something dangerous and ancient—something that insisted if she owed me, then I ought to collect. Swallowing a mouthful of knives, my throat perpetually sandpapery these days, I bit the insides of my cheeks and shook my head.

“It’s, uh, fine.” My fingers longed to map her curves, to walk the swell of her hip, the dip of her lower back, the delicate hollow of her throat. I clenched my eyes shut for a moment, hoping she wouldn’t notice in the cell’s shadows, and then forced myself to focus on being normal and not some lusting, bloodthirsty fiend who wanted to ravish and devour her in equal measures. We had been at great odds lately, poet and monster, and I suddenly realized these precious moments alone only made things worse. “We were fine.” I choked it out, pointedly scanning the walls, the ceiling, like it was the first time—like I hadn’t memorized every damn brick months ago. “I didn’t really do anything.”

At this proximity, Katja’s natural scent had a slight upper hand over the deodorant, and I gritted my teeth, battling back the surge of displeasure and the rush of exhilaration at the fact that my linens now smelled like her. For Elijah’s sake, for hers—hell, maybe even for my own—I had battled my attraction to her for months. The last time the dragon shifter had brought it up, he seemed marginally accepting of my interest in her, but I couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t… covet his fated mate.

Even if she was lovely—Aphrodite reincarnate.

Even if I was a sucker for good conversation, and every single night we had that in spades.

Now here she was, sullying all my hard work, my resistance to her lure, her unwitting siren song, by shuffling down the cot and closing in on me as Tully meandered off her lap and sat his asshole down on my pillow.

While I longed to gaze into her eyes, I focused on my hands instead, fidgeting with the red fabric stretched over my thighs. No. I staunchly refused to be in a fucking love triangle with my best friend and a witch. I couldn’t. I had to—

Her hand suddenly found mine, her flesh an inferno only surpassed by her mate, and before I could stop it, her fingers wove us together. Desire surged, cock swelling with interest again, and my mouth watered as a delicious image danced through my mind…

Of her—naked, sprawled over a luxurious bed so vastly different from the one we found ourselves on.

Her creamy soft skin, her eyes burning with starlight, her crooked finger beckoning me home.

---