Page 62 of Caged Kitten

And me, ravenous, a monster, sinking my fangs into her inner thigh.

Fuck. I tugged my hand away, my attempt to be gentle—kind, even—failing miserably.

“Katja, maybe you should…” Go. Get the fuck out of my cell while I still clung to the tenuous strands of self-control. Everyone always talked about how shifters fought the beast within, the man trying desperately to quell the animal snarling in his chest. But they never mentioned how we struggled, how vampires faced temptation each and every night. How we were bound by laws, punishable by stake or sunlight should we break them, that forced us to keep our basic instincts in check.

To swallow the bloodlust.

The lust in general.

“No, please just…” Katja fiddled with her nails, cheeks flushed again at my rejection. “I need to… I… Thank you, Rafe.” She shuffled about on the cot, one leg bent and tucked under her, the other dangling over the side as she faced me. “Thank you so much for everything.”

“Er, like I said…” I scratched at the back of my neck, falling back on all the fake nonchalant gestures I had studied and perfected over the centuries. Tully’s eyes locked on mine for a beat, his tail swishing back and forth, my pillow officially his, and I cleared my throat. “It’s really nothing. He’s a good cat—”

“I’m not just talking about Tully,” she insisted. “I haven’t had the chance to say it, and I should have sooner, but thank you for… talking to me that first night. And every night since then.”

Except the night she returned from the bakery reeking of sweat and sex, of Elijah and sweet briar rose petals and so much more that it suffocated me. The memory hung between us, as unacknowledged now as it had been back then. Loath as I was to admit it, I’d sulked that night. I’d let weakness win and pouted in my cell like a child.

All was right the following night, but weeks later, I despised myself for reacting that way—for punishing her when she wasn’t at fault. Neither was Elijah. And, frankly, neither was I. The storm brewing between we three, featuring a lightning bolt of Fintan every now and again, was nobody’s fault.

But my responses were mine, and I owned the guilt of ignoring her that night.

Jaw briefly clenched, I glanced her way, hating how lovely she looked in the darkness, how the light trickling in from the common area really highlighted her beauty. “Katja—”

“No, let me say this.” The witch rolled her shoulders back, as if steeling herself—bracing herself, preparing herself, and I feared where this might be headed. “I need to… I wouldn’t have made it a week without you being there at night. You’ve been so good to me, and I feel like I’ve been taking and taking—”

“We’re all just trying to survive in here,” I muttered, my one-shouldered shrug halfhearted. She tucked her loose red waves behind her ears with a sigh, her breath the pungent spearmint of the prison toothpaste.

“You make it a lot easier.” She paused, only to gnaw at her lip—wholly unaware what that did to me, the flash of teeth a reminder that I longed to claim her with my own, to mark her up, to tear flesh with my fangs. I clenched my hands to fists, shoving those thoughts aside only for them to come back swinging, stronger than ever, when she tentatively touched my thigh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m taking advantage of your good nature… and your friendship with Elijah.”

“That’s ridiculous, Katja,” I said tightly, unable to tear my gaze away from her fingertips on my leg, her touch somehow both featherlight and bruising.

“Is it?”

The wobble of uncertainty had my head snapping up, and I found her studying me with such doubt, such disbelief, that it was like a stake to the fucking heart. “Maybe at first I-I volunteered because Elijah and you… He knew from the very beginning…” Fated mates. Why did the stars favor shifters? Why did they get soulmates while the rest of us were left to flounder about for eternity? “But now I…”

Now what?

What was I supposed to say?

Pour my heart out—not a chance in hell.

My body responded with a will of its own, ignoring my sluggish thoughts, my scattered mind, and reached out for her. I smoothed a few fallen bits of coppery-red back behind her ear, tending to the shorter layers that always refused to stay with the herd. Surprisingly soft, despite the frizzy ends. Her breath caught as my fingers slid down the curve of her mane, tracing it, then up the column of her neck, along her jaw. My thumb found her lower lip before I’d clued into its intention, plucking at it, tracing the fullness, the rosebud pucker. Victory sharpened in my chest when her lips parted for me, when the pink beneath my thumb trembled ever so slightly…

I reared back with a hiss like she had burned me—for she had. The lightest touch, torturously fleeting, and Katja Fox set me aflame.

And the fire reminded me that she belonged to another.

Their heat was meant for each other; my frost, my dead porcelain, had no role to play in this game.

I can’t.

“And now?” Katja whispered, hope twinkling in her sapphires, tenuous and paper-thin but there.

Christ. I stabbed my thumb into the would-be mattress beneath us, as if feeling the cot’s cruel springs would extinguish the fire. “What?”

“You said at first you—”

“Now we’re…” I swallowed hard again—only the knives were gone. My mouth watered for her as it never had before, and that should have been my cue to run. Take a walk around the cellblock. Pester Avery—something. “We’re friends.”

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