by Rhea Watson
Yeah, she was beautiful, all petite and porcelain and freckled, her hair like fire and her eyes like sapphires. That fit the mental image of a dragon’s mate, what with their penchant for all things shiny. Back in Britain, Elijah’s countryside manor dripped with wealth courtesy of his innate urge to hoard treasures, and witch Katja was pretty enough to warrant a place on his wall.
Yet from what I’d seen today, both in the cellblock and the dining hall, she was also quiet and standoffish, distant and dour. And now she was sobbing, probably on the verge of passing out if she didn’t get her breathing under control.
Honestly. Her? Fated to Elijah?
I just couldn’t see it.
But he was one hundred percent certain—and he should know. Shifters just felt… so… deeply. I couldn’t imagine existing with so much swirling around inside me, all this feeling—both human and animal—and never mind that literal other creature, not metaphorical in the slightest, always desperate to get out. Even during my moodiest stint as a starving human poet, I had never gone that deep. What a nightmare.
But Elijah was a nightmare I had put up with for eight years—my first and only real friend in six centuries. When he’d told me over supper that he and this Katja woman were fated, I’d believed him because I owed him that much, but my God did it piss me off, because now I would have to babysit him. His reaction anytime they were in the same space, anytime he could see or smell her, was totally unacceptable in our current environment. If he acted out, a guard would notice.
And they’d have a grand old time making him pay for it.
Sadistic cunts.
For six long months, he and I had flown under the radar. We didn’t get involved with other inmates. We let bad shit happen because it wasn’t our job to stop it. Trapped inside a highly warded prison, with warlock guards strutting about flashing their wands—compensation for the smallest cocks on the planet, probably—every two seconds, wearing collars that kept Elijah from shifting into the magnificent and downright brutal dragon he could be—we were fucked. No sense in making a bad situation worse by involving ourselves in drama.
Katja brought drama.
A lot of it.
Because Elijah couldn’t keep his shit together, and after eight years of living in a cottage on his property, writing and thriving and living my best life with a friend, I gave a damn about him. Unfortunately.
So, even if I didn’t think this mewling witch deserved to be the fated mate of one of the most decent shifters I knew, the only one who didn’t play the political games, Elijah believed it. He had connected with her in an instant—and it was biological, something he couldn’t help, couldn’t avoid even if he tried. So. Fine. If fate had selected her for him, for my best friend, my shifter brother, then perhaps I owed it to him to make her shut up.
Er. I mean. Calm her down.
And then maybe, just maybe, I could get an hour or two of sleep tonight to replenish my wasting body.
Shrouded in darkness and speckles of unfettered starlight, I finally—begrudgingly—rolled off my bed. The springs creaked and groaned, and my bare feet touched down on cool stone as soon as I was upright.
I waited a moment, listening, not needing to strain—
Still crying.
Damn it.
Scratching at the back of my neck, I stood, then dropped to my knees and crawled to the little mousehole that stretched between my cell and hers. The place was full of cracks and holes, vermin alive and well—just another means to torture innocent supers, all so the warden could show off the first supernatural prison in the world.
Not that we needed one, but obviously someone was in the mood to make money. Prick.
Humans had been doing it for decades—for-profit prisons—so why not us? Why not punish a community that already had to hide in the shadows, a community full of its own regimented laws, a community at war with itself half the time anyway?
No one had asked for this.
And surely no one but those lining their pockets wanted this.
“Hey?” I called through the little hole, settling on my side and peering through the black, my night vision as spectacular as my hearing. Not that there was much of a view: just more dusty brownish-grey stonework, then what appeared to be one of the metal legs of her bed shoved up against the far wall.
At the sound of my voice, the witch fell silent save for a little sniffle, and I raised my eyebrows, waiting for a response.
Nothing.
Fair enough.
I didn’t really talk to anyone but Elijah and I’d been here six months. But I couldn’t just leave it at that; scaring her wasn’t the goal, and I most certainly was not like the majority of the actual criminals in here.
“Katja, right?”
“I-I’m sorry,” she murmured, voice carrying through even though she was positioned somewhere out of sight, somewhere deeper in her cell. Probably next to the window, the small taste of freedom and normalcy this place allowed any of us. “Could you hear me?”
“Well, yes.” Obviously. She wasn’t exactly being quiet over there. Unfortunately, my sardonic tone set off another bout of crying, and I shook my head, rolled my eyes, and flopped onto my back. Elijah was accustomed to my snark, my bouts of melancholy, my dry wit, but it could be a touch off-putting to strangers.
“It’s fine,” I remarked, threading my hands together on top of my chest. “Everyone cries the first night. I mean, the innocent ones, anyway.” Really, the thought of Deimos or Constance wailing inside their cells was laughable. “The other bastards probably expected to be in something like this at some point.”
Bare feet tiptoed across the stone tiles, and I listened to her hands grazing the wall between us, followed by shuffling along the base until she stumbled onto the little mouse highway. I glanced to the side, the nothingness on the other end suddenly filled with a sapphire-blue eye searching me out.
“Hello,” I whispered when our gazes met fleetingly, hers disappearing just as fast as it appeared.
“Hi,” she offered in return. After a little more scuffling on her end, all I saw was that brilliant red hair in front of the hole, suggesting she had adopted a similar position on the floor. Katja cleared her throat, her voice thick and hoarse as she said, “Everyone says they’re innocent though.”
“Again, yes.” I pressed my lips together and swallowed the sarcasm down. “But you can hardly believe them, can you? They’re all practiced liars, even the guards. And watch yourself with Deimos.”
Elijah had gone way too far with the demon earlier today, catching his eye with that display, encouraging the little shit to take a special interest in him and Katja. From here on out, Deimos and his cronies would be paying extra-close attention to the pair whenever they interacted, and I dreaded having to involve myself in another tedious spat.
Especially over a woman.
How sinfully cliché.
Mind you—it wasn’t really about Katja. Deimos had sensed Elijah’s alpha qualities from the beginning, and that made the demon want to fuck with him. Simple, typical, stupid supernatural dynamics—all alive and well in Xargi Penitentiary.
She let out a watery laugh. “Yeah, like I’d cozy up to a demon. I’m not that desperate.”
“Good to hear.” At least she had a brain in that pretty head. A tense quiet settled over us—tense only because there was never an easy quiet in a place like this. If someone in our cellblock wasn’t making a ruckus just for kicks, usually Constance, occasionally that rat shifter Blake, then someone, somewhere, was screaming, and it carried through the vents like thunder come nightfall.
“I’m sorry I kept you up,” Katja said suddenly, sounding a little sheepish. I shrugged, even if she couldn’t see it.
“It’s fine. I’m used to it.”
“The collar doesn’t kill your hearing, huh?”
I picked at the leather, more habit than anything, careful not to trigger its failsafe curse—the kind that went off if you were stupid enough to try and re
move the thing. “Not as much as I’d like.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop saying that.” Her breath hitched, and I rubbed the knot between my eyebrows with a sigh. “No, I just mean… It’s fine. I understand, anyway.”
“I’m a bit… overwhelmed, I guess,” she admitted softly. Just as I was about to tell her that was completely understandable, that this place was a steaming pile of hot garbage that ought to be burned to the ground with all the guards and that fucking warden still inside, she burst out crying again. Again. Sobbing, probably beneath both hands, she sounded like she was trying her best to keep it in as much as possible.
For my sake?
Christ.
Her breath hitched, and something strangled and deeply sad shuddered from what I remembered to be a pair of rather full lips. Strange detail to recall in the heat of the moment, but I was desperately starved in here. Starved for blood and sane women. I mean, all the ones in here were beautiful; supernatural men and women were usually attractive. Predatory advantage to be lovely.
But Jesus, she was still going.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
I despised a wailing woman.
And not because the sounds grated on me, or that all the emotion irked me—I wasn’t a heartless bastard, no matter the stigma surrounding vampires—I just never knew what to say. As a man who prided himself for his words, my vast vocabulary shriveled up to single syllables in the face of a crying woman—especially one I was determined to make stop.
So, without thinking, I launched into one of my originals. A poem from two centuries back, one that had beguiled crowds at pubs and sailors in bunks. I’d written it about the Wild Atlantic Way, the stretch of cruel, breathtaking coastline that ran the full length of my darling Éire. It was a land I knew well, savage in its splendor where the sea met the land, home to selkies and merfolk. Passages to fae realms dotted the shoreline, which turned the Atlantic bitter. The poem came out of nowhere, a limerick I hadn’t thought of in centuries, yet it flowed seamlessly from my lips now, lines about the sea and the storm, the calm and the tempest, the beauty and the terror.
And when I finished, my voice soft as it always was for poetry, Katja had fallen silent. Briefly, we experienced a quiet unknown to me during my stint in prison so far—and it was magnificent. Surrounded by stone and starlight, we both lay there on either side of the mousehole, my words slowly fading into the ether—
My eyes snapped open.
What—the fuck did I just do? Panic-recited poetry to make a woman stop crying?
Aghast, I licked my lips, mouth suddenly too dry. “I just thought—”
“That was beautiful,” she whispered through the hole, full lips right there—like she had murmured her praise into my ear. Heat flared in my chest, but as I lay there on my back, stiff and still, I was suddenly acutely aware it was no longer embarrassment that ripened inside me.
But something else entirely.
Something—strange.
Unwelcome, especially in a place like this. I’d already decided months ago that no one could affect me. No one could move me to pity. No friends. No flirtations. No nothing. Just me and Elijah and our survival.
Then along came a witch, fated to my best friend, her voice like silk, like the gentlest mist of the first spring rain, and I—
“Thank you,” I gritted out, only because I should. No one had admired my poetry in decades, my current work erring toward a blend of tabloid journalism and hard-hitting news, depending on the publication and the pen name. Occasionally I put out the odd fiction—one psychosexual thriller had recently been optioned for a TV series. “I, er, used to be a poet… in another life.”
“I run a café in Seattle,” she told me, her voice thick and tired—exhausted, really, every word laced with a weariness I knew well, the sort that settled into your bones. I felt it here with the lack of blood, the isolation, the injustice of being ripped from my life and brutalized by warlocks in uniforms. She cleared her throat, and I blinked the flash of rage away. A quick peek through the hole showed she had rolled onto her side, one beautiful blue eye gazing at me again. “I don’t have any pretty words to describe it though.”
I too lolled onto my side, my cheek to the dusty stone, same as her.
“It’s nice to meet you, Katja.”
A tear careened down her pale flesh and plopped onto the floor. “It’s nice to meet you too…”
We stared at one another for a beat, that blue orb suddenly dancing about, and I bit back a grin.
“Rafe.”
“It’s nice to meet you…” She shuffled closer. “Rafe.”
Excitement fluttered about in my chest at the sound of my name on her tongue. Abort. Abort!
“Good night, Katja.”
She blinked back at me. “Good night, Rafe.”
Another unsettling tingle, my dead heart skipping a beat despite the fact it had been rotting in my chest for nearly five and a half long centuries.
Katja rolled away first, and I quickly did the same, returning to my creaky bed and flopping onto the mattress with a sigh I didn’t need—never needed, but always felt satisfying to do, some semblance of humanity clinging to me even now. Hands folded on my chest, I stared up at the ceiling, at the thin beam of moonlight slashing in from the window. Odd how the giddy flutter had vanished, replaced instead by a warped feeling of pride, of accomplishment, that I had settled this crying woman.
The crying witch.
Katja.
And even after she fell asleep, her breaths long and even, occasionally hitched, I struggled to close my eyes, finding it even harder to doze off now in the prison’s familiar nighttime hush than I had when she wept by my side.
And frankly—that pissed me right off.
5
Katja
I’d never been this exhausted before. Not when my brothers died. Not after Dad passed. Not in the first year of running a business full-time at the age of twenty-four all by my freakin’ self. At least then Tully had been by my side, fueling me, replenishing me, supporting me with cuddles and purrs and strength.
None of that in here.
And it was only the second day.
The first meal of the second day at that.
I’d been inside Xargi Penitentiary for a good, what, maybe twenty hours, and it already felt like twenty years.
The trio of cellblock guards who’d put us to bed were gone when the alarm tolled this morning. After a quick pee in the world’s scummiest toilet, the little sink above it spewing perpetually freezing water, I’d joined the rest of the inmates in a rainbow of jumpsuit colors at our place outside the cells—right next to the door, standing in the wall between our hole and our neighbor’s. Vampire Rafe glanced my way as soon as he shuffled out into the shadows, sunlight beaming from every cell but his, only I refused to meet his eye. Last night had been one of the worst of my life—and it had been utterly humiliating that he heard me bawling like a homesick schoolgirl during her first year at the academy.
I just… couldn’t face him. Needed some time to, I don’t know, find my dignity again.
And then let go of the fantasy that a peppy host with a camera crew was about to materialize out of nowhere with a microphone that he’d shove in my face after telling me this was all a big joke, a new supernatural prank show that someone had nominated me for…
Because…
Because that was just pathetic. Life seldom worked that way, and as they marched Cellblock C out in a single-file line, wands drawn, I accepted that this was real.
But I couldn’t accept that I was stuck here. I wouldn’t accept it. I was an innocent witch wrongfully detained, and if it was the last thing I ever did, I would breathe free air again.
While we had sunlight in our cells, the interior corridors of the penitentiary were illuminated by long fluorescent bulbs that flickered and tinged at random. It appeared vampires weren’t permitted their usual schedule—sleep all day, up all night—which explained why the p
rison cafeteria was underground. Down a few winding stone corridors from our cellblock, one guard at the front, one at the back, the other stalking the line with a steely eye, a cruel smirk, and a wand as black as his uniform, we took a hard left into a stairwell.
And went down, down, down, three levels deep before filing into the huge circular cafeteria. With a max of ten inmates per cellblock—judging by the number of cells in ours, anyway—the entire inmate population ate together, called to grab our food by wedding-buffet rules, which meant one at a time, starting with Cellblock A. Last night at dinner, I had counted thirteen cellblocks total: A through M. Roughly a hundred and thirty inmates in one place, thirty-plus guards patrolling the area.
I’d expected chaos.
And compared to the unnerving quiet of the cellblock, it was, but at least it was organized chaos. As soon as we filled our trays with whatever the kitchen crew had prepared, the hair-netted supers behind the counter wearing jumpsuits like me, we had the freedom to sit wherever we wanted.
Last night at dinner, I’d sat alone. That had felt safest.
This morning, with my plastic serving tray and a breakfast of greyish scrambled eggs, a tiny carton of orange juice, and a slightly burnt English muffin awaiting me, I wasn’t quite as lucky. Not an empty spot in sight, dozens and dozens of round metal tables with stools bolted to the ground situated across the center of the cafeteria. Guards patrolled the perimeter, chatting, laughing, wands always in hand.
I missed my wand.
Missed what it could do to the bastards who had first shoved me into my cell, to the bitch in processing who literally made me strip naked, right down to my bobby pins, then squat in front of her and cough.
Like I’d somehow shoved contraband into my pussy before whoever kidnapped me from Seattle knocked me unconscious. Honestly. The most degrading experience of my life: who knew how many others had been watching through the two-way mirror.
I bit the insides of my cheeks, trying not to think about it, to get lost in the events of the recent past—because I’d lose it. Again. And I couldn’t lose it in here. Rafe had been sweet in his own way, but for all I knew, everyone else was a hardened criminal, and they ate weakness for breakfast, not expired eggs.
