by Rhea Watson
Katja wouldn’t have soap yet. Only halfway through her first week in the scummiest place on Earth, she had no buying privileges. No funds in her account—whatever the penitentiary wasn’t siphoning from her already, anyway—and no access to the prison shop. Fortunately, she smelled fucking fantastic no matter what. Dirty. Clean. A little sweaty… Her body odor was intoxicating as hell, always rousing my inner dragon and getting him all riled up with just a whiff. Four days on and you’d think we would have adjusted to her presence, especially with Rafe digging his claws into my arm anytime I fixated on my mate, but nope. Seeing her now was like seeing her for the first time—every time.
A feeling I loved and loathed. No one had ever had this much power over me before, such sway. Not a human, not a super, and never another shifter. I’d spent centuries learning to control the beast within. My inner dragon and I—we operated on the same page, always. His moods were my moods and vice versa. We thought as one, rarely quarreled, and navigated this world as a team.
But around her, he was a beast and I was just a man, driven by lust and need and a desire to protect and hoard unlike anything I had ever experienced. Hoarding came with the dragon territory, and I usually exhausted that urge through my jewelry business. In Xargi, one of my workplace assignments was the smithy, forced to forge weapons and trinkets in front of a fire for hours. In the last six months, that had been enough.
No longer.
After all, I wasn’t allowed to keep anything I made, wasn’t permitted to squirrel it away in an underground safe like I did back home. Now that my fated mate had entered the scene, it was chaos. Unbridled, unfettered, absolute chaos.
And it had only been four fucking days.
I’d lose it by seven.
“Greystone—move your ass.”
I hopped to, nudging off the wall between my cell and Helen’s, headed for guard Cooper with a scowl. The fucker liked to flick lit matches at any poor bastard within range when he smoked in here, and it took everything in my power to not ram the pack of cigarettes he always carried down his throat. Beyond that, he was a sleezy warlock, one of many who had taken up Constance’s offer for head, which meant there was always the chance he had allied himself with Deimos.
Phillips, the other guard escorting inmates to the showers this morning, was still gone with his female charge, and as I headed for the main door and an awaiting Cooper, who looked bored out of his skull, a quick perusal of those left waiting showed a distinct lack of Katja.
My inner dragon rumbled at the thought of her naked and wet, close enough to touch.
Simmer down, you fuck. There’s a wall between us.
So, not quite close enough to touch, unfortunately. One of the few places not crafted entirely of dusty stone blocks, each cellblock had their own shower area. Much like a gym or a school, the tiled room had a metal showerhead jutting out from the wall—just the one. No partitions for privacy. No curtains. Just a stretch of space with a lone faucet bathed in artificial light. A tiled wall separated the women’s side from the men’s, and while I had never peeked around the divider, I assumed their side was the same as ours: sparse and grimy.
Towel in one hand and a thinning plastic bag hanging from my fingers in the other, I followed Cooper out of the cellblock and walked the familiar path down the hall. Ten paces, turn right. Four paces. Door. Not a thrilling venture, but any chance to stretch your legs was one you had to seize. The plastic bag swung into my knee when I stilled behind Cooper, who was in the process of stabbing his wand into the keyhole—which I assumed had been enchanted to only open the doors for guards.
Or inmates who paid the guards for favors.
I’d picked up a few new soap bars from the shop last week, and the gentleman in me insisted I should have given one to Katja. Unfortunately, I tended to lose my shit around her, which meant I, like her, had kept my distance. We hadn’t even had a proper conversation yet because I was such a fucking mess, but as the door swung open and humidity wafted into the corridor, I wondered if she felt as I did.
As a non-shifter, could she sense our bond? Feel that fate had entwined us together?
Did it frustrate her as well, the lack of self-control?
Rafe had told me she still wept each night, only quieter now, as if not wanting to disturb her neighbors.
That gutted me.
Absolutely destroyed me—that I couldn’t be there for my mate, that she was suffering in what was practically the same room and I had to stay in my cage and do nothing about it.
“You know the drill, Greystone.”
“Fuck off, Cooper,” I muttered, breezing by him through the door. The divider wall greeted me a few paces in, women’s area to the left, men’s to the right, and I veered right, dumping my shit on the floor and undoing the top few buttons of my jumpsuit. Whoever had been in here before me left a mess, water everywhere, and without a hook to hang my towel, it was probably already wet—useless.
From day one, I’d never had a problem stripping in front of anyone. Let them look. I had nothing to hide under my prison-issued attire save for a tattoo across my back—a pair of scaly wings reminiscent of my own that stretched from top to bottom, coiled, ready for flight. Intricate and highly detailed, it had cost me a small fortune from the mage who did it. After all, permanently inking anything into a shifter’s skin, flesh that healed itself in a heartbeat, was a difficult task that required a skilled practitioner to get right.
Otherwise all that expensive ink would leech out of your pores before you even peeled the bandages off.
Beyond that, my cock seemed to have no appeal for any of our wannabe alpha guards. Cooper had already forgotten me before I’d even stepped under the showerhead, my shoes paper-thin at this point. He loitered at the end of the dividing wall, leaning against the corner and peering around it. Teeth gritted, I glowered at the back of his head as I wrenched on the shower, blasted immediately with a chilly, underwhelming spray.
Seconds later, Cooper and Phillips—the latter hidden on the other side of the wall—erupted in fits of echoey laughter.
“Always nice to have a new pair of tits in this place,” Cooper mused, his voice carrying. Fire ignited in my chest, a fucking inferno engulfing me from head to toe in an instant. A new pair of tits obviously referred to Katja. She—
They—
My inner dragon roared, his fury like a nuclear explosion, and I planted a hand on the tiled wall, a surface I vowed never to touch if I could help it, just to keep from losing my balance.
“Baby, I know you don’t have soap, but you should try to clean everything,” Phillips sneered from the other side of the divider, his nasally intonation a fucking assault—and fuel to the fire. “You need help reaching your ass?” I pushed off the wall, my vision tunneled and the edges flaring red when that piece of shit laughed again. “How about the kitty cat between your legs? Looks like you keep it groomed…”
Furious, I shifted into pure predator mode, stalking toward the fuckers in absolute silence. As soon as I was within reach, I grabbed a fistful of Cooper’s blond hair and slammed his head into the corner of the divider. Blood spurted across the tile, and I tossed the guard’s unconscious body aside, peeling around the wall in a flash and knocking Phillips’s wand away as soon as he ripped it from his belt. Snarling, I drove an open hand to his chest, and the blow sent him stumbling back and sputtering for air.
Sure enough, there she was—my mate, mine—cowering beneath the showerhead. Soaked and trembling, her arms folded up to cover her chest, her back to what had seconds ago been a pair of leering guards.
This wasn’t how I imagined my first time seeing her naked. In my head, there had been passion and flame and privacy. Not this. Never this. Never the look on her face, the fear in her eyes as she peered over her shoulder.
“Greystone, calm down,” Phillips barked, hopping to his feet—nimble for a warlock who so obviously enhanced those muscles with magic. All flash, no fucking substance. I closed in on him, fuming, my in
ner dragon turning my insides to magma at the injustice of it all—at the very idea of two strange males ogling our mate. The guard’s hands sparked, magic crackling in the humid air, but I just shouldered him up against the tiled wall, pools of water sloshing at our feet. His eyes widened. “Back down, inmate!”
“Have you no fucking respect?” I roared, the question so beyond rhetorical it was laughable. At the second shimmer of magic in the warlock’s fingertips, I locked onto his throat with one hand and squeezed tight. His cheeks darkened as he slapped at my forearm, eyes like saucers.
“I-inmate,” he choked, and I hoisted him off the ground so that his fucking militant boots dangled.
“If you look at her like that again, if you speak to her like that again…” I growled, my inner dragon snapping and bellowing inside so loud that I was lost to the rest of the world, unable to hear a damn thing beyond the gnashing of razor-sharp teeth and the thunder of my pounding heart. I ducked closer to Phillips, to his purpling face, his bulging eyes, his gasping mouth so that the message really hit home—so that he didn’t miss a word. “I swear, James Bartholomew Phillips, I’ll rip out your fucking tongue and feed it to the wolves. Then I’ll come for your eyes, you pathetic creature, you insidious worm!”
More beast than man, I was lost. Done for. Gone. Blind with rage, I snapped my other hand around his throat, determined to throttle the life out of him, to really make him suffer…
“Elijah?”
Until she said my name.
Then the world came screaming back into focus. Shaking, I looked over my shoulder, needing to lock eyes with my mate, to gaze into the startling blue and find some semblance of clarity—
Something clocked me upside the head, sharp and stinging of offensive magic. I tumbled back in what felt like slow motion, unable to focus, seeing triple of Phillips as he doubled over and sucked down air at my feet, a hand to his bruised throat. As shadows replaced the red shrouding my vision, the vague, nonsensical shouts of men trickled into the scene, followed swiftly by countless boots on tile, all of it muffled…
And then finally—all of it gone.
7
Rafe
After our first week inside Xargi Penitentiary, Elijah and I made a number of rules to ensure our survival, though they all had a central theme.
Don’t get thrown into solitary. Don’t look at a guard funny so that they put you in solitary. Don’t pick fights with other inmates. Don’t slack on work duty—Elijah, not me—and don’t give any bastard out there an excuse to lock you in the hole.
Because that was what solitary was: a hole. A pit in the ground, quite literally, two floors beneath the cafeteria. From what I’d heard, each hole was twelve feet deep, all twenty of them, with barred tops where guards would drop slop through for your once-a-day feeding.
Having spent the last four days in solitary, the dragon shifter moron across the table from me could confirm all of that was true. The holes dug into the earth. The bugs. The manhole coverings. The food that dripped down the dirt walls. The guards patrolling, stomping over your cell. One had even pissed into Elijah’s pit on the third night—Phillips, of course, just to even things out. The guard Elijah had nearly throttled to death had been reassigned to a new cellblock in the wake of my friend’s bathroom heroics; everyone knew the story within an hour of it happening, gossip carrying like wildfire through this place. Naturally, the warlock had to reassert his dominance, and now patrolling Cellblock E, he had apparently been the biggest gobshite out there.
Inmate beatings.
Unlawful use of magic to subdue supers who, as far as I could tell when I saw it, were just going about their business.
A lot of barking and shouting, throwing his weight around like he had a cock the size of the Empire State Building. Downright ridiculous, but hardly surprising: all the guards were petty. At least Cooper had been unconscious for most of Elijah’s ranting, which meant he was still in our cellblock, totally unaware of the specifics of what happened.
Yet he bore the scar on his forehead from where Elijah had slammed it into a corner like a badge of honor. Like he had fought in an actual war when shifters in here had been fighting amongst themselves, against other packs or clans, for centuries.
“So, I assume that garbage doesn’t seem too bad now by comparison,” I mused, thrusting my chin toward Elijah’s dinner tray with a smirk. Stringy green beans. Overcooked steak strips. Watery mashed potatoes. A pathetic effort, sure, but a step above licking blended sludge off a dirt wall—definitely. The dragon shot me a look, his heavy eyes the one giveaway that said he had spent the last four days suffering.
It didn’t surprise me one bit that he’d been beaten every night of his stay in solitary; he had attacked two guards, and the goons who patrolled this place took quite the offense to that. My friend might have been physically stronger than just about anyone in here, but he was no match for eight wands and the sixteen fists and steel-toed boots that went with them. Not with the collar on, anyway. Let him shift and then attack—that was a fight I’d pay to watch. Rumor had it magic bounced clean off dragon scales, just like everything else.
Dark golden hair thick and noticeably greasy, Elijah stabbed his spork into his mash, then scooped a giant heaping into his mouth before the watery potatoes spilled over the sides. He’d only been back in the block an hour, spending most of it resting in his cell before we had been lined up for dinner. Not a bruise in sight. No split lips or eyebrows. No broken nose. No fingernails missing.
All of that would have healed in an instant for him, same as me.
Vampires and shifters really were the ideal targets of torture. We could suffer a lot, endure the unspeakable, heal up over the course of an hour or two, and then the sadist holding the whip could get right back to it.
But what didn’t heal was the soul. I’d always assumed mine had gone as soon as my maker turned me, but I saw the stain of four long days and nights in solitary in Elijah’s tawny gaze, in the sluggish way he moved. That would cling to him, possibly well into his afterlife. We hadn’t touched on it, but I assumed any future heroics were out of the question after this little stint, even for the witch who was supposed to be his fated mate.
Speaking of which…
My eyebrows shot up when I spotted a familiar mop of red hair weaving through the cafeteria crowd toward us. Lovely as ever, Katja strode about a half inch taller than when she’d arrived courtesy of the standard-issue shoes that had magically appeared in her cell yesterday. They had cost me a fortune from the shop, but I just couldn’t stand to see her shuffling about barefoot anymore.
Strange that she might approach Elijah and me; she usually spent her meals with the scarred rabbit shifter from Cellblock B, pointedly avoiding anyone from our block. Not that I could blame her… Everyone else was a sociopath. Still, I wasn’t all that bad, and I’d spent four days alone without Elijah. While I might have soothed her that first night, Katja and I weren’t exactly on casual conversation terms. If she wasn’t forced to interact with anyone during mealtimes, the witch was hiding away in her cell. She hadn’t been assigned a work duty yet either, which meant when everyone else was whisked off for their shifts, it was just her and me and whoever had the day off left in the block. Bit awkward, both of us knowing the other was there, literally right next door, and not doing a damn thing about it.
Shockingly, tonight she strode right up to our table, white-knuckling her plastic tray, shoulders back and chin lifted. Elijah straightened as soon as he caught her scent, nostrils flared, though he scoped the dining hall with less intensity now than when she’d first arrived.
Katja stopped at our table, practically right on top of it, loitering by the vacant stools, me and Elijah seated opposite each other. She cast me a fleeting glance, her cheeks pink, before focusing solely on Elijah. His inner dragon must have loved that. The man, however, just stared back, exhausted but alive.
Rolling the empty glass blood vial between my hands, I waited for something to happe
n. Anything. What I got was a whole load of staring, the pair locked in each other’s gazes like the rest of this shithole had disappeared. My eyebrows shot up. Fuck me, fated mates had to be draining. I’d never been happier to be a vampire than right this second. You would never catch a vampire going all googly-eyed over a mate. Never.
Still, she had the loveliest mouth—supple lips that were a lush rouge-pink, always slightly downturned and sultry, fetching even without a speck of makeup. Her lower lip suddenly quivered, snagging my attention with more ease than I cared to admit, and then she cleared her throat, rolling her shoulders back.
“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” Katja remarked, calm and firm, oddly self-assured for someone who still cried herself to sleep after lights-out. Elijah set his spork aside and smoothed his hands down his thighs beneath the table, wiping them clean, then gave her a one-shouldered shrug.
“You didn’t have to.”
The pair descended into silence again, just staring at each other, unflinching and unblinking and Jesus Christ how dreadfully dull. I ought to feel like the world’s biggest third wheel, but I didn’t. In fact, despite my usual aversion to most social situations, especially when supernatural dynamics came into play, I felt oddly at home. Like this was where I was supposed to be, watching the two of them sort out their nonsense, communicating without saying a word—waiting for it to be over.
Strange.
Strange that the ease I felt with whatever the hell this was didn’t bother me. Smirking, I tapped the glass tube on the table, the red smear pooling in the bottom all that was left of my paltry supper.
