Page 75 of Caged Kitten

Cooper dragged me along at a brutal pace, but I kept up, desperate to get back to my mate—to all of them. To Rafe’s furrowed brow, knitted deep with confusion and anger and injustice. To Fintan’s sharp tongue and laughing eyes, always capable of breaking the tension even when the rest of us were miserable.

Only we didn’t take the usual winding corridors back to the shittier side of the building. As instructed, the warlock with a death grip on my arm led me through unfamiliar hallways, up and down spiral stairwells. I didn’t find my bearings until we passed the prison shop, which always reminded me of a shanty liquor store with its huge open doorway and goods locked behind bars, the teller in a caged dome at the back. We blitzed by it so fast that I couldn’t pick out the faces of the inmates doing a bit of predinner shopping, but the flash of a red jumpsuit made my heart skip a beat.

Made the marks on my throat tingle like they were fresh and sore.

We finally stopped—seemingly out of nowhere—just around the corner from the commissary, Cooper jerking me back when I stumbled forward with the momentum of our march. He positioned me in front of an ordinary door with Supplies scratched into the wood, and everything inside me stilled, a cold fear taking root. Because… Well, not exactly the most professional signage, some crude lettering carved into the panels with, what, a knife?

“Uh, what are we—”

Cooper shook me hard enough to jostle my neck and make my teeth chatter, then grabbed the brass knob and turned it. Flung open the door to reveal…

Deimos.

Constance.

Avery and Blake.

A little Cellblock C reunion.

The four loitered around the tiny closet, a space that really did look like a storage room with cleaning supplies and dingy rags piled on the shelves. I planted my feet, eyes widening, adrenaline soaring, but Cooper still managed to shove me inside.

Then the bastard closed the door behind me, the click of a lock making my heart sink.

Okay. I swallowed hard, battling with the lump in my throat. Okay. A high-pitched whine erupted, slicing through my skull and growing louder by the second. Okay, okay. None of them had access to their powers—all the collars were still firmly in place. Okay, okay, okay, don’t panic.

Back to the door, I looked to Deimos in his black jumpsuit, scenes of grotesque torture tattooed over every bit of exposed flesh, creeping all the way up to his chin. At some point since I’d arrived, someone had carved 666 into his temple—so original.

No, pleasant thoughts only. He knew I despised him—I never tried to hide it—but right now, I was also at his mercy. All by his lonesome, the demon sprawled across one whole wall of shelves directly in front of me. Constance giggled to my left, the air thick, and swung her legs from her shelf-perch midway up the wall. Avery and Blake, meanwhile, stood to my immediate right, arms crossed, silent and waiting.

“Deimos,” I started, then staggered back into the door, hitting the wood with a noisy whump, when he pushed off the wall and stalked toward me. I held up my hands, defenseless, every synapse firing as I searched for just the right words to defuse this. Only adrenaline made my mind frantic and scattered—made my limbs shake and my extremities numb. “W-wait—”

He swiftly closed the gap between us, then gut-punched me with the force of a charging bull. My diaphragm absorbed the hit, all the air whooshing out of my lungs, and, gasping, I folded over without meaning to—I just couldn’t stay upright—and Deimos shoved me the rest of the way down. The tinny whine between my ears rocketed up to deafening when I hit the ground, thrust into the middle of the space on my hands and knees, and a blow to the side from someone’s foot knocked me over.

It all happened so fast, so furious, that I didn’t have time to lash out or strike back. I’d never been in an actual fight before, and as all four closed in, laughing and jeering, whatever words they hurled at me muffled against the screechy whine, I just curled into a ball. Protect the important bits: face and brain. My fingers crunched when someone stomped down on them. My back arched and bowed at the unrelenting blows. Someone—Constance, based on the scratch of talons up my neck—grabbed a fistful of my hair and spun me around in a circle, the maenad’s cackles girlish and savage.

To my credit, I didn’t make a sound besides the odd whimper and cry. No screams—I refused to give them that. No begging, either, because it wouldn’t matter.

“You chose the wrong side, foxy,” Deimos told me in a singsong voice, his words followed by a harsh pounding on my rib cage. Something splintered, and I sucked in a ragged breath, pain exploding through my torso. “I could have put in a good word for you—kept this from happening.”

Finally, the kicks and stomps stopped, and a hand grabbed me roughly by the shoulder and rolled me onto my back. Deimos loomed over me, grinning, pupils so dilated that his eyes were completely black, full demon mode engaged. Still curled up, locked in this position, I wheezed through the agony of a broken rib, tears falling hot and heavy down my face and into my hair. Everything hurt. Everything. Something equally warm dribbled from my nose, and a bit of blood teased the corner of my trembling lips.

“You fucked up, witch,” he whispered, sweeping his greasy black hair back with a sneer. Constance crouched beside him, then dipped her finger into the blood oozing from my nose and smeared it over my lips.

“Red’s your color,” she sneered, and before I could swipe at her, some of the fight weaseling back into my limbs, Deimos grabbed me again and flipped me onto my stomach. This time I screamed, my rib taking a hard hit, snot and blood spattering the stones below, tears making the darkness swim.

Razor-tipped nails grazed my neck again as Constance gathered my hair with a gentleness that felt almost mocking. As I struggled through every sob, sharpness stabbing outward from my busted rib, she swept it all into one hand, then shoved my face into the stone, cheek-down, and wrapped my hair around her fist.

Holding it like a dog leash.

Riiiiip. With Avery and Blake loitering overhead, Deimos must have been the one to tear my jumpsuit clean in two, shredding the back, exposing me.

“Maybe you should just take his offer, eh?” the demon whispered in my ear, and my eyes widened. Fuck Lloyd Guthrie. Was this what he meant by applying pressure? Fire blasted through me like a nuclear bomb, and I swung back, gritting through the agony to slash at him, at Constance, at anyone within reach. Ineffectual, but as Deimos snapped my underwear’s waistband, then hiked the cotton up between my cheeks, it felt good to fight.

His knee found my back and drove in hard, forcing another scream from my ragged throat as bone crunched in my chest. He then tore my panties off, elastic groaning, cotton ripping, all my bits squished and twisted in the process.

Just as his hand smoothed over my ass, as someone stomped on my flailing legs and bruised my calves even more, there was a crash against the door. A snarl that I felt in my bones. The room stilled, Deimos’s fingers ghosting over my slit. Another crash. Male voices escalating outside.

The third crash sent chunks of wood and dust raining down on us, and Constance shrieked as footsteps thundered into the tiny space. Deimos’s filthy fingers were wrenched from my body, the knee on my back vanished, and a red jumpsuit flashed overhead as Rafe—my Rafe—tackled Deimos to the ground. Shivering with shock, panic, I dragged my body away from the scuffle as best I could, barely taking in the fact that Rafe had started slamming Deimos’s head into the ground and showed no signs of stopping. Fangs bared, the vampire smashed him into the stone over and over again, a plastic bag from the prison shop abandoned at the open doorway.

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