Caressed by Ice

Judd’s expression didn’t alter. “Be more specific.”

Sudden, blinding anger swamped the fear raised by the memories. “Sometimes you make me want to scream! Would it hurt you to try and appear a little human?”

He didn’t respond.

“Walker’s different.”

“My brother is a telepath with a special affinity for young Psy minds. He was a teacher in the Net.”

She took time to think that through, surprised he’d answered at all. “You’re saying he already had the capacity to feel emotions before you defected?”

“We all have the capacity,” Judd corrected. “The whole point of the conditioning under Silence is to cauterize that capacity—elimination is impossible.”

She wondered what he saw in her face, because she saw only the most chilly calm on his. He stood unaffected by her anger, her fear…her pain. The realization caused an odd, hollow sensation in her stomach. “But you said Walker’s different.”

A nod sent several dark strands of hair falling across his forehead. “My brother’s constant contact with children who hadn’t yet finished the conditioning process, contact that continues with Toby and Marlee, means that he was always more susceptible to breaching Silence in the right environment.”

“What about you?” It was a question she’d never before asked. “What did you do in the Net?”

She thought she saw his shoulders tighten. But when he replied, his tone was unchanged. “You don’t need any more nightmares. Now, tell me what you see.”

She stepped closer to the dangerous maleness of him. “You’ll have to talk about it someday.” But she knew from his inflexible stance that it wasn’t going to be today. So she gathered up her courage and opened that box of evil and death. “I saw Timothy’s death in a dream. But…he didn’t have a face then…just a smooth oval of bare skin where features should’ve been.” She couldn’t get the disturbing image out of her head. “I saw how he would die.” A sharp blade cutting through muscle and fat to expose bloodred flesh.

Judd continued to watch her without blinking. “Could be simple transference—your mind’s way of interpreting the images Enrique left in your brain.”

It disgusted her that Enrique had gotten that far. Sascha had assured Brenna that she hadn’t broken, that she’d kept the bastard from her innermost core, but it didn’t feel like that. No, it felt like he’d crawled into the very essence of her being, violating every part of her from the inside out. And Sascha didn’t know the worst of what the butcher had done…what she had submitted to—Brenna intended to take those secrets to the grave.

“Brenna.”

Stomach churning, she raised her head. “Transference?”

His eyes were piercing, as if he were attempting to see through her skin. “You could be mistaking or merging an old or known image over a new one.”

Because Enrique had liked to terrorize her by showing her recordings of his past kills. “No,” she disagreed. “Even before I saw Tim’s body, I could feel differences…in the cuts, in the evil.” Enrique’s favorite weapon had been a scalpel, used in conjunction with the telekinetic powers of his cardinal mind. Cardinals were the strongest grade of Psy, but Enrique had been a power even in that select company. “It’s as if I’m being forced to watch someone else’s fantasies.” It was her ultimate fear—having her mind raped again, being shoved full of dark, nauseating thoughts nothing could wash away.

“You’re a changeling, not a telepath.” For a second, she thought she saw the gold flecks spark to life in the rich brown of his eyes. “There’s more.” Not a question.

She swallowed. “When I saw the murder in my dreams, when I heard the screams, it—” Her nails cut into the fleshy pads of her palms.

“It what, Brenna?” His voice was almost gentle. Or maybe that was what she needed to hear.

“It excited me,” she admitted, feeling dirty and wrong…a monster. “I enjoyed it.” She had craved the agony of her victim, her blood fevered with sick excitement. “Every cut, every scream.”

Judd’s expression didn’t change. “But only during the actual dream?”

She wanted to be held so badly, but Judd Lauren was about as likely to do that as he was to turn wolf. “It’s like he left a piece of himself inside of me.”

“Santano Enrique was a true sociopath. He didn’t feel anything.”

Her laugh sounded jagged to her own ears. “If you’d seen him as I did, you would never say that. He might have been cold, but he enjoyed what he did. And he infected me.”

“Enrique didn’t have that ability. Transferring mental viruses is a rare skill.” He pushed off the door and walked to her. “Sascha found no trace of one in your mind and she’d know—her mother is the best viral transmitter in the Net.”

“He did something!” she insisted. “These thoughts, these feelings, they’re not mine.” They couldn’t be. Not if she wanted to remain sane.

“You shouldn’t be seeing anything,” he said, standing so close she could feel his body heat. Alarm and need mixed in raw confusion. “Your brain pathways function completely differently from those of a Psy.”

She went to thrust a hand through her hair and stopped. Her waist-length mane was gone, another thing Enrique had stolen. “Do you think he changed that?”

Judd’s muscles rippled as he uncrossed his arms. “It would seem to be the logical conclusion. If you let me scan your mind—”

“No.”

He inclined his head in a small nod. “Fine. But that makes it much harder to diagnose the problem.”

“I know. But no.” No one would ever again crawl into her mind. For most victims, it was the last inviolate space. For her, it was a part that had been brutalized once and would never trust again. “Do you have any idea what it could be?”

“No.” He reached out to touch her neck. “How did you get this bruise?”

Taken completely off guard, she found herself placing her hand over his. “A bruise? Maybe when I was sparring with Lucy.” Brenna might not be a soldier, but she needed to be able to protect herself…now more than ever. Because the truth that no one knew, the secret she’d successfully concealed since the rescue, was that Enrique hadn’t simply damaged her mind, he had destroyed her on a far more fundamental level, a level that threatened to obliterate her very identity. “Can you find out about my dreams?”

His hand was big under hers, his fingers long. She was exquisitely aware of every millimeter of skin-to-skin contact. Touch might be second nature to her race, but predatory changelings didn’t let just anyone touch them. Only Pack, mates, and lovers had skin privileges. Judd fit none of those criteria. Yet she didn’t push him off.

“I’ll put out some feelers.” He withdrew his hand, the roughness of his palm an unexpected shock. “But you have to accept that no answers may be forthcoming. You’re unique—the only one of Enrique’s experiments to have survived.”

He watched Brenna Kincaid leave Judd Lauren’s room from the shadows. It was all he could do not to leap out and choke the life out of her right there and then. The bitch was supposed to die months ago, but she’d clawed her way back to life. And now she’d remembered something. Why else would she have pulled that scene with the body?

The words that left his mouth were low and vicious.

He’d been close to panic in the days after her rescue, but thankfully, her memory had turned out to be full of holes. If those holes were filling up, he was in trouble. The kind of trouble that could lead to an execution—especially if she had that fucking Psy on her side. He should’ve betrayed the whole Lauren family the first chance he’d gotten, but he’d waited too long to use the information and now his greed had come back to haunt him.

It made no difference. He had no intention of being hunted down like a rabid dog. He stared at the pressure injector in his hand, the same one that had weakened Tim and made him such easy prey. It could be used on Brenna, too. The crazy-eyed whore was not going to mess up his life.

Judd kept his eye on Brenna until she reached the end of the long corridor and turned the corner to join the steady flow of people on the other side. His military-trained mind had picked up something in the air the second after he’d opened the door, but he could find no reason for the warning flag. Still, he didn’t move until she was safe.

Then, closing the door, he glanced down at his hand, flexing and unflexing it in an effort to lose the imprint of