Caressed by Ice

CHAPTER 4

One day after the murder, and countless hours of arguments with herself later, Brenna knew Judd was the only person she could ask, the only one who might possibly understand. And yet, he was also the worst, so cold that he sometimes appeared less human than a statue carved out of ice. Before being kidnapped, she’d gone to great lengths to avoid him, intrinsically disturbed by the inhuman chill of his personality.

Well aware her brothers would turn feral at the mere thought of her alone with Judd, she took every care to remain invisible as she tiptoed out of their family quarters after dinner and toward the section occupied by unmated soldiers. Judd lived alone, his brother, Walker, and the three minors having been relocated to the family section. The move had taken place four months after the Laurens first sought sanctuary with SnowDancer.

Surprisingly, it had been the pack’s maternal females who had ordered Hawke to think about what it was doing to the Psy children to be isolated in the soldiers’ area. Given how sensitive the females were to anything that might pose a danger to the cubs, Brenna would’ve expected them to demand distance—Marlee and Toby might be kids but they were very powerful kids.

Conversely, SnowDancer pups tended to play rough and could maul the Psy children without meaning to. But the maternal females had extended the invitation and Walker Lauren had accepted on behalf of his daughter, Marlee, and nephew, Toby. At seventeen, Toby’s sister, Sienna, could no longer be classified as a child, but neither was she an adult. In this case, the headstrong teenager had chosen to stay with the children.

Leaving Judd alone.

As Judd was considered the most dangerous member of the Lauren family, his living quarters had never been in any question. He continued to be looked on with suspicion, though she knew he’d been integral to her rescue. While he hadn’t been one of those who’d entered the pain-soaked room that had been her torture chamber—an omission for which she would always be grateful—he’d helped Sascha lay the psychic trap that had led to Enrique’s capture. He’d proven his loyalty. But still he remained an outsider.

The unfairness of it rubbed at her sense of justice, but she couldn’t blame her packmates for their feelings, not when Judd seemed determined to reinforce their attitude. The man was aloof to the point of rudeness.

Reaching his door, she knocked softly. “Hurry up.” Though the corridor was currently deserted, she could near the sound of approaching footsteps. With her luck, it would be one of her overprotective brothers.

The door opened. “What—?”

She ducked under his arm and into the room. “Shut it before someone comes.” For a second, she thought he would refuse, but then he pushed it closed.

Turning to stand with his back to the door, he folded his arms across a bare chest. “If your brothers find you here, they’ll put you under lock and key.”

She was suddenly hyperconscious of the scent of fresh male sweat and gleaming skin in a confined space. Terror spiked, but she squashed it almost before it arose, hiding it in that impregnable box in her mind. “Aren’t you worried about what they’ll do to you?” Despite the edge of fear, her fingertips tingled, wanting to touch this dangerous creature.

“I can take care of myself.”

Of that she had no doubt. “So can I.”

Judd’s eyes, eyes the color of bitterest chocolate except for the flecks of gold in the irises, didn’t shift their focus off her face. “What are you doing here, Brenna?”

She shook herself out of her fascination. “I need to talk to a Psy and you’re it.”

“What about Sascha?”

“She won’t understand.” Brenna both respected and liked Sascha Duncan, the Psy mind-healer who had mated with Lucas Hunter, alpha to the DarkRiver leopards. But…“She’s too good, too gentle.”

“It’s a side effect of her abilities,” Judd said in his usual icy tone.

It was a tone that infuriated the other males, but Brenna knew she wasn’t the only female who wondered about thawing him out. Her claws pricked the insides of her skin as she was hit by a near-violent surge of inexplicable sensual hunger. She fought it—she wasn’t stupid enough to think she could change him.

“Sascha feels the emotions of others,” Judd continued. “If she harmed another being, it would rebound back on her.”

“I know that.” Fisting her hands, she turned on her heel and began to pace around the small room. His scent was everywhere, closing around her changeling senses in a dark and uncompromising masculine wave. “This is like a cell. Couldn’t you put up a poster at least?” The size of the room was comparable to those of other unmated soldiers, but even the worst lone wolf made some changes to his living space.

In contrast, Judd’s was stark in its emptiness, his bed the single piece of furniture, the sheet white, the blanket institutional gray. The only addition appeared to be a horizontal exercise bar fitted about a foot below the ceiling.

“I don’t see the point.” He leaned back against the door, the movement drawing her attention to a chest she knew was pure hard muscle. “Ask what you came to ask.”

“I told you I’m seeing things. I saw that—that—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, to reawaken the nightmare.

Of course Judd didn’t attempt to offer comfort. “I explained that they’re likely nothing more than psychic echoes of the trauma you suffered at Enrique’s hands.”

“You’re wrong. They’re real.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“Bad, bad things,” she whispered, hugging herself. “Death and blood and pain.”

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 heat burned into it the second he’d touched Brenna. It had been an utterly irrational action, prompted not by thought but by some buried instinct that had momentarily overridden his conditioning when he’d glimpsed the bruise marring her skin.

His phone beeped, reminding him he had a job to complete. He couldn’t afford to be distracted from his goals by a changeling who looked to him to vanquish her nightmares. As if he were…good. What would Brenna say if he told her that he was the nightmare?

His phone beeped a second time. Picking it up, he switched off the alarm and went to wash off the sweat that coated his body. The tactile sensation of soft feminine skin continued to cling to his palm, but he knew it would disappear soon enough—the scent of death had a way of immersing everything in chilling frost.

And, Judd thought as he packed the surveillance equipment he’d need tonight, he was very good at causing death, had been since he was ten years of age. Tonight was a simple tracking job, but only days remained until the hit. The bombs were nearing completion. All he needed now was a window of time, of opportunity. Then blood would spread across his skin once more, a scarlet flower that told the true story of what he was.