The Psy-Changeling Collection (108 page)

She nodded, expression solemn. “What Faith said about the pain.”

“It’s called dissonance and it accumulates.” Pain in his head, in his nerves, in his very bones. “I have to extend a certain amount of power to keep it contained.”

Brenna jerked her hand from his without warning. “In real-speak, you hurt every time I touch you, every time we connect!”

He grabbed her hand again. “It’s a programmed reaction, one I can handle.”

When she tugged this time, he didn’t allow her to get away.

“And that’s another thing,” she muttered, “how come you’re so strong?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “What happens if you try to dismantle the conditioning that causes the dissonance?”

“I can’t afford to disengage that conditioning.” An immutable fact. “I need the spikes of pain—they keep me from killing by telling me when I’m getting too close to an emotional reaction that might lead to the unintentional activation of my abilities.”

“Okay, but why can’t you get rid of the other parts of the Protocol—so you don’t get hurt for feeling things below that unsafe level?” She bit her lower lip and gave him a guilty look through her lashes. “I asked Faith for help in getting you to break Silence.”

A flare of red. “If you want to know something about me, come to me.”

“I needed some advice!”

This time, it was Judd who pulled away. Walking to the other side of the room, he turned his back to her, bracing his palms on the wall. “There is no way to break Silence. Not for me. I refuse to become a danger to you or anyone else. This—tonight—is as far as I can go.”

Brenna wanted to kick something. Instead, she went to stand behind him and, after a slight hesitation, put her hand on his muscled shoulder. His skin was a fever. It hurt her to know that her touch hurt him, but she also knew if she stopped touching him, she’d lose him to the talons of Silence. “Listen instead of doing the alpha male thing on me.”

“Hierarchy is a changeling concept.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed herself to his back. Then she bit him—a light graze over his naked back. He didn’t growl as a wolf male might have, but what he did was just as dominant, just as deliciously sexy. She didn’t want a puppy—she wanted a man with teeth. And Judd had plenty.

Looking over his shoulder, he gave her a dark glance. “Keep pushing and you might not like the result.”

Something sizzled under her fingertips, a thousand tiny teasing bites. Delighted, she pressed a kiss over the skin she’d bitten. Judd looked away, pressing his hands harder on the wall in front of him. It had the effect of further defining the muscles in his back.

“What was that you did?”

“A controlled use of Tk.” His voice was arctic in its extreme focus.

Dangerous, he was dangerous. Again her brain tried to tell her something important, but she was concentrating too hard on getting through to Judd. “Just listen, okay?” She kept going before he could interrupt. “I’ve been talking to Faith more than you know. She thinks that maybe Silence isn’t all bad.”

“The Protocol gives sociopaths free rein.” Words that sliced with their brutal cold.

She shivered. “That almost felt like you cut me.” The sensation had been of a knife passing close to her skin. It scared her—Santano Enrique had taunted her with his scalpels hour after hour. Sometimes he’d done more than simply taunt.

Judd turned to stone. “Stop touching me. I’m losing control.”

There was something in his voice that made her obey. She unclasped herself from him and took a couple of steps back. He didn’t turn as he spoke. “I can cause telekinetic damage that looks like a cut, literally turn my will into a blade.”

She swallowed at the image. “Okay.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, every muscle on his back tight.

Her fear transformed into pure tenderness. God, the man was so hardheaded, so unwilling to see the truth. He’d likely kill himself before harming her and he thought he had to convince her of that? “I said it
almost
felt like you’d cut me. You didn’t actually.”

“So close, Brenna. Too close. You should be running, not trying to convince me to test my chains even more.”

“That’s exactly it,” she said, fisting her hands in order to keep her distance. Touch was natural to her, the lack of it unbearable. Especially where Judd was concerned. “Maybe you can choose which parts of Silence you want. Where is it written that you have to accept or reject the entire Protocol? Faith says the skills she learned under Silence help her fight the cascades triggered by bad visions.”

“What about Sascha?”

She breathed a sigh of relief—he was listening. “You know the answer. Silence was plain bad for her; it ran totally counter to her abilities. But not for Faith—”

He turned to face her at last. His expression stopped her in midsentence. “If Sascha exists, then it’s logical I do.”

“I don’t understand.” Her changeling instincts urged her to hold him to her with tactile contact. The need was so strong she had to physically force herself to pay attention.

“I’m her exact opposite.” Judd crossed his arms over that beautiful chest that made her want to stroke. “She heals. I kill. Those are our gifts.”

Anger burned through her sensuality but paradoxically stoked up the more profound hunger inside of her. Oh, how she wanted Judd Lauren. “Why do you insist on seeing yourself that way? You helped heal me, remember?” He’d “fed” Sascha his psychic strength, had often ended up totally drained, only to show up again the next day.

He waved off the reminder. “A lesser ability. My main one can be used for little else but death. For me, Silence—all of it—is necessary. As long as I can discipline my emotions, I won’t kill. Simple.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“You’ve forgotten what happened to those like me pre-Silence.”

“No, I haven’t.” The idea of her beautiful, loyal, and strong Judd spending his life alone or in a jail cell was her personal nightmare. “But they were the other extreme—no emotional control at all. I’m asking you to consider that there might be a middle way.”

Something beeped, startling her into a slight jump. Judd took a sleek silver phone from his pocket and spoke a few terse words into it. All she really cared about were the last—“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She waited until he’d hung up to ask. “Where?”

“That was Indigo. They think they’ve tracked down one of the hyenas responsible for the cabin explosion.” Picking it up off the floor, he pulled on his shirt. “They’re holding him at the cabin.”

“Why do they need you?” Her craving for touch,
his
touch, was a biting ache by now. Unable to resist, she closed the distance between them and began doing up the shirt buttons. “The soldiers question people all the time.” If they got the wrong answers, they did more than just question. Brenna accepted the necessity of that—in their world, mercy was often taken as weakness. Which was why the SnowDancers made certain their public face was one of vicious strength.

Judd didn’t push her away. “To scare him, what else?”

Finished with the shirt, she dropped her hands and looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His eyes hadn’t returned to normal. “Everyone in the pack has a position. You’re a tech, Riley’s a soldier, and Lara, a healer. Haven’t you ever considered what I am?”

“A soldier like my brothers,” she said, a painful knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

“The kind of soldier they call on when a mess needs to be cleaned up.”

CHAPTER 29

“Hawke wouldn’t
use you like that.” Wouldn’t demand that price for the sanctuary Judd had sought for the children’s sake.

“Hawke will do whatever it takes to keep the SnowDancers at the top of the food chain.” A blunt answer. “But you’re right—changelings don’t much like to use assassins.”

Attack from the front. It was a matter of pride. Of honor.

“But,” he continued, frost chilling his voice, “there are a lot of things I can do without killing—or even leaving a bruise—in order to get someone to speak.”

Brenna knew he expected that to send her running. But she’d grown up in a family of tough men. She wasn’t some wide-eyed miss who didn’t know the facts behind SnowDancer’s power. “That doesn’t scare me, Judd.” Though she’d be lying if she said it didn’t worry her—for him. What impact did it have on a man to be the darkest of enforcers?

“Good, because I told you—there’s no going back.” He turned toward the door.

“Bite me,” she snapped, frustrated at his stubborn will, his refusal to even consider a way out of Silence. In the tense pause that followed, she finally listened long enough to her own instincts to understand something she’d known subconsciously since the day he’d told her about his telekinetic abilities. Frustration transformed into anger and it flowed through her like fire. “You know what really pisses me off?”

He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t have time for games, Brenna.”

“What really pisses me off,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “is you daring to come across as so possessive and protective when you’ve been
lying
to me for months.”

He went very still. “That’s a dangerous insult.”

“You’re a Tk. Enrique was a Tk. You can throw men against walls and crush their bones. So could he. How am I doing so far?”

“Get to the point.”

Her blood boiled at his icy response. “If strong Tk are so damn lethal, how did SnowDancer and DarkRiver men manage to execute Enrique without a single changeling fatality or major injury?” Striding to where he stood, she went toe-to-toe with him. “You were there the night they rescued me and executed that monster.” She had complete faith in her pack’s ability to deal with a murderous Psy, but Santano Enrique had been a cardinal Tk fighting for his life. “Weren’t you?”

“What would it matter if I was?”

Her heart froze—she had wanted her sudden burst of insight to be nothing more than paranoia. “It matters because you didn’t tell me! Why the hell not?”

His phone beeped again. They both ignored it.

“Because you didn’t need to know.” His jaw was as unyielding as stone. “It has no bearing on anything.”

“The hell it doesn’t.” She thumped a fist against his chest, making him move back from the door. “It means you’ve been lying to me from day one! If you can lie about that, what else might you be lying about?”

He grabbed her wrist when she would’ve spun away. “You’re acting extremely irrationally. This has nothing to do with what we were talking about.”

She wrenched her hand from his hold, not wanting her defenses falling victim to the raw heat of his touch. She was so damn hungry for him she could easily become his sensual slave. One, just
one
teasing stroke and she’d melt. Good thing Judd wasn’t the stroking kind. “Guess what? Out of the PsyNet, this is called being furious. And, for your information, I’m planning on staying that way for a while.” Wrenching open the door, she walked out and headed toward an exit.

She didn’t give in to the shakes until she was hidden in the inner perimeter, surrounded by the thick dark of the forest. Placing a hand on the trunk of a tree, she tried to breathe evenly of the cold air, but it was all she could do to take in ragged gulps. Judd was right. Her reaction had been unreasonable on the surface, as if she were picking a meaningless fight. He didn’t understand.

The fact of his keeping something from her because it might upset her, treating her like an invalid, was enough to make her mad. But that wasn’t what devastated her—it was the realization that he’d seen her at her most broken, her most humiliated. She’d been tied spread-eagled on a bed in the butcher’s personal torture chamber. Naked. Bleeding.

She didn’t want Judd to have that image of her in his mind. He’d seen her during the healing sessions, but there, she’d been fighting back, proud of herself for surviving. But in Enrique’s lair, she’d been close to giving in, close to having her will crushed. In the final hours before she withdrew wholly into her mind, she’d begged. If the butcher had promised to set her free, she would have crawled, would have cooperated with his sick games, would have licked his feet . . . anything to make the pain stop.

Tears streamed down her face for the second time that day, but these weren’t quiet, silent tears. These hurt coming out and burned like acid on her skin. She bit her lips to keep from making loud noises. But the tears wouldn’t stop. She was humiliated and hurt and angry and lonely, the emotions a caustic brew that made it impossible for her to draw a clear breath.

Hands on her shoulders.

They startled her enough that she allowed him to turn her before lifting up her fists to keep distance between them. He hugged her to him anyway. “Shh. Don’t.”

It only made her cry harder. When his body curled protectively over hers and he rubbed his cheek against her hair, her heart almost broke. She knew the payment Silence must be demanding from him. And still he held her.

“Why?” She tried to push off his chest but he wouldn’t let her. “Why?”

One of his hands rose to close over her nape in that dominant way she’d come to expect, a hold she allowed because she trusted. “I know how proud you are, how strong. That’s how I see you and that’s all that matters.”

Her throat felt scraped raw. “Did you see me?” Splayed out on that bed, reduced to a
thing
, mind and body no longer connected.

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me again. I can’t bear it.”

“I didn’t see you. Your brothers refused to let anyone near.” But he’d gone into the room afterward. He’d seen where she’d been held, seen the restraints she’d bloodied in her attempts to get out, the instruments of torture Enrique had preferred over his Psy abilities.

Her tears had lessened, but she didn’t stop crying altogether until several minutes later. If he never heard those broken cries again, it would be too soon. Her ensuing silence cut parts of him no one should have been able to reach. He wanted to force her to speak.

The blue flare around her eyes seemed to glow when she finally raised her head. “I made Drew and Sascha tell me the details of the rescue. They didn’t mention you, aside from saying you’d provided a psychic distraction at a certain point in the trap.”