“Judd.” Brenna’s face lit up the second she saw him. She went to hold out a hand but dropped it halfway.
He grabbed it anyway. Damn the consequences. “The nursery?” he asked Lara.
“Looked worse than it was,” she said. “No kids hurt but that was by sheer luck. If a pup had crawled into the doorway when it came down—” She shook her head.
“A diversion,” Judd said. “He had to get D’Arn away from Brenna.”
“D’Arn’s already beating himself up about it.” Riley blew out a breath. “But Dieter knew what he was doing—I would’ve taken off for the nursery, too. Bren can look after herself, pups can’t.”
Brenna shot her big brother a smile at the vote of confidence, before returning her attention to Judd. “I was telling Hawke how it happened. I left to grab my comm equipment from my room and when I came out, he was standing here.” Her voice shook, not with fear but anger. “He smirked at me, said no one’s here to protect you now, little girl. He had that injector in his hand.” She pointed to the small cylindrical object lying in a corner.
A wall hanging crashed to the floor, the tough plasglass cover splintering.
As everyone else turned toward the sound, Brenna squeezed his hand. The warning worked. He pulled his rage under control, but it was an uncertain control at best. “When did you remember about the van?”
“That smirk.” She almost spit out the words. “It made me want to kill and then I knew why.”
Hawke kicked aside a piece of debris on the floor—a large splinter from the door. “No wonder you blocked it out. One of us served you up to die.” His eyes had gone pure wolf.
“Yes.” Her tone softened, grew sad. “He killed Tim, tried to kill Drew, gave me up . . . and for what? Money.”
“I’ll find out what he knows.” Hawke glanced at Judd. “Can you help?”
He thought of how Dieter’s heart had felt in his hands, so slick, so crushable. “Give me a week. I’d kill him right now.”
“It’ll take him longer than that to heal the damage Brenna tells me she did.” Lara’s tone was without its normal gentleness. “I’ve got to go stitch him up now.”
Hawke went with Lara. Judd looked at Drew and Riley. “Give us a few minutes.”
Both men left after a short, tense silence. Judd took Brenna into her room and closed the door. She stood with her back to it as he leaned over her, palms braced on either side of her head. “You’re okay.” Not a question, because even bruised, she was standing strong.
“You’re not.” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at his jaw and he realized he was bleeding from his ear canal again. Worry laid another bruise in her eyes, turning the areola of blue almost indigo. “You can’t wait much longer.”
Taking it from her, he finished the task and shoved the cloth into his jeans pocket. “You didn’t need my help.”
She smiled, teeth sharp. “I knew you’d come. That’s why I fought so hard. I knew that by the time I got tired, you’d be there.” Her smile faded. “Go, calm down. I’m okay.”
He left her and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. The urge to crush out Dieter’s life beat in him with every pulse of his own heart, a pounding echo that knew nothing of logic or sense. It just wanted justice. In his current state, he couldn’t even act on his decision to break Silence. He was too unbalanced.
Walking out into the snowy spread of the inner perimeter, he attempted to work off some of his energy by going through a number of strictly choreographed hand-to-hand combat moves. He had to wipe more blood from his nose before he began. The color was close to black—the countdown was reaching the final stages.
When Tai materialized out of the forest an hour into his session, he had to force himself not to react with unwarranted aggression. His control was still fragmented, his rage to kill a trapped beast inside him. “What are you doing here?”
“I was heading back to the den after a run. Been out since this morning.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “I don’t suppose you could teach me some of what you were doing.”
“It requires discipline,” he replied, realizing Tai had no awareness of the chaos that had ruled the den less than an hour ago. For some reason, that knowledge broke through his anger. “You can’t fight instinctively—you need to think before you react.”
Tai put his hands into his pockets, bunching up his shoulders. “You think I can’t do it?”
“I think you’d be going against your nature, but that’s not a bad thing. It’ll teach you to focus and channel the abilities you already have.”
Tai’s grin was young, cocky. “Yeah, I’m not too bad, huh? I got in a few shots with you and you’re a lieutenant.”
“True.”
The smile faded and Tai took his hands out of his pockets. “Thanks for not ratting me out to anyone. About going clawed, I mean.”
Judd remembered Lara’s advice. He just listened.
“I got frustrated and lost it,” Tai admitted. “I apologize.”
“Fine.” Judd jerked his head. “If you want to learn something, follow me.”
Tai came to stand beside him. “What do I do?”
“Think. Stand in place in this position.” He showed the position. “And think about what your body is capable of, what will push it to the limit, what won’t. To use a tool effectively, you must first know its capabilities.”
Tai took a deep breath. “My body as a tool? Okay, I get it. I think.”
Oddly, teaching Tai discipline brought Judd’s own darkness under almost total control. By the time Brenna found him a few hours later, as the trailing edges of the day faded into night, he was thinking relatively clearly.
“I’m sorry,” she said after Tai left, pulling her thick coat tighter around her body. “I needed to be with you. Stupid after I acted so strong and unaffected by the attack. I should go—our being close will hurt you.”
“Never be sorry for coming to me.” Picking up his discarded jacket, he shrugged into it. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
She nodded, lower lip trembling for an instant before she got it under control. “I’m such a baby. I was fine as long as I was cleaning up, but as soon as I stopped, I got so
angry
. Almost as if I was picking up everyone else’s anger, too.”
He matched her smaller strides as they walked, choosing to focus on the lighter aspect of her comment—they’d discuss the other later. “You might be a baby, but you’re mine. And I like babysitting.”
Her laugh was surprised. “Very funny. Anyone else saying that would be dodging claws right now.”
He thought back to D’Arn and Sing-Liu’s interaction the day of the war games. Finally, he grasped what had seemed so puzzling then. But the similarity was only on the surface. He and Brenna were different in one crucial respect, a difference they had both gone to great lengths to avoid discussing—the lack of a mating bond between them.
He was a psychic being. He would have seen it had it been present in any form. That it wasn’t, was a sign that though they might be drawn to each other, they weren’t made to fit. He didn’t give a damn. He was keeping her.
“What was Tai doing with you anyway?” she asked when he remained silent.
“Tai makes a good student. But when did I become a teacher?”
“You’re a lieutenant, a big brother to the young ones.”
“Ah.” That made sense. “They trust me.”
“Yes.”
“I could damage them.”
“But you won’t.”
Such faith for a renegade from the Net. “It’s time.”
She understood at once. “Here?” They were in a very small clearing between towering redwoods. “It’s dark.”
“It’s as good a place as any. And there’s no need for light where I’m going.” He took a seat on a fallen log after brushing off the snow and Brenna sat beside him. “I might not respond if you call me. Don’t panic.”
“I won’t.” Her voice trembled. She took a deep breath. “I won’t.” Far stronger this time.
“You also have to be prepared for the possibility that this might not work, that we’ll have to separate permanently.”
Her skin paled. “It’ll work.”
“This time stubbornness won’t do it,” he said, attempting to be gentle but knowing he sounded harsh. “It’s lasted so long because of how solid it is. The conditioning reprograms the most fundamental aspects of our brains. To break full Silence is one thing—but to make use of an isolated aspect of it as I intend to, might be another altogether.” What he didn’t want to tell her was that the attempt could prove fatal. But he would not lie to her. “If I do it wrong, I could trigger the most extreme level of dissonance.”
“Are you telling me you could die?”
“Yes.”
Her face twisted. “You can’t die. You’re mine.”
“I have no intention of doing anything wrong and every intention of surviving.” He was an Arrow, and for the first time, that might be a good thing. “I was trained to circumvent and use pain to my own advantage. Trust me.”
Swallowing, she nodded. “I know I can’t help, but—”
“You can help.” It was something he’d realized during the calm fostered by teaching Tai. “After putting Andrew’s heart back together, I recovered far quicker than I should have in terms of physical strength. I think it was because of you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” There was no bond, but she reached him in ways no one else ever had. “If you ever find your true mate,” he said, “I won’t allow you freedom.” He didn’t have such goodness in him.
She scowled. “I’m a one-Psy woman.”
Satisfied with the acceptance, he nodded. “Keep in physical contact with me.”
She blanched. “It hurts you when I touch.”
“Because I’m conditioned to see it as a danger. It is one—touch anchors me to you, which threatens to break Silence.”
Swallowing, she nodded and clasped her hand over his shoulder. “The first thing I’m going to do after you come back is pet you all over for as long as I want. Promise you’ll let me.”
“Promise.” With that sensual goal as his guiding light, he closed his eyes and went deep into his mind. Deeper than he’d ever before gone. What he saw threatened to shake his confidence in his ability to use the Protocol to his advantage.
CHAPTER 45
He had never
realized how far the talons of Silence had dug into his brain. Removing them felt like picking out thorns one at a time. But the strangest thing was that, though he was operating exclusively on the psychic plane, he could feel Brenna beside him, her hand having moved to close over his forearm, an anchor that kept him centered.
Extraordinary.
The outer ring of conditioning was deceptively easy to unravel. Deceptive because midway through, he realized it was linked to the dissonance loop—on a level that would cause unconsciousness. He stopped, retraced his steps, and found the embedded triggers. Disarming them was eerily similar to taking apart a thousand tiny explosive devices. Good thing he’d been trained for just that. Of course, this was a little different. One mistake and he’d cause an implosion in his brain. So he wouldn’t make mistakes.
By the time he finished, he had a new respect for the programming process. They’d done a hell of a job on him. There had been not one but six Black Keys built into the initial layer, contingencies upon contingencies. If he hadn’t been as skilled as he was, he could have activated any one of them several times over.
It made him wonder about Sascha and Faith. Sascha was easy to explain—Silence had never “taken” with her. Her ability had simply run so counter to it as to make conditioning impossible. But Faith
had
been under and, from what he could understand, had shattered Silence during a major emotional storm. She’d never mentioned aggressive factors such as Black Keys and psychic grenades meant to shut down the body and mind.
Those facts bolstered his earlier theory—that the programming was altered to suit the needs of each individual child. He’d required extremely severe controls because of his Tk-Cell abilities. He couldn’t fault his trainers for that. But he had a suspicion that those controls had been further strengthened because of his future as an Arrow. They hadn’t wanted to lose their best assassin.
The worst danger appeared on the third level—lines of conditioning tied directly to his ability to kill with a stray thought. After examining them for several minutes, he opened his eyes. Brenna’s concerned face was the first thing he saw.
“What is it?” Her hand clenched on his arm.
“This is where I have to choose which parts of Silence to delete and which to leave functional. Too much and the dissonance will keep trying to disable me. Too little and I’ll eliminate the safety systems that stop me from killing by accident.” As he had killed eight-year-old Paul, a name he’d never forget, a face that would haunt his dreams forever.
“Why don’t you take a break?” Brenna stroked his hair off his forehead in that habit she had. “You were under for an hour.”
He allowed himself to touch her cheek with his knuckles. “No. It’s better if I do it all at once. If I delay, some of the embedded protocols may reinitiate.”
She rubbed back against his touch. “All right. Do what you have to do. But remember—if you kill yourself you’ll be in big trouble.”
Nodding, he closed his eyes and returned to his mind. And found a hidden reservoir of emotion. The conditioning was anchored in guilt, fear, protectiveness, and a fierce desire to keep people safe. They’d used his own emotions to chain him. Part of him appreciated the efficiency, but another part was so incredibly angry, it was a chill across his soul.
However, he didn’t have time for anger. Not today. Calming his mind again, he began to unlace the threads of control. Step by slow step. It felt like hours passed. Then suddenly he was at the center point, where a choice had to be made. Reason clashed with his need to be free. He needed the warning system, but he didn’t need it crippling him. He undid the entire structure.
It took as long as it took. But finally, it was done. His Psy powers were now free of any restraint. But it wasn’t a freedom that was good. As Tai had to learn discipline over his physical strength, Judd had to maintain it over his psychic abilities. The only difference was that Judd couldn’t afford
any
mistakes.
It took him a long time to find a solution and, once again, it was his training as an Arrow that came to his aid. “I’m setting a trip wire,” he said out loud, knowing in his bones that Brenna was terrified for him.