Judd returned
to the cabin after dark to find Brenna sitting on the floor by the laz-fire, tools and computronic parts set out neatly in front of her. She glanced up when he entered, but her smile was absentminded. “Gimme a few minutes, baby.”
Baby?
Putting the use of the term of affection down to her preoccupied state, he hung up his jacket and took off his boots before going into the kitchen area. As he’d thought. She hadn’t eaten. Pulling out two of the prepacked meals from the cooler, he put them in the cooking unit. He was trained to go without food for days if necessary, but Brenna needed to get some calories in her. Changelings burned energy faster than Psy. Added to that, she was still recovering from the damage Enrique had done to her body.
That done, he went to sit near the fire and watch her work. Two things became immediately clear. One, that Brenna loved what she did, and two, that she was very,
very
good at it. Not that that was anything unexpected. She was a qualified computronic tech and had been engaged in further study before a sociopath changed the course of her life.
The images came again—of her, bruised and battered, the blood on the walls, the sounds of tearing flesh. Enrique’s screams. Everyone screamed at the end. Everyone.
Judd had watched the former Councilor being torn to shreds by claws and teeth and felt no sense of racial allegiance. Blood for blood. Eye for eye. Life for life. It was changeling justice and Santano Enrique had deserved nothing less.
Brenna suddenly smiled and it was a flash of light cutting through the grim darkness of memory. “Finished.”
“Are you charging for that?” he asked, aware of the value of her work.
“Oh, it’s for Drew.”
“And what does your brother think of you being here?” Color flooded her cheeks. “Um, he sort of might think that I’m with Sascha.”
“Ashamed to be seen with a Psy?”
“You know,” she said, scowl gathering, “I think Indigo’s right about the size of men’s brains.”
Judd decided not to ask for clarification. “You need to eat.” He fetched the meals.
For once, she didn’t argue. Dinner passed in silence but one unlike any he’d ever before known. It was . . . easy. After they’d cleared away the plates, she pulled him back to the fire. “Sit.” He obeyed, the sofa at his back. Following, she proceeded to tell him what Indigo had discovered about the murder victim.
“Rush is used primarily by changelings?” he asked, not familiar with the substance.
“Humans, too, but less so. Their bodies process things differently from ours.” She stretched out her legs, the movement more like that of a cat than a wolf. “Ruby Crush was developed specifically for changelings, like Jax was for Psy.”
“Jax isn’t a recreational drug.”
Brenna half turned to face his profile. “You mean it has a medicinal use?”
Medicinal. That was one way to put it. “In minute doses calibrated to precisely match the patient’s weight and metabolism, it has the effect of both intensifying the strength and enhancing the endurance of natural Psy abilities.”
She braced one elbow on the sofa. “Like an upper for the psychic mind?”
“Yes. But without the physical consequences suffered by street users. The effect fades over a set period and then you’re back to a normal level of strength. No crash.”
Brenna frowned. “You said physical. What about psychic?”
All at once, he understood why he’d told her, what he was about to confess. “They said there were none—the M-Psy in charge of dosing us.”
“You took it?” A shocked whisper.
“I was an Arrow. An elite soldier.” He had never before either confirmed or denied his rank. “We were the reason Jax was originally invented.” So they could be better, faster, deadlier than anything else in the Net. “Taken in the correct dosage, it has none of the psychic side effects you see in the addicts.” A slow loss of Psy powers followed by a quiet form of insanity and then death. Yet his people continued to use it. He’d heard it allowed feeling during the high, a chemically induced short circuit of the conditioning.
Scooting to sit in front of him, Brenna touched a trembling hand to his knee. It felt like a brand even through his clothing. “It terrifies me that you were exposed to it. Tell me about the effects the M-Psy didn’t warn you about.”
CHAPTER 12
He knew
he should push off her hand. But he didn’t. “It changed us while we were functioning under its influence, made us less human, more capable of killing. Perfect programmed soldiers who could still think with crystal-clear accuracy.” Jax had altered the Arrows’ view of right and wrong, made them incapable of seeing shades of gray.
“How long were you exposed to it, Judd?” She sounded frantic. “There could be long-term effects.”
“A year,” he told her, wondering why she wasn’t running—he’d admitted to having blood on his hands. “I believe I’m safe. My brain didn’t have a chance to reset permanently.” As had happened with some senior Arrows. They truly
were
the darkness, lethal machines who followed the will of their handlers with unswerving dedication.
“Only a year.” She rose up on her knees and leaned in close enough to grip his sweater. “How long were you an Arrow?”
He found he’d made a space for her between his raised knees. One more move and his hands would be on the soft curves of her hips. He fought the compulsion with the hard truths of memory. “From eighteen to twenty-six. Eight years.” But he’d been in training since the age of ten, since the day he’d first killed.
Brenna uncurled her hands from his chest and reached out to touch him lightly on the side of his jaw. He met her gaze, fascinated as always by the spiking explosion of arctic blue around the pupils. He’d never seen it as a scar, but as a symbol of her strength. Most people did not walk out sane after having their minds torn open.
“How?” she asked, dropping her hand to his collarbone. “How did you escape being administered with the drug after that first year?”
The dissonance had kicked in during that fleeting caress along his jaw, but the pain was slight. Easily manageable for a man trained not to break even under torture of the most inhuman kind. “I realized what it was doing to me seven months in.” He had known his handlers would never agree to a simple request to halt the drug regime, not when Jax gave them a fully obedient and extremely lethal army.
“My abilities aren’t common, not the specific subdesignation.” Of which she could know nothing. The second she found out about his Tk, she’d classify him in the same group as Santano Enrique:
the cabal of murderers.
No matter what he’d decided about the need to force her to keep her distance, he didn’t want Brenna seeing him that way. A jagged spike of pain speared through his skull—the dissonance had moved to stage two. “So there was no way for anyone to cross-check my statements about it.”
She reached out to brush a lock of hair off his forehead and her skin felt so delicate, so different from his. “You lied.”
“Yes. I began to deliberately make psychic mistakes while on Jax.” Such as not applying enough pressure to cause death or the specific type of injury he’d been instructed to bring about. “Then I told them I was having dreams.”
“Dreams?” Her forehead lined with concentration. “What’s wrong with having dreams?”
“Psy don’t dream.” To dream was to be considered flawed. He’d begun dreaming as a child, but the dreams he had as an adult were not the ones he’d had then—before his ability had come to vicious life.
Brenna’s hand clenched on his shoulder. “No freedom, even in sleep.”
“No.” He wanted to touch her hair, it looked so soft and silky. The dissonance became a fraction stronger, but it was nothing compared to what he’d undergone as a ten-year-old boy put into the custody of the squad’s trainers. They’d placed modified electrodes on the most sensitive parts of his body, strapped him down, and proceeded to teach him the meaning of pain.
It had taken him only a week to learn to stop screaming, another five to stop blacking out. By his eleventh birthday, he could watch his arm being broken and not react. “My plan worked—they took me off Jax.” They had also removed several others with related abilities. Interestingly, none of those men had ever asked to be put back on the drug.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that.”
He didn’t respond, his attention caught by something else.
“You’re staring,” Brenna accused a minute later, a faint blush coloring her cheeks.
“I apologize.” Her skin looked creamy and rich in the warm light from the laz-fire, her hair golden and her eyes—they appeared lit from within. “You’re staring, too.”
Her blush deepened. “I can’t help it. You’re so pretty, so perfect.”
It wasn’t the word he’d been expecting and he wasn’t sure it was the one he wanted to hear. “Are you attracted to perfection?” He wasn’t being vain. He’d been told during advanced training that he had a face of perfect symmetry, something that attracted humans and changelings alike, and could, therefore, be used to his advantage. He’d never followed that advice—it would have been one step too far into the abyss.
She laughed, the sound husky and intimate. “No, pretty doesn’t do it for me. Otherwise Tai would have succeeded in reeling me in during high school.”
He recalled the young wolf’s face—a shock of straight black hair, high cheekbones covered by healthy brown skin, slightly slanted blue-green eyes. The elements added up to a picture that Brenna’s comment told him was attractive to females.
Pretty
. His hand curled into a fist on the carpet. “Then if you don’t find me attractive, why are you staring?”
“I didn’t say that.” Brenna’s voice had grown darker, hungrier. “If pretty was all you were, I wouldn’t be so fascinated. You have dangerous eyes, a stubborn jaw, the body of a soldier, and the mind of a hunter. That, my darling Psy,” she whispered, “makes you a gorgeous, sexy package I want to lick from head to toe.”
Her confession was followed by silence so deep Judd could hear the whispers of the wind whipping around the cabin. Then her blush fired to red hot. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I actually said that out aloud.”
Neither could he. The fact that she saw him as so sexually appealing was enough of a surprise to render him speechless. He was numb. Even the dissonance cut off—likely reading his reaction as one of complete unemotionality.
“Say something.” Brenna’s hand turned into a tight fist on his shoulder.
He found his voice through an act of intense willpower. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“I don’t usually say things like that to men.” She scowled. “Are you sure you aren’t using Psy powers on me?”
“I would never break that ethical law.” His tone went cold at the implication.
She thumped his shoulder. “I was joking, you idiot.” Blush having faded, her lips began to curve in a slow, teasing smile. “You don’t know what to do with me, do you?”
Admitting that seemed like a bad idea. “If you were male, I’d simply throw you out with a few bruises. As you’re not, I’m uncertain how to get rid of you.”
“That’s just mean.” But she continued to smile. “Can I ask you something?”
At that instant, he was her personal Arrow. “Ask.”
“Don’t you want to—” She paused. “Actually, I don’t think I’m that brave.”
“Don’t I want to what?”
“Forget I said anything.” Rising to her feet, she ran a hand through her hair, sending the short strands spiking.
Still seated, he put a hand on her leg, on the sensitive skin behind her knee. A small touch but one that restarted the dissonance with a vengeance and froze Brenna. He knew why. According to his research on body language, the touch was an intimate one, something most females only allowed those they trusted. “Tell me.”
Her expression was inscrutable when she glanced down. “You’re Psy, figure it out. It’s a logical progression.” With that, she shook off his hand and walked toward the small kitchen area. “Do you want coffee?”
He changed position so he could watch her. “Alright.” Coffee wasn’t part of the Psy meal plan, but he’d become used to it since his defection. While waiting for Brenna to prepare the drink, he did as directed and worked through their conversation. It would’ve gone faster had he not kept getting distracted by the sight of her moving with feminine efficiency mere meters away. The sway of her hips was—“Don’t I ever want to lick a woman all up?”
She squeaked, then swiveled to face him, bracing her hands on the counter behind her. “Not quite how I would’ve put it.” Her tone was higher than normal. “But yeah.”
“You,” he said quietly, no longer able to lie. “You tempt me.”
“Oh.” Her breasts rose up as she took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’ve never let on.”
Yes, he had. If she ever saw the way he watched her when she wasn’t looking, she’d be in no doubt as to the strength of his unacceptable reaction to her. “Because it doesn’t matter,” he told her. “It changes nothing.”
“Liar.” She stared at him unblinking. “Other Psy don’t feel desire.”
“It’s a major fracture in my conditioning,” he acknowledged—to her and to himself. “A fracture I intend to repair.” What he couldn’t understand was why it had reappeared so quickly after the work he’d done to close it yesterday. He should’ve been immune to the sweet seduction of her body.
“Then what? You forget temptation?”
“Yes.”
Eyes full of fire, she turned her back to him and continued with the coffee preparation. “You know that list about you? I should’ve added pigheaded to it.”
Her anger fascinated him as much as every one of her other emotions. And admitting that brought him another hazardous step closer to the edge of a catastrophic breach. The dissonance spiked and this time he listened, because for him, the pain wasn’t simply a warning to get his emotions under control, it was a warning to get his
ability
under control.
His power wasn’t passive, wouldn’t turn inward if he lost his white-fisted grip on it. No, it would go outward, would seek to tear flesh and crush fragile feminine bones. “Don’t you ever wonder,” he asked coldly, conscious that he was assassinating any chance he had with her, “if you’re attracted to me because of what Enrique did?”