Nalini Singh - Caressed by Ice

“He’s dead.” Brenna knew she was being unreasonable, but she was sick of being pushed around. “She can hardly help him now.”

“And what do you intend to achieve by remaining here?” A simple question that highlighted her ridiculous behavior with cool Psy precision.

Hands curling against the urge to strike out at this male who always seemed to catch her at her weakest, she turned and walked out. Packmates glanced at her curiously as she passed. More than one wore a look of judgment—poor Brenna had finally snapped. It was tempting to walk past without meeting their gazes, but she forced herself to do the opposite. She’d had her self-respect stolen from her once. She would not relinquish it ever again.

Several pairs of eyes shifted away at being caught staring, while others continued to watch her, unblinking. Had the circumstances been different, she would’ve taken their intransigence as a challenge, but today, she just wanted to get away from the overwhelming dead scent of the body. However, that urgency didn’t blind her to the fact that even the boldest of them dropped their stares after looking past her shoulder.

“I don’t need you to fight my battles,” she said, after they cleared the crowd.

Judd moved to walk beside her, no longer a shadow at her back. “I wasn’t aware I was doing so.”

She had to concede he was probably telling the truth—most people in the den were simply too scared of Judd Lauren to want to draw his attention under any circumstances. “You saw the cuts.” She could still smell the odor of death mingled with the metallic edge of blood. “They were just like his .” The sharp gleam of a scalpel flickered in her mind. An image of spurting blood. Screams ringing against the walls of a cage.

“They weren’t identical.”

His cool response pulled her out of the nightmare chaos of memory. “Why do you sound so certain?”

“I’m Psy. I understand patterns.”

Dressed in black and with those emotionless eyes, there was no doubt he was Psy. As for the rest…“Don’t try to convince me that all Psy would’ve been able to process the details so quickly. You’re different.”

He didn’t bother to confirm or deny. “That doesn’t change the facts. The cuts on this victim—”

“Timothy,” she interrupted, a rock in her throat. “His name was Timothy.” She had known the fallen SnowDancer only in passing, but couldn’t bear to have him being reduced to nothing more than a nameless victim. He’d had a life. A name.

Judd glanced at her, then gave a small nod. “Timothy was killed using the same type of method, but the details are different. The biggest being that he was male.”

And Santano Enrique, the bastard who’d tortured Brenna and killed so many others, had taken exclusively women. Because he’d liked to do certain things, things that required a woman’s—Brenna shoved the memories back into the locker inside her mind where she kept the darkest, filthiest pieces of what he had done to her. “You think someone’s copying him?” The idea made her gorge rise. Even dead, the butcher’s evil continued.

“Likely.” Judd halted at a fork in the tunnels. “This isn’t your fight. Leave the investigation to those who have experience in that area.”

“Because I only have experience at being a victim ?”

The metallic scent of blood rose from his shredded flesh as he folded his arms. “You’re too blinded by your own emotions to do Timothy justice. This isn’t about you.”

She opened her mouth to tell him how wrong he was but shut it as quickly. Admitting the truth wasn’t an option—it would sound insane, the ravings of a broken mind. “Go get your wounds tended,” she said instead. “The smell of Psy blood isn’t particularly appetizing.” She was worried about how deep Tai had gouged him, but damn if she was going to admit that.

Judd didn’t even blink at her insulting tone. “I’ll escort you to your room.”

“Try it and I’ll claw out your eyes.” Turning, she strode off, able to feel his gaze on her every step of the way until she turned the corner. It was tempting to collapse then, to release the mask of anger she wore like a shield, but she waited until she was safely back in her room before giving in. “I did see it,” she told the walls, terrified.

The flesh parting under the blade, the blood pouring, the pallor of death, she’d seen it all. It had left her a trembling, shaken mess, but she’d found comfort in the fact that it had been nothing more than a nightmare.

Except now her nightmare had taken the ugliest of forms.

Judd ensured Brennawas in her quarters before he returned to the crime scene and spoke at length with Indigo. Then he made his way to his own room. Once there, he stripped and showered to remove the dried blood on his arms. Brenna was right—the scent would only draw attention to him, given the changelings’ acute sense of smell, and tonight, he needed to be invisible.

When he stepped out, he didn’t bother to look in a mirror, simply thrust a hand through his hair and left it at that. A part of his mind noted that his hair was past regulation length. Another part dismissed the issue as irrelevant—he was no longer a member of the Psy race’s most elite army. The Psy Council had sentenced his entire family—his brother, Walker; Walker’s daughter, Marlee; and Sienna and Toby, the children of his dead sister, Kristine—to the living death of rehabilitation.

If they hadn’t defected, they would have had their minds wiped clean, their brains destroyed until they weren’t much more than walking vegetables. It had been a calculated gamble to come to the wolves. He and Walker had expected to die, but they had hoped for mercy for Toby and Marlee. Sienna, too old to be a child, too young to be an adult, had decided to take her chances with the wolves rather than face rehabilitation.

But the SnowDancers hadn’t killed the adults on sight. As a result, he now lived in a world where his old life meant nothing. Getting dressed, he pulled on his pants, socks, and boots first. A man could defeat an opponent bare-chested; having bare feet was a far greater disadvantage. It was as he was pulling on a shirt that the expected message came through on his small silver phone. Leaving the shirt buttons undone, he read the encrypted words, translating them in his mind.

Target confirmed. Window: One week.

He deleted the message the second after reading it. His next act was to push up the long sleeves of his black shirt and wrap plain cotton bandages around his forearms—they would help mask the smell of rapidly regenerating skin. Brenna would have been very surprised to see how fast he healed.

His mind went over the murder scene one more time. He was certain they were dealing with a copycat. The cuts had been superficially similar to those made by Santano Enrique but nothing more. Where Enrique had taken pride in the precision with which he mutilated his victims’ bodies, this killer had hacked rather than sliced. Indigo had also confirmed that no Psy scent had been found at the scene. The final deciding factor was that Santano Enrique was most definitely dead—Judd had witnessed the other Psy being torn to pieces by wolf and leopard claws.

There was no need for Brenna to worry that her tormentor had come back from the grave. Of course that was Psy logic at work and she was indisputably a changeling. More to the point, she didn’t know that Judd been present at Enrique’s execution and, by extension, her rescue. He had no intention of changing that. Because, while he might not be much good at predicting emotional reactions, he had learned enough about Brenna during the healing sessions—where he’d “lent” his psychic strength to Sascha as she worked to repair the fractures in Brenna’s mind—to know she’d react negatively to the knowledge of his involvement.