"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.