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"You’re a changeling, not a telepath" For a second, she thought she saw the gold flecks spark to life in the rich brown of his eyes "There’s more" Not a question

She sed "When I saw the murder in my dreams, when I heard the screams, it - " Her nails cut into the fleshy pads of her palentle Or maybe that hat she needed to hear

"It excited a ony of her victim, her blood fevered with sick excitement "Every cut, every screae "But only during the actual dream?"

She wanted to be held so badly, but Judd Lauren was about as likely to do that as he was to turn wolf "It’s like he left a piece of himself inside of me"

"Santano Enrique was a true sociopath He didn’t feel anything"

Her laugh sounded jagged to her own ears "If you’d seen hiht have been cold, but he enjoyed what he did And he infectedmental viruses is a rare skill" He pushed off the door and walked to her "Sascha found no trace of one in your mind and she’d know - her mother is the best viral transmitter in the Net"

"He did sos, they’re not mine" They couldn’t be Not if she wanted to re," he said, standing so close she could feel his body heat Alarm and need mixed in raw confusion "Your brain pathways function completely differently froh her hair and stopped Her waist-lengthEnrique had stolen "Do you think he changed that?"

Judd’s muscles rippled as he uncrossed his arical conclusion If you let me scan your mind - "

"No"

He inclined his head in a snose the probleain crawl into her mind For most victims, it was the last inviolate space For her, it was a part that had been brutalized once and would never trust again "Do you have any idea what it could be?"

"No" He reached out to touch her neck "How did you get this bruise?"

Taken co her hand over his "A bruise? Maybe when I was sparring with Lucy" Brenna ht not be a soldier, but she needed to be able to protect herselfnow more than ever Because the truth that no one knew, the secret she’d successfully concealed since the rescue, was that Enrique hadn’t sied her mind, he had destroyed her on a far more fundamental level, a level that threatened to obliterate her very identity "Can you find out aboutShe was exquisitely aware of every ht be second nature to her race, but predatory changelings didn’t let just anyone touch thees Judd fit none of those criteria Yet she didn’t push him off

"I’ll put out sohness of his palm an unexpected shock "But you have to accept that no answersYou’re unique - the only one of Enrique’s experiments to have survived"

He watched Brenna Kincaid leave Judd Lauren’s room from the shadows It was all he could do not to leap out and choke the life out of her right there and then The bitch was supposed to die o, but she’d clawed her way back to life And now she’d re Why else would she have pulled that scene with the body?

The words that left his mouth were low and vicious

He’d been close to panic in the days after her rescue, but thankfully, her memory had turned out to be full of holes If those holes were filling up, he was in trouble The kind of trouble that could lead to an execution - especially if she had that fucking Psy on her side He should’ve betrayed the whole Lauren faotten, but he’d waited too long to use the inforreed had come back to haunt hi hunted down like a rabid dog He stared at the pressure injector in his hand, the same one that had weakened Tim and made him such easy prey It could be used on Brenna, too The crazy-eyed whore was not going to mess up his life

Judd kept his eye on Brenna until she reached the end of the long corridor and turned the corner to join the steady flow of people on the other side Hisin the air the second after he’d opened the door, but he could find no reason for the warning flag Still, he didn’t lanced down at his hand, flexing and unflexing it in an effort to lose the imprint of heat burned into it the second he’d touched Brenna It had been an utterly irrational action, proht but by some buried instinct that had li her skin

His phone beeped, re him he had a job to cooals by a changeling who looked to hiood What would Brenna say if he told her that he was the night it up, he switched off the alarm and went to wash off the sweat that coated his body The tactile sensation of soft fe to his palh - the scent of death had a way of iht as he packed the surveillance equip death, had been since he was ten years of age Tonight was a si job, but only days re completion All he needed noas aof time, of opportunity Then blood would spread across his skin once more, a scarlet flower that told the true story of what he was

Chapter 5

In the rich velvet night of the PsyNet, the door to an impenetrable vault slammed shut A vast mental network that connected millions of Psy across the world, the Net housed their collective knowledge and was updated trillions of times a day as Psy uploaded data It also allowed those of their race to meet at a ht, seven htness in the darkest core of the Net, each appearing as a white star so cold, it threatened to cut