Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(34)

Alexei’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So who did the fucker threaten?”

“Other little girls and their mothers. He’d show me pictures of them and say he’d do the same things to them that he’d done to me and my mother. Only he’d mete out more torture, cause so much pain that they’d beg for death.”

Alexei was growling again, deep in his chest, but when she looked at his face, she saw that his eyes were yet human-gray. “Bastard.” His free hand was suddenly on her nape, a rough warmth, while he maneuvered the vehicle with his other hand. “He knew an empath couldn’t bear to cause pain to others.”

Memory’s mouth dried even as the stabbing pains retreated from her body to be replaced by a thick, honeyed warmth she didn’t understand.

You’re not an empath. You’re a nightmare.

Renault had taunted her many a time, and she wasn’t foolish enough to believe he hadn’t lied at least half those times. But in this, he was right. From everything she’d seen on the news media, empaths healed emotional hurts and helped soothe ravaged minds. They were the counselors who could see into your soul, the healers who walked into the darkest valleys of the mind and pulled people out by the hand.

Memory didn’t do that. Memory did something altogether different. Something horrible and ugly.

“What about when you got older?” Alexei continued to grip her nape, and for some reason, his rough touch felt infinitely better than Lucy’s gentle hold.

“I physically couldn’t ask for help.” Bile burned Memory’s throat. “He was inside my mind by then, moving me like a puppet.”

Returning his hand to the wheel to maneuver them around a narrow and tight bend, Alexei scowled. “Current data we have says long-term mind control is nearly impossible because of the toll it takes on the controller—it literally sucks them dry.”

Memory wanted to haul his hand back to her nape and tell him not to move it until she gave him permission. Clenching her abdomen against the urge, she told herself to get the tactile need under control before she became as much a junkie as Renault. “I’m a special case,” she said, staring out the windshield as the tiny stabbing pains began to return limb by limb.

“Yeah?” A glance she felt. “Why?”

“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” The memories of how Renault had violated her, how he’d dragged her down into the abyss, made her so angry she could barely think. To her surprise, Alexei let her be. For a growly wolf, he could be very quiet when he wanted. “Empaths don’t want to kill, don’t want to murder,” she blurted out, her gaze on the rain-drenched landscape. “They don’t fantasize about torturing annoying people with tiny insects.”

A shrug of those muscled shoulders that she caught with her peripheral vision. “I dunno. Sascha scrambled the brains of the idiots who tried to come after her cub.”

Memory sat up straight in her seat, angling her body so she could see his profile. “Did she truly?” Her heart raced, her lungs aching with withheld air.

A nod. “Fuckers wanted to abduct her baby. She threw them into a nightmare. Served them right.”

Memory’s mother had fought for her and Diana Aven-Rose had been an inmate of Silence. Sascha had rejected Silence on her defection. Of course she would fight relentlessly for her child. “I never heard about this on the comm.”

“Not sure it was covered widely. Cats and the locals took care of the aftermath pretty fast. Couple of SnowDancers responded, too, along with several other allies.” He shoved away a strand of hair that was threatening to fall into his eye. “I need a damn haircut.”

“Don’t.” The word spilled out of her lips before she could stop herself.

A quick glance, both eyebrows raised.

Cheeks heating, Memory muttered, “It’s beautiful, even if you are a bad-tempered growler.”

His lips curved, the openly smug smile unexpected and devastating. “Tell you what,” he said, “you let me play with your curls and I’ll let you pet any part of me you like. Exchange of skin privileges. Fair and square.”

Skin privileges.

Memory shaped the term inside her head, tried to understand its meaning. But she kept getting caught on one indigestible fact. “My hair is a matted nest.” Renault had used his hold on her mind to force her to straighten it each time they went out, ostensibly so that she’d have the appropriate “look” as his aide, but Memory knew it’d had more to do with control and humiliation. She’d been aware and conscious while he forced her to erase a part of herself, her body a marionette and her mind caged.

“You know what hair goop you need?” As he spoke, Alexei pushed something on the dash that changed the vehicle from hoverdrive to wheels.

The SUV touched the rutted track that had appeared in the trees, the jolt that rocked up her body a pleasant reminder that she was no longer in a cage. “Yes,” she said, though she’d never actually used any of the conditioners or creams; Renault had refused to supply them for her after she saw ads on the comm and asked.

In the only rebellion left to her, she’d deliberately allowed her hair to go wild the instant he was no longer forcing his mind on her own. She’d done zero maintenance on it. It had always taken hours to straighten it when he wanted her to perform, and she’d resisted him every inch of the way. It hadn’t stopped him—he’d had her since she was eight years old, the pathways he’d laid inside her mind permanent tracks he could access with only minor physical contact.