scream anymore and could talk about the horror. Not that she would tell the aggravating wolf that; he’d take it as encouragement to keep on being a provoking demon.
“At first, when I was young, he controlled me with fear.” Memory had only achieved Level 3 beginner status in Silence at the time of her mother’s murder—she’d been behind her age group and in remedial Silence lessons after school. Ironically the very lessons from which her mother had picked her up that last fateful day before Memory’s world ended. Whatever fragments of Silence she’d attained, she’d lost it all in the hallway where her mother gasped her last, frantic breaths.
Emotion had become her enemy and her leash.
“He couldn’t threaten anyone I loved, because I had no one left.”
“Your father?”
“It was a standard fertilization agreement, done for a fee.” Psy took genetic lines seriously, and while Memory would always have access to her paternal line’s medical and genetic information to ensure her health—and to keep her own genetic history unbroken—that was the extent of their contact.
“Neither my mother nor my paternal donor wanted a joint-parenting agreement. It was a strictly transactional relationship.” Old enough to understand how Psy agreements worked, Memory had never expected her father to come for her. “It was worse because Renault blanketed my mind with his own soon after my abduction, cutting me off from the PsyNet. It felt like no one else even knew I existed.” She’d felt so alone.
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