Psy & Changelings 10 - Kiss of Snow

Judd’s telepathic touch when they’d first discovered the second intricate level of dissonance programming. But that hidden knife blade of pain had made perfect sense to Sienna—it wasn’t tied to emotion and had nothing to do with Silence except in that the mechanism had been developed as a result of the Protocol. Instead, this level of dissonance only kicked in when her X abilities triggered without her conscious awareness, a blaring warning that she was about to go active.
    Now, the spike of agony down her spine had her close to blanking out, white dots floating in her vision. She rode the razor’s edge, allowing the dissonance to dig in its vicious claws until she staggered and brought herself back to her room in the family quarters . . . a room she’d hung with Toby’s graphic art and Marlee’s watercolor paintings.
    Nausea curdled her stomach, bile burning the back of her throat. She was moving to throw clothes and personal items into a duffel even as her body continued to tremble with the aftereffects of the dissonance—she had faith in her ability to control her “gift,” but she was still an X. Mistakes happened.
    Walker was sitting at the dining table, making notes on a datapad when she came out. “Going somewhere?” Cool green eyes held her to the spot.
    “I’m moving to my quarters in the soldiers section on a permanent basis.” Her fingers clenched on the canvas handles of the bag. “I’ll talk to Toby and Marlee tomorrow, explain.” The words hurt coming out, emotion a rock in her throat.
    Walker rose to his feet. “They’ll be fine. They understand your position in the pack.” He didn’t ask the question, but she felt compelled to answer anyway. That was the thing with Walker—he wasn’t her father, had never tried to take that role, but he was, to all intents and purposes, the patriarch of the Lauren family.
    “I’m emotionally unstable and it’s affecting my psychic control,” she admitted, a cold sweat breaking out along her spine. “If I suffer a shield breach, I don’t want to be anywhere near where I could hurt them.”
    “Do you need to return to DarkRiver?”
    “No.” Distance wasn’t going to do it any longer—not when she’d be thinking about Hawke the entire time anyway. At least here, she’d know as soon as he took Rosalie to his bed, not spend her days with the possibility eating away at her insides as she waited for it to be confirmed. “I’ll take care of it.”
    “Sienna,” Walker said when she was almost to the door, “you’re not alone. Never forget that.”
    She nodded, but as she headed down the corridors toward the area of the den set aside for unmated soldiers, she knew the words for a lie. She was alone in a way none of her family could understand.
    Sienna Lauren.
    Designation: X.
    Rating on the Gradient: Cardinal.
    She was, in fact, the only cardinal X ever to survive to adulthood according to the records in the PsyNet. Perhaps the only cardinal X ever to have been born. The mutation was rare—so rare that she hadn’t been properly classified until she was five.
    She’d almost killed her mother that day.
    Dropping the duffel on the bed when she reached her quarters, she shoved the unbearable memory to the darkest recesses of her mind and sat cross-legged on the floor to do mental exercises designed to wrench her abilities back under the strictest control. An hour later, her T-shirt was plastered to her body, her hair sticking to her face, but she’d safely corralled the raging ferocity of her power.
    It was as she was stepping out of the shower that she got the call and invite. “I’m in,” she said, because staying here with the gnawing cruelty of her own thoughts was not an option.
    Hanging up, she pulled on some panties before beginning to rummage through her clothes—both what she’d carried over in the duffel and the things she’d stored in the closet here, most of them items she rarely wore. First, skintight jeans. They were all but painted onto her body by the time she managed to twist, shimmy, and curse her way into them—she’d never have bought them on her own, but one of the leopards near her own age, Nicki, had dragged her along on a shopping expedition not long ago.
    Sienna had glanced down at the plain jeans and gray sweatshirt she’d been wearing at the time. “What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
    The petite honey blonde’s response had been a despairing shake of the head. “It says you’re two