Psy & Changelings 10 - Kiss of Snow

legs over the side of the bed and pushed back strands of hair that had escaped her braid to stick to sweat-damp skin.
    “Perfect.” Ming, looking at her as a human might a high-performance vehicle. “You really are the most perfect genetic specimen.”
    Perfect—if you wanted a cold-blooded mass murderer. Except of course, her blood no longer ran cold. “Still a potential murderer,” she whispered, trembling so hard her vision wavered.
    “We are who we make ourselves.” Judd’s voice, compelling in its very quietness. “Don’t ever give up your will to some idea of genetic predestination.”
    She clung to his words. Judd had made it. He’d changed the nature of his gift from death to life, become a healer. That wasn’t a path Sienna could follow, her ability was too much of violence, but she’d forge her own path—and not as the butcher Ming had intended her to be, the butcher he’d spent so many years grooming in the expectation of owning her body and soul. Until she’d proven too dangerous even for him. “You didn’t break me, you bastard . ” Not then, and not now.
    Rising to her feet, she stripped and walked into the shower, setting the temperature close to boiling point. Only when her skin was pulsing with heat almost painful in its intensity did she step out and rub herself down. A glance at the clock showed her it was five a.m. Dressing and plaiting her damp hair, she logged in to the roster to double-check her schedule and saw a reminder that she was meant to attend a training session from noon until late in the afternoon.
    Checking the rest of the roster, she coded in a call to Riordan. It went through with visuals. A rumpled sounding wolf said, “I’m getting up, Mom. I promise,” from under a blanket. “Gimme just a minute.”
    Her lips twitched. “You mind if I take your shift this morning?” He was rostered on from six to eleven.
    Riordan raised his head to meet her gaze, his hair sticking up in a mess that was mysteriously attractive. “Dear God, you’re showered. Crazy woman.”
    “Since I am . . .”
    “You sure?”
    “Wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t.” If she kept moving, then maybe she’d forget the bleak insight she’d had in the SUV last night, forget that the past stood as an opaque barrier between her and the only man who’d ever broken through her own shields. “You can pay me back later in the week.”
    “Sounds good. Thanks, Sin.”
    Logging off, she grabbed a small daypack and walked out to the communal kitchen/dining area in this sector of the den. It was empty, the lighting dim. But someone had started the coffee, and there was a still-warm tray of muffins on the counter. The sight made her heart lift.
    Forcing herself to wait, she stashed a water bottle in her pack, along with a sandwich she put together using the fresh ingredients in the cooler. That done, she poured herself a glass of milk—a habit for which both Evie and Riordan teased her unmercifully—chose the biggest muffin on the tray and sat down to indulge. Her eyes almost rolled back into her head at the first bite.
    Cream cheese and peaches—her favorite.
    Licking her fingers after finishing it, she glanced at the tray, bit her lower lip. Food was the most innocent of sensual pleasures but one she never took for granted, remembering all too well the nutrition bars that had been the mainstay of her diet for so many years. It was Hawke, she remembered with a stab of pain deep within, who had given her her first bite of something that had set her senses humming.
    She’d been shaky, on her knees on the grass, her arms around the kids as they’d blacked out after Walker cut their connection to the PsyNet.Judd had stood in front, Walker at the back, both of them giving her time to make certain Toby and Marlee wouldn’t break away from the newly created familial net into which Sienna had pulled them, wouldn’t seek to rejoin the Net.
    So blue , she remembered thinking as she raised her head and met the gaze of the man who stood opposite Judd’s protective form, his hair brilliant even in the dull sunlight that fateful morning. So lethal , had been her next thought. They’d done their research, and so she’d known who he was, what he might yet do to the adults, herself included.
    But Toby and Marlee, they were children, and wolves loved children. Judd, Walker, and Sienna had bet the kids’ lives on that bit of knowledge, hoping against hope that the two youngest members of the family would