Free Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh Page B

out?”
    â€œShe’s held on to her Council seat for more than a decade because other Psy, even cardinals, are terrified of her. The woman’s a seriously powerful telepath.” He folded his arms across his chest, the small tattoo on his right biceps clearly visible. An echo of the markings on Lucas’s face, it was a quiet statement of where his loyalty lay. All of the sentinels had followed the jaguar’s lead, though Lucas hadn’t asked it of them. Lucas’s own upper arm bore the image of a hunting leopard, the promise of an alpha to his pack.
    â€œThat’s not unusual enough to scare people,” Dorian pointed out. Nothing about him indicated that he was latent and people had learned not to taunt him, because when Dorian bit, you didn’t survive.
    â€œNo,” Vaughn agreed. “But her talent has a little twist. She can infect other minds with viruses.”
    â€œRun that by me again?” Mercy sat up on one of the huge flat cushions that served as Lucas’s sofas and pushed back her thick waist-length hair. “A virus?”
    â€œApparently it’s like a computer virus but affects the mind of the person it’s directed at. The rumor on the street is that Nikita rose to the Council by quietly getting rid of the competition.” Steel lay beneath Vaughn’s deceptive drawl.
    â€œSeveral cardinals suffered mysterious breakdowns or deaths around the time of her ascension. Nothing could be traced to her and the general consensus is that that only increased her cachet with the then sitting Councilors. Murder is an accepted part of Nikita’s arsenal.”
    Lucas prowled around the room. “We’ve always assumed the entire Council was in on it, but even if we’re wrong and some members don’t know, Vaughn’s information makes it highly unlikely that Nikita doesn’t.”
    And if Nikita knew, then it was almost impossible that Sascha, her cardinal heir, didn’t. He was having trouble accepting her complicity in the cover-up—the panther in him was captivated by her, and he didn’t want to be captivated by cruelty. “Sascha is our way in.”
    Clay, who’d been sitting silently on a window ledge, finally spoke. “Can we break her?”
    Lucas knew what the sentinel was asking. Nobody on the changeling side was willing to play nice anymore, not after eight of their women had been butchered in the most brutal way.
    â€œWe don’t torture women.” He made his voice a whip.
    â€œI was talking about sex.” At thirty-four years of age, the dark-skinned sentinel was the only other packmate, aside from Nate and Vaughn, who knew the full details of that blood-soaked night that had turned Lucas from juvenile to alpha in everything but name. “Women are drawn to you. Can you use that against her?”
    Dorian laughed. “You don’t know the Psy, Clay. They’re about as vulnerable to sex as I am to mating with a SnowDancer.”
    Lucas let the idea wash over him. Seducing Sascha was a strangely compelling idea. His body recognized hers in a way that made not touching her an exercise in restraint. The panther wanted to lay her down and luxuriate in the essence of her femininity, while the man wanted to shatter the shell she lived inside and discover the real woman. What made him wary was the possibility of learning that she was rotten to the core, daughter to a woman who’d killed with cold brilliance.
    â€œWe go in slow. Don’t tip them off,” he told the sentinels. “Let them think we’re just animals.”
    Too bad if the Psy had forgotten that animals had teeth . . . and claws.
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    Lucas shifted into panther form after the sentinels had disbanded, and went for a run. A second after he set out, he knew that one of them was following him. The sentinels existed to protect him but they weren’t his bodyguards—no leopard liked to be babysat. Clay was