by Mandy Rosko
As Cold As Ice
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
As Cold As Ice
Dangerous Creatures Book 3
USA Today Bestselling Author Mandy Rosko
Other Paranormal Romances by Mandy Rosko that you might enjoy:
Things in the Night Series:
The Vampire's Curse Book 1
The Legend of the Werewolf Book 2
The Dragon and the Wolf M/M Novella
The Shepard's Agony Book 3
Dangerous Creatures Series:
Burns Like Fire Book 1
A Shock To Your System Book 2 M/M
As Cold As Ice Book 3
Gonna Make You Howl A Novella Available Now!
Let Me Play a Trick on You A Novella Coming Soon!
Others:
The Princess' Dragon Lord
The Lady And The Dragon’s Holiday
Sold To The Enemy
My Angel Lover, Have Mercy on Me M/M
Mate of the Wolf
Bite Me (A Woodland Creek Novella)
Night and Day Series:
Night and Day Book M/M Book 1
The Calm Before the Storm M/M Book 2
All Hell Breaking Loose M/M Book 3
Book 4 Coming Soon!
Medieval Romances by Rizzo Rosko:
Lady Thief Book 1
Lady Deception Book 2
Smashwords License Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright Mandy Rosko 2015
Cover Art by Giovanni Auriemma
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Chapter One
They stopped putting other people into her cell when they realized one thing: The people they put in with her, she hurt them. A lot. Sometimes, she killed them if they got a little too up-close-and-personal.
After the third inmate froze to death, the people in charge cut it out and left her alone.
Jessica Frost didn't want to be alone. Not exactly. Solitary confinement was its own form of torture, she knew that, but none of the other prisoners would stop harassing her.
She got the feeling they were offered special treatment if they tried to rough her up, which made her feel a little guilty for a couple of minutes if she killed someone.
Only a couple.
Jessica had told them. She’d warned them about what she would do if they’d tried touching her. No bracelets had been put on her wrists or ankles, so she’d still had access to her ice, the frost that swirled inside her. The threats she’d been making hadn’t been empty. The handlers weren't limiting her power, but none of the inmates had believed her before they’d attacked.
Jessica sat on the cold floor of her cell. Despite still having her powers, she couldn’t make it cold enough to break out of there. Plus, there was a point where the cold did start to bother her a little, too, so it wasn’t like she could make a blizzard in there. Not enough water in the air for a start, and if she could fill this place up with snow and freeze the walls, she’d still have to hope the metal warped enough for her to break through.
She might bury herself alive in her snow before that happened.
Jessica lifted her finger. Her nails were blue. She hadn’t painted them to look like that. They were always that color; she didn’t know why. It wasn’t like she had blue eyelashes or hair. She was a brunette, but her finger and toenails had always been a pale shade of blue.
For her entertainment, she summoned the lightest touch of frost to her fingernail, making it cold enough so she could watch the branches and reaching paths of a snowflake forming on her finger.
With how cold her hands were, it could sit there for a while without melting, so long as she kept her focus.
It was something to do while she waited.
Jessica knew how this worked. She knew why her power was not being suppressed. It wasn't like it was difficult to figure out.
The handlers who kept her alive, sometimes fed yet barely clothed, were able to come and go without much of a problem thanks to the air vents that would seep in sleeping gas, knocking her out whenever they wanted to come in and let the men and women in white lab coats do their tests.
Only then were the irons ever slapped on her. When she was out cold and couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
She had tried to block off the vents with ice, fairly sure the room she was in wasn’t air-tight, so there was no harm in trying it. That just got her door immediately busted in, and at least half a dozen hunters jumped on her, slapping the shackles on her wrists before she could do more than give the first one frostbite.
Yeah, she hadn’t done that again.
Despite limiting her, they were still testing her. They were testing the limits to her powers. Why? Did they want to know how far she would take it if another inmate attacked her? If they tried to slash at her face with dirty fingernails, bite her, or choke her?
Her brother, Ethan, had never liked it when Jessica did more than act as an air conditioner during an overly hot summer. What would he think of her if he knew she’d killed some people?
How was he doing in that moment? He was a hunter, too, just like she used to be, but he had no powers. His only secret was that his sister was a paranormal. Keeping a secret like that, however, could still land him in prison.
Had he been caught and no one told her? Was he being locked up with other paranormals? Left alone to be attacked, just so the people watching him could see if he had some hidden power or not?
Jessica shuddered to think of it. Ethan was human. Jessica was human, too, but that wasn't the way a lot of people in government saw her. Well, whatever; Ethan was the classic definition of human, at any rate. A homosapien born without any extra gifts or powers. He was exceptionally strong and smart, but only in the ways that were acceptable to the public.
He was so boringly normal that she hated him for it sometimes.
Next to no one wanted to see paranormals walking free. Not with memories of the civil war still fresh in the minds of the older generation.
Which was why it was a crime to hide a paranormal, as Ethan had done with Jessica, and they would still lock him up if they caught him.
If the other hunters captured him and brought him in, questioned him, and he said the wrong thing, even gave off a small hint that he'd known his sister was an illegal paranormal, then he could go to prison for that.
For the rest of his life. Jessica knew perfectly well that people in power didn't take kindly to being embarrassed. Having one hunter who turned out to be a
paranormal, hiding right under their very noses, was bad enough, but to have the possibility of two? Or even just the one while the other had been covering for her?
No way.
Jessica sighed. She sat in the corner of her cell, hiding beneath the two-way mirror that let any number of people watch her at any given time. There was a camera in the room, but the two-way mirror was worse somehow, and she wasn’t sure why.
The steel-frame bed, which was bolted to the stone floor, didn't interest her much. Not only was the mattress laughably thin and barely worth sleeping on, but she'd killed a man on it a couple of days before.
She eyed the thing, like it was some evil force that wanted to grab her when she wasn't looking. It hadn't been her fault. Another angry paranormal was shoved into the cell with her. After looking around his gaze landed on Jessica. He recognized her. Jessica recognized him as well.
Not only was he a paranormal, but he was one of the men Jessica had captured, stuck in a box, and brought in herself.
To be fair, the guy had been a criminal, even in the regular sense of the word. Using his power to break into people's homes, terrorizing them, and then stealing from them before leaving.
The paranormals who had criminal records that involved more than just existing were always worth more for a hunter to bring in. The bounty on that guy had been particularly big, even though he'd never actually killed anyone. He was just a thief who liked to threaten and scare.
Which was why it saddened her when she had to kill him.
He'd seen her, rushed at her, and managed a good, hard punch to her stomach before grabbing her hair. Her clothes were ripped from where he'd yanked on them in his frantic attempt to scratch at her.
The guy was normally a werewolf. Not the kind who only changed on the full moon, but who could shift any time he wanted. He couldn't change his body then, thanks to the spelled shackles on his wrists and ankles, but that didn't stop him from clawing at her, from trying to bite her and maul her.
So, she'd killed him. Jessica had sucked up all the moisture in the air, even a lot from her own body, before she'd encased his hands in a block of ice.
The problem was that she'd used too much ice in her panic and stuck his entire body in there. The ice was so thick and heavy that, even though his eyes were still frantic inside, when Jessica had called for help and tried to get him out of it, she'd accidentally pushed the man's body off the bed.
Again, flimsy mattress, held up by only a few bits of wire. It wasn't her fault. She knew that.
The crack of the ice wasn't anything overly dramatic. The man's body didn't shatter. He wasn't that frozen, and the ice wasn't that thick around him.
But apparently, his spine did snap under the pressure. She only found that out when one of the handlers came in the next day, after she was properly drugged and shackled.
He'd told her about it, but he didn't give her too many other details. If he had, then Jessica couldn't remember them.
She probably only got that small amount of information because a lot of the people who worked in the building knew her. Jessica was usually calm and reserved, but she smiled at the woman at the reception desk, had conversations with the hunters and handlers who came and went. Even her brother was known to be the donut guy, since he often brought over a box and flirted with anything that had two eyes and two legs.
At the moment, she didn’t know where he was, and though she tried to keep herself from doing it, she couldn’t help but start to feel sorry for herself for being in this position.
Which was fine. It was a normal emotion, but she was glad when it left and replaced itself with anger, and all the little plans she fantasized about doing to the people who had once tried to be friends with her. Jessica had turned her back on her own kind, brought them in and left them to be locked up or studied, all in the hopes of hiding for just another day, of living a somewhat normal life.
The second she got the chance, she was going to make the lot of them pay. She’d put her hand over each and every one of their hearts and send a blast of cold so deep into them it would make their lungs stop. She’d do it for herself, the people she’d been forced to kill while they tried to figure out how powerful her ice really was, and for all the innocent paranormals she couldn’t save, couldn’t hide, and couldn’t speak up for.
The light above the only door that led into her room flashed green, letting her know someone was about to come in. She sighed and pushed herself to her feet, keeping her hands relaxed and at either side of her body. If she put them behind her, it gave off the impression that she was trying to hide something, and that never worked out well in her favor.
The door opened, and Charles Mallary walked in, a tall, blond man with a widow’s peak which just made his receding hairline look that much worse. He had a clipboard in his hands, and he looked down at it as if this was just another day in paradise, not even caring that Jessica didn’t have on her shackles.
Soren Birgir followed behind him. A man who was taller than Mallary by a good five inches, was closer to Jessica's age and had better, thicker hair, but he was thin. Definitely thinner than the last time Jessica had seen him. There were blueish-looking bags under his eyes, suggesting he hadn’t been sleeping much. Eating much either, apparently, if the way the white coat hung off him was anything to go by. His stubble was also a tiny bit longer than it had been the day before, which meant he hadn’t shaved, either.
He’d spent another night sleeping at his desk. Doesn’t he ever go home?
A pair of fingers snapped in front of her face. Jessica blinked and looked to the side. Charles wasn’t exactly glaring at her, but he didn’t appear happy, either, even as he finished snapping the iron shackles onto her wrists.
With the round spectacles, he looked like a grown-up Draco Malfoy who’d stolen Harry Potter’s glasses.
“I asked you if you were ready.”
Jessica waited. When no explanation came, she struggled to hold her patience. “Ready for what?”
Soren answered for her. “Your solitary confinement is over, for now. It’s been decided that you will be safe enough to spend time with the other test subjects.”
Chapter Two
Jessica’s heart tried to lunge into her nose, but she tightened her throat and kept it from launching too high up. Did the fear show on her face? She hoped not; otherwise, she might as well be completely and totally done if she couldn’t mask her emotions from them.
“I put a lot of these people away. I handed them over to you, you both know that.”
“And we will do everything in our power to make sure no harm comes to you,” Charles said, adopting a comforting tone as he rubbed her back through her torn, white pajamas, which were standard for the paranormals locked up in there.
Jessica didn’t like the touch. Her skin crawled, but she’d regained her composure. She didn’t shiver in disgust, or sneer at Charles for what he was clearly doing.
He’d had a thing for her for a long time, that she knew, but he was also something of a creep. The type of man who stood a little too close to her whenever she’d sat at her desk, pretending like he wasn’t trying to rub his balls on her shoulder.
Still, maybe she could use this. It didn’t matter how she got out, so long as she got out. She looked up at him, widening her eyes like she was afraid, keeping her voice small and unsure as she tightly held her hands together at her chest. The picture of the frightened and helpless damsel. “You won’t let them hurt me, will you?”
Charles’s eyes softened from behind his round spectacles. “Of course not, no. That’s not what this is. We just want to see how the others will react to you. No one will be hurt this time, that’s why you’re wearing the bracelets.”
Sometimes hunters, handlers, collectors, and the scientists who all worked for Head Office called the shackles that. Bracelets. Even Jessica had used the word before plenty of times over. Mostly whenever a hunter was trying to explain how harmless and safe they were to a family who’d ca
lled in and was turning over a relative who had uncontrollable powers. Or when someone from HR was doing an interview on television, trying to explain with a polite face to the camera how not barbaric it was to be putting people who weren’t guilty of any real crime in these things.
Basically, bracelets was the politically correct term for something so much uglier. Everyone in the PR department said that word, especially when talking to the media or any politicians. If anyone called them what they were—shackles, chains, handcuffs, regardless of whether or not there were any actual chains connecting the two pieces—then they were immediately terminated from their post.
Okay, so Jessica had made herself look helpless and scared, so then she had to look like she was overly grateful and happy for Charles’s protection. Too much whimpering and crying was never attractive. “Thank you,” she said, glancing away from Charles’s face and down at her hands, as though shy. She wished she could summon a blush, but it just wasn’t in her.
“Not to worry, not to worry. We’re still friends here,” Charles said, his hand finding its way to the small of her back as they started walking out the door. “We’ll take care of you. I know you’re not actually dangerous, and we’ll get this whole thing settled.”