Valiant refused to look into Tammy’s pretty eyes any longer. The revulsion he saw hurt him deeply. He’d wanted to be honest with her by telling her everything about his life. His mate would need to know. It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to spend her life with him if he kept secrets. He stared at the blanket covering her lap.
“We have heightened senses of smell, hearing, and our eyesight is better than most Species. We are stronger, faster, and even our intelligence was heightened in some cases. We are experimental prototypes that failed and in order to recoup their losses they even tried to turn us into perfect killing machines. They wanted to stamp out our humanity so we could be trained as pure animals that would follow their commands. It didn’t work out for them so well when we wouldn’t break. We fought them instead, killed them when given the chance and refused to do their bidding. They were still working on us when we were discovered and freed.”
“They tried to turn you into a killer?” She whispered the words.
He glanced up and stared at her. “Please don’t get that look in your eyes. I know how to fight and kill. It doesn’t mean that I’m some mindless slayer. They tried to salvage the failures by making us fighters mostly and since we were so impressive looking they believed we might turn a profit. They wanted me to be their…” He paused. “‘Display’ New Species for the failures they wished to sell. I would not comply.”
“Display?”
“To sell us.” Valiant’s voice tightened. “Third-world countries, private armies for rich fanatics, or whoever was willing to pay a fortune for an animal that could talk and kill efficiently on command. Luckily for us, we never heeded orders well. We had too many flaws for them to actually put us up for sale.” He shrugged. “At least most of us. We now have found out that some of our women were sold.”
Tammy stared at him in horror. “So some of your women are out there being forced to kill people?”
He shook his head. “I do not know exactly what DNA I was changed with. It might have been multiple large feline species from my looks and abilities but we guess the lion is most obvious. Their records having to do with how we were created were destroyed. Mostly our experimental prototypes were changed with species known for tracking, hunting, strength and fighting. Canine. Feline. Primate. We discovered that some of our females were mixed with weaker animal DNA strains to make them smaller and less aggressive. They were sold to provide funding to continue the research.”
“Sold to whom and for what?”
Valiant looked furious. “Sold to whoever wanted to make large donations to Mercile Industries. They called them Gift females and in exchange for large sums of money and for helping them cover up what they were doing and to avoid being caught, they handed them over to humans. They were giving our women to those bastards as sexual slaves. We have recovered some bodies and some living females.”
Tammy swallowed and tears filled her eyes. “I never heard any of that on the news. My God. That’s terrible. Those poor women.”
“You won’t hear it on the news. Justice thinks, if the press takes it public, that the men holding our women will kill them immediately to destroy any evidence that they ever had them. Justice and your government are tracing financial records and serving warrants to search for our missing ones. We don’t know the numbers with the records being destroyed but we find another one every few weeks lately.”
She reached out and her fingers traced the back of his hand. “That’s horrible. It just is sickening, isn’t it? Those poor women.” She paused. “I hope that all of them are found.”
He nodded grimly. “We do as well. We’re free and it bothers us that some of our people are still being tormented and imprisoned.”
“There’s no way to recover all the information to find them?”
“When the testing facilities were breached by your government law enforcement it triggered alarms where we were hidden. The staff started fires in the record rooms and destroyed the computers holding the information. They started killing our people too. Some died but most of us lived. Very few records were salvaged.”
“I hate to say this but it’s probably a good thing. You know how information goes. Someone could get hold of it and use it start all over again. You guys are pretty impressive. I’m betting that company would be tempted to start new testing facilities with new people to experiment on.”
He shivered. “We were told by a doctor who was arrested that the leading researcher who created us destroyed that information. She didn’t agree with what Mercile planned to do with us after she succeeded in creating us and she disappeared, taking that knowledge with her. That’s why they began to try to breed some Species to create more. I hope no one could ever replicate what was done to us. It’s enough to give us nightmares. We’re trying to financially destroy Mercile Industries. We’ve won in your courts often on financial matters and your government has put a lot of them in your prisons.”