Khan by Kathi S. Barton

we had sex…I know now
that we never made love. It was the first time we’d had sex that I knew there
was something about her that was different. It wasn’t like she was a paranormal
like me, but something about her mind and heart were different. She was cruel
to anyone that she considered lesser than her. She treated her servants with
little to no respect, and she treated me…” He let go of her hand to get up and
pace. “It was as if she had me around because I was something she wasn’t
supposed to have. But I was okay with that because I thought I loved her.”
    “Her parents didn’t like you?”
    He nodded and then shook his head.
    “Then what? They liked you?”
    “They liked me because I was able to
make Roseann happy for a time, but they didn’t want me to marry her. They
actually tried to pay me off when I asked for her hand. I was too stupid to
realize then that they weren’t paying me off so much as they were giving me an
out. I should have taken it.” He paced more around the room and then opened the
refrigerator. He took out the pitcher of tea and filled two glasses with ice. He
poured her one then one for himself as he continued. “I told her what we were. I
showed her what I could do and how that I could shift. She asked me so many
questions that I should have… No, I had no way of knowing that she was thinking
along the lines of what I could get her rather than spending the rest of her
life with me.” He drained his glass and refilled it. “A week or so later, she
comes to the house. She’s so excited because she has this amazing idea. She
wants us to get married right away. I said yes.”
    “Then what happened? She wanted to marry
you, so she must have felt something.”
    He looked at her and wondered why he’d
never seen the difference in the two of them before.
    “Khan?”
    “She wanted to get married right away,
and she wanted me to convert her to what I was. She thought it would be great
if the two of us could run in the woods behind her home and be free to do what
we wanted.” He sipped his drink this time. “But that’s not what she wanted. She
wanted me to convert her so that she could kill people. Anyone and everyone who
pissed her off, she wanted to kill. She told me that when I explained to her
that I couldn’t change her, that humans died most of the time, and that I
wouldn’t take the chance in killing her.”
    “She didn’t believe you, did she?”
    He shook his head at Monica’s question.
    “She didn’t, and decided that if I
wouldn’t do it, she’d get one of my other brothers to do it. She started with
Reed. He was barely twenty when she approached him. But he wasn’t as stupid as
she thought and he turned her away. Then she claimed that he’d raped her. And
that he was an animal. He was arrested the next day. When she did that, she
came to me and told me that if I did as she asked then she’d drop the charges.”
    When Monica stood up, he thought she was
going to leave him, but she didn’t. When she stood before him, she sat on his
lap and put her arms around him. He moved his chair back so that he could hold
her. When she told him to continue, he did without stopping.
    “There was no proof that she had been
raped. The test that they had done had shown that she’d not had brutal sex, the
kind that she said that Reed had done to her. So she changed her story three
more times. First, Reed raped her, then Sebastian had beaten her, and then,
finally, I robbed her. All of it was dismissed, so that’s when she came to me
with proof of what we were. It was video that she’d taken one afternoon while
we were out in the woods playing around. She’d told me that she erased it, and
like a fool, I believed her.”
    “What happened to it, the video? I would
have remembered seeing it if she had blackmailed you. And I’m pretty sure that
a man changing into a panther would have been on some news feed.”
    He kissed her nose. “Caitlynne found it
and destroyed it.