“I’m learning. I was raised around doctors, techs, and security guards. I’m afraid my vocabulary is limited to what they taught me. I didn’t get as much exposure to them as some of the other Species did. I was different.”

She frowned. “Do you know how to read?”

“Yes. I learned after I was freed in the months we spent in hiding waiting for our home to be established.”

He sat on the edge of the mattress. “Most of my kind were taught before then but I wasn’t slated for any interaction with humans. It was a waste of time according to them. They just wanted to keep me alive because I was so strong and closer to animal than most.”

Tammy stared at him mutely. She was too shocked to even reply. Valiant looked a little sad as he gazed into her eyes.

“How much do you know about New Species?”

“Just what I hear on TV and read sometimes in the newspapers. I know that some pharmaceutical company did illegal research on you guys and they finally got popped. I know they made you part human and part animal. That’s really about it except for how you guys have your own Homeland down south near Los A ngeles and how you opened up this place recently.” She shrugged.

Valiant sighed. “We were altered with different animal DNA . Some more than others, such as myself. They made mistakes and I am one.” A nger tightened his expression as he regarded her, seeming to be waiting for a reaction.

Tammy stared into his exotic eyes. “A mistake? I don’t understand.”

“I’m different—my animal traits are more dominant than my human ones.”

She stared at his face, taking in his eyes, nose, mouth, and cheekbones. “You appear more New Species than most.”

“It’s not just how I appear. My instincts are stronger than most of my kind.”

“What does that mean?” She was glad she was sitting down, almost afraid to hear whatever he wanted to share with her.

“I’m more animal than man. It’s the only way I can explain it. The testing facility ‘mistakes’ such as myself were trained to be aggressive, to fight and to take a lot of pain. We were regarded as expendable and therefore heavily abused by their drug research trials. They tested the most dangerous ones they make on us. We were useless for any other purpose.”

She had one of those rare moments where she couldn’t form words. Valiant had a talent for making her speechless.

“They performed a lot of drug research on most New Species. They expected huge profits from enhancement drugs to that would make soldiers and athletes stronger, faster and better. They trained them to show off what their drugs could do. They were valuable. The failures were not. They tried breeding experiments with me but decided after a few unsuccessful attempts that they didn’t wish to produce more of us.”

“Breeding experiments?” She got the question out but wasn’t sure she really wanted to hear the answer.

“They brought some females to my cell to breed with me to see if I could impregnate them. The other males hadn’t produced results. Their testing failed with me as well.”

Tammy tried hard to hide her horror. She knew she hadn’t done a good job of it when Valiant’s gaze dropped and his shoulders sagged. The sadness on his face tore at her heart. He hadn’t had a choice, had been horribly abused, had been a victim.

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. “A t 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.”