Khan (9 page)

“If you don’t leave this room right this
minute, I’m going to scream for your brothers and tell them…tell them that you
hurt me.”

“They won’t believe you. I can’t harm
you. It’s in our DNA not to harm our mate.” She left the door open and came to
the bed. He thought she was going to forgive him, but she pulled open the
drawer. Suddenly, there was a gun in her hand and she was aiming right at his
head.

“It’s not in my DNA, and I will hurt
you. Now you either get out of here right now or they’ll take you away in a
body bag.” More than the gun she held to his head, he believed her because of
her voice. It was low, mean, and full of truth. He moved off the bed and stood
up. When he reached for his shirt, she jumped on the bed. “I’m not fucking with
you any longer. Get out of here.” The gun went off an inch from his head, and
he watched her steady hand. She’d do it, he realized. She’d fucking shoot him.
When the others spilled into the room, he glared at her.

“This isn’t finished. You’re my mate and
I’m not going to put up with this from you or anyone else.”

“Well that’s just fucking great with me
because I’m not putting up with it either.” She didn’t even look at the door. “Take
him away upright or dead, but get him out of here.”

Khan walked to the door and out into the
hall. He didn’t look to see if they followed him or not, but went down the
stairs and toward the kitchen. The man standing in front of him was going to
regret trying to stop him if he was thinking he could. Before he touched him,
he turned. He looked at the man holding the gun on him, standing just inside
the door, and then back at the man in front of the door who now had a gun too.

“We’ve been told to keep you here. You’re
to go to the living room and have a seat or we are to restrain you.” The man by
the outside door spoke again. “I don’t want to have to shoot you, Mr. Bowen,
but I will if I have to.”

He was ready to tell them to go for it
when Caitlynne and another man he didn’t know came through the door. She didn’t
look happy, and the man beside her looked livid. He lifted his chin. If she
wanted to take him on, then he was more than in the mood for it.

“There have been two murders. Brutal
ones. Senator and Mrs. Barr were murdered sometime yesterday in Mrs. Barr’s
home. Her throat was slit and he was bludgeoned to death with a poker.” She
came into the room and he noticed then how pale she was. “And I brought her
here.”

He was confused for several seconds. He
didn’t know who she was referring to until he remembered that Walker told him
the man’s name that was stalking Monica. Barr. His parents were dead.

“Did he do it?” She nodded as she fell
into a chair. “Do you know if he’s aware that Monica is here?”

“I don’t know. He might not be, but when
he doesn’t find her there, he’s going to come here. He knows who I am and how I’m
related to you. He’s going to figure out eventually where she might be. I have
to send her away. Somewhere that no one knows where to find her until we find
him.”

“I’m not going to let you do that.” He
looked up when one of the men shifted on his feet, but didn’t lower his gun. “I
can’t…she’s pissed at me right now and will probably welcome him with open arms
over me, but I can’t let her go.”

“Everyone in the household knows she’s
pissed at you, Khan. You fucked this up, and now I have to protect her. Go back
home. You can’t fix what she doesn’t want fixed.”

He slumped in the opposite chair from
her as she continued ripping his heart out.

“You can’t learn to shut up, can you?
You just had to have the last word, didn’t you? Why?”

“I don’t know how to be with her.” He
got up to pace and noticed that the men were gone. “Christ, I don’t know what
to do. What the fuck am I doing with a mate anyway? I can’t please her except
in bed and then I hurt her. She said I didn’t, but she was out for so long. How
is it that I’m such a fucking asshole even when I try to be nice?”

“It’s called breathing and thinking
before you open your mouth.”

Khan looked up at Monica who looked like
she’d been crying.

“Why do you feel it’s necessary to say
whatever is on the tip of your tongue? Can’t you just say to yourself, ‘will
this hurt her feelings?’ ‘Will this make her want to bash my head in and have
her dance in my brains?’ It’s tempting every time you say something that pisses
me off.”

“You say stupid shit too.” She turned to
walk away and he called her back. “Please, I’m going to try, but I’m not going
to change overnight.”

“And you’re not going to change at all
if you don’t try. I can’t have you bullying me, Khan. I’ve put up with too much
as it is. I’m not as un-normal as you are, but I do have feelings. Feelings
that get crushed when you treat me this way.”

“She hurt me.” She turned back to look
at him. “When she left me, she hurt me, not by what she did, but because she
had hurt all of my family too. I’d failed them because I’d fallen for a human.”

“And that is my fault how?” She didn’t
leave when Caitlynne and the others did, but sat down. “I didn’t do anything to
you but try to keep out of your hair. You kept bringing me back and pushing me
away.”

“Yeah, a yo-yo.” He wanted to reach for
her hand, but was afraid she’d jerk away from him. “But it was more than that
with Roseann. She had taken not just our secret, but my dignity and my pride.
She’d told me that I was less than a man for not doing as she’d wanted and
that…”

“And what? What did she say to you?” She
took his hand and he laced his fingers into hers. “Tell me all of it, Khan.”

“The first time 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. I don’t know when because I’ve never asked her, but she said
she’d found it when she’d been looking into something else she’d been involved
in. Roseann not Caitlynne.”

She laid her head on his shoulder and
didn’t say anything. He wanted to ask her all sorts of questions like, was she
leaving him? Would she help him become a better man? Would she please give him
another chance? But he didn’t ask anything of her. He simply held her. When she
did talk, he wanted to go and find Roseann and rip her fucking heart out.

“So you hate me because some other woman
hardened your heart and your head to anyone else. You have a family that
worries about you, yet you let her continue to triumph over you. You’ve hidden
away the best part of you because someone, a bitch of a someone, hurt you.” She
looked up at him. “I never really thought of you as a coward.”

He started to say he wasn’t when he
really was. He’d been hiding behind her hurting him for a long time. And
because of that hurt, he’d been missing out on a great many things. Like loving
the woman in his arms.

Monica stood up. “I have to leave here. That
man will figure out where I am and he’ll come here and hurt you all.” He took
her hand to stop her. “Don’t do this, Khan. You know I’m right.”

“No. Yes, you’re right, but you can’t
leave here.” He kissed her hands. “I’m not ordering you to stay, but begging
you to. He’s here. Barr is right here in Washington. And Caitlynne said that he’s
murdered his parents.”

Caitlynne watched her. Monica hadn’t
said much since she’d come out of the kitchen with Khan. She wondered what he’d
said to her to make her not leave, but whatever it was, she was happy for them.
When Khan took her hand again, Monica smiled at him, but even Caitlynne could
see she wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on. It was time to
take it up a notch.

“Monica, tell me how you encouraged him
to see you.”

Monica looked up at her, but didn’t
comment.

“I mean, why else would he come across
the state to find you and to try and get you to come back with him?”

Khan stood up. “You’re barking up the
wrong tree, Caitlynne. I would suggest that you back off.”

“But don’t you see? She had to have done
something. Maybe you flirted with him a little. Impressed with his money,
maybe?”

“No. I didn’t do anything. He asked me
out and I went, but he wanted more.”

Monica looked panicky. Good, this might
work. “But you did date him. You said so yourself.” When Khan started for her,
Walker stepped in front of him and spoke to him in very low tones. “You went
out, how was that?”

“Don’t do this. I told you what
happened. Isn’t that enough?” She stood up too. “I don’t want to talk about it.
I just want to leave.”

“He raped you, didn’t he?” Monica didn’t
move and neither did Khan. “You didn’t tell me that part. You told me how he
held a gun to your head while you sat in the restaurant with him. You told me
how no one would help you, but you didn’t tell me he raped you, did you?”

“He didn’t. Not…he couldn’t get hard. He
said it was my fault that…I knew it was because he was insane, but he blamed
me. He said…Why are you doing this?”

“Because it’s eating you alive knowing
that he killed his parents. You’re blaming yourself because he raped you and
you didn’t report it. Not then and not since.” Caitlynne nodded at Khan. “He
told you his story, now you tell us yours.”

“He slammed me against the car and while
the limo driver and several other people watched, he ripped my clothes off. All
of them until I was naked. Is that what you want to hear? Or is it that he used
a bottle on me? Rammed it in my ass so deep I bled for a month. Then when he
was through with it, he tried to masturbate over me only to not be able to make
himself come that way either.” She pulled up her shirt and pointed to the scar
there. “So he beat me. Then he pulled out a knife and tried to cut my throat.
He tried to kill me.”