My Five Beast Wives Want Me Dead in the Apocalypse

CHAPTER 5 PART 2

The room went still. Even the buzzing overhead light seemed to hold its breath.

"So here's what's going to happen." Kyle pointed at the plate. "You are going to take this thing back into the kitchen, throw it in the garbage, and make me something I can actually eat. Spicy wings. I want spicy wings. And if I don't have a plate of spicy wings in front of me in twenty minutes, I'm walking upstairs and signing all four certificates tonight. Every single one of you walks free, which means every single one of you loses the bond, which means the burial law no longer protects you from each other or from whatever is out there in the dead zones. Is that what you want, Bianca?"

Bianca's smirk was gone. Her dark eyes had gone wide, just a fraction, and her jaw was locked so tight Kyle could see the muscles jumping beneath the skin.

"You wouldn't," she whispered.

"Try me." Kyle held her gaze and did not blink. "Spicy wings. Twenty minutes."

Bianca stared at him for five long, silent seconds. Then she snatched the plate off the table with one hand, turned on her heel, and disappeared into the kitchen. The door swung shut behind her with a bang that rattled every dish in the cupboard.

For thirty seconds, there was peace.

Then the smoke came.

It started as a faint haze drifting from under the kitchen door, followed by a sharp, acrid smell that hit the back of Kyle's throat like a fist. Within a minute, the entire dining room was filling with a thick, choking cloud of chili laced smoke so dense it blurred the overhead light into a dim orange smear.

Kyle's eyes began watering immediately. Riley started coughing, covering her mouth with one hand and slamming the other against the table. Hailey pressed her face into her sleeve, her cheeks flushed red, her eyes squeezed shut. Even Vivian turned her head away, her amber eyes narrowing against the sting. Scarlett set her teacup down for the first time, her golden eyes watering, a single, restrained cough escaping through her pressed lips.

"She put a whole bag in the pan," Riley choked out between coughs. "She dumped an entire bag of dried chili into one pan. That lunatic."

"Is that smoke coming from Kyle's house again?" A muffled voice drifted through the window from outside. Blake Sterling's compound, right next door. "Someone should check on them."

"Nobody check on us!" Kyle shouted toward the window, tears streaming down his face, his voice cracking from the smoke. "We're fine! We're having a family moment!"

It took fifteen minutes for the smoke to clear after Bianca opened the back door and every window on the ground floor. When it was over, the dining room looked like a battlefield. Tear streaked faces, red rimmed eyes, and a faint gray haze still hanging near the ceiling like a stubborn ghost.

Kyle stood at the head of the table. He looked at each of them in turn. Riley, still coughing. Bianca, standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate of blackened, nuclear wings and a murderous expression. Vivian, watching. Scarlett, wiping her eyes with one elegant finger. Hailey, red faced and still hiding behind her sleeve.

"Alright," Kyle announced, and his voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "I'll keep this short because I know none of you want to hear me talk. The man who lived in this body before me was garbage. He did things I can't undo, and he treated all of you worse than animals. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I can fix that with a speech."

He paused. Every eye in the room was on him now.

"But I'm here now, and things are going to change. Starting tonight. There will be no more beatings. No more selling anyone to the black market. No more locked doors and punishments. That's over."

"And the divorce?" Riley's voice cut through like a blade.

"The divorces stay on the table," Kyle told her, and watched the hope flicker across her face before he finished. "As a punishment. Whoever performs the worst going forward, whoever causes the most problems, whoever makes life hardest for this household, that person gets their papers signed. And the rest of you stay."

The hope in Riley's eyes curdled into something ugly. Bianca's grip on the plate of wings tightened until her knuckles turned white. Vivian's expression did not change at all, which was somehow the scariest reaction in the room.

"One more thing." Kyle tapped the floor with his foot. "I know the five of you have been sleeping on the living room floor and on mats in the basement. That's done. There are four empty bedrooms upstairs. Pick one, move in, and start sleeping like actual people. Tonight."

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Five women stared at him with five different shades of disbelief, anger, suspicion, and cold calculation, and Kyle stood in the center of it all, a baseline human with no Ability, no strength, and no power except the single, fragile thread of a marriage law that kept him alive.

Scarlett Reyes picked up her teacup, took one slow sip, and set it back down without a sound. Her golden eyes finally met his for the first time that evening, and what lived behind them was not anger, not contempt, but a quiet, measuring curiosity that somehow frightened Kyle more than all of Vivian's killing intent combined.