My Five Beast Wives Want Me Dead in the Apocalypse

Chapter 2

Kyle sat with his back against a cracked concrete wall on the fourth floor of a half collapsed apartment building, the stolen memories still throbbing behind his eyes like a second heartbeat. Wind whipped through the open side of the structure where an entire wall had been ripped away, exposing the floor to a straight drop down to the street below. Zombies shuffled in loose clusters on the pavement, their groans rising and falling like a sick, broken song.

He could not stop seeing her face.

Vivian Cross. The black serpent. The first wife the original Kyle Cole had destroyed.

The memories played out in sharp, ugly detail. The original had stood in front of the government matching terminal the day the results came in, staring at Vivian's profile with his face twisted in rage. A black serpent. Not even a rare breed. Not a golden serpent, not a storm serpent, not anything that would have made his neighbors shut their mouths. Just a common, injured black serpent with cracked scales and a half healed wound running down her left side.

And next door, the protagonist had been matched with a golden flood dragon.

That was where the poison started.

"You could have just been decent to her," Kyle whispered to no one, his voice almost lost in the wind. "You could have just left her alone."

But the original had not left her alone. He had found out which medicine Vivian needed to heal the wound on her side, and he had swapped it out with a counterfeit. Then, when she was too weak to fight back, he had contacted a black market trader and sold her for a handful of crystal cores. Handed her over like livestock. The trader had thrown Vivian into a cage and marked her as live feed for a mutated beast fighting ring.

Food. He had sold his own wife as food.

Kyle pressed both palms over his eyes and felt something hot and sick crawl up his throat. The original had done that and then gone home and complained to the other four wives that Vivian had run away because she was too weak and ungrateful to stay.

"And she survived," Kyle muttered, his fingers digging into his own scalp. "She survived all of that, and now she wants to kill me."

"She should."

Kyle's head snapped up. Riley stood at the edge of the broken wall, her white hair blowing sideways, her cat ears turned flat against her skull. She was not looking at him. Her pale blue eyes were fixed on the street below, scanning the zombie clusters with the practiced calm of someone who had done it a thousand times.

"The zombies that cornered you down there," Riley continued, her tone as flat and cold as a slab of iron. "That happened because we split up to look for Vivian. All four of us went out searching while you sat in the safe zone picking your teeth. And because we left, nobody was watching the perimeter. The dead ones walked right in."

Kyle swallowed hard. "You were looking for Vivian?"

"What do you think?" Riley turned her head just enough to look at him, and the disgust on her face was so raw it made him flinch. "She has been missing for six days. Six days. And you told us she left on her own. That she abandoned the house because she was ashamed of her beast form."

"I didn't..." Kyle started, then stopped. He did not have the words. The original had done it. The original had lied. But standing in the original's body with the original's face, there was no explanation in the world that would matter.

"You are the lowest creature I have ever seen," Riley told him, each word precise and deliberate, the kind of quiet that was worse than shouting. "Lower than the dead ones down there. At least they don't know what they are. You chose to be this."

Kyle got to his feet slowly, his legs still shaking from the memory flood. The moment he stood, the wind caught him full in the chest, and he made the mistake of looking down.

Four stories. Straight down. Nothing but broken concrete and groaning corpses at the bottom.

His vision tunneled instantly. The rooftop tilted under his feet, and his body lurched forward as if the open air was pulling him in. His arms pinwheeled, his stomach flipped inside out, and for one horrible second he felt gravity take him.

Riley's hand closed around his wrist and yanked him backward so hard his shoulder nearly popped out of its socket. He hit the concrete floor on his back, gasping, staring up at the gray sky with his heart slamming against his ribs.

"You almost fell off a building." Riley released his wrist like she was dropping something filthy. "You can't fight. You can't run. You can't even stand near a ledge without almost dying. And I have to keep you alive because if you die, we all get buried with you."

She crouched in front of him, her blue eyes burning with something that went deeper than anger.

"Sign the divorce papers, Kyle."

He looked up at her, still flat on his back, still breathing too fast. Every survival instinct in his new brain screamed the same thing at once.

If he signed those papers, the bond broke. The legal tie that forced his wives to protect him would vanish. And the moment it did, there would be nothing stopping any of them from snapping his neck. Especially Vivian, who was out there somewhere right now, alive, furious, and hunting.

"No."

Riley's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes went very still. "What did you just say?"

"I said no." Kyle sat up, his voice shaking but his jaw locked. "I'm not signing anything. Not now. Not until I find Vivian."

"Find Vivian?" Riley's lip curled so far it showed the sharp edge of a canine tooth. "You are the reason she is gone. You think she wants to be found by you?"

"I know she doesn't." Kyle forced himself to his feet again, staying close to the wall this time, keeping his back pressed flat against solid concrete. "That's exactly why I need to find her first. Before she finds me."

"You're a coward," Riley breathed, and her voice held a kind of wonder at it, like she had discovered a new species of something disgusting. "You won't let us go, and you won't face what you did. You just keep us chained to you like a rat hoarding food it can't even eat."

"Think whatever you want about me," Kyle told her, and he meant it, because he was thinking worse things about himself. "But take me to the black market. Now."

Riley stared at him for three long seconds. Then she grabbed him by the back of his collar, hauled him up and over her shoulder like a sack of rice, and launched off the edge of the building.

Kyle screamed the entire way down.

Far below the city, in the basement of a building that did not appear on any official settlement map, the air was thick with the stink of old blood and animal waste. Rusted iron cages lined both sides of a narrow corridor, and inside each cage something massive and wrong shifted in the dark. Mutated beasts. Failed experiments. Creatures with too many teeth and not enough eyes, bred for one purpose only.

Fighting. Killing. Entertaining the kind of men who paid crystal cores to watch something bleed.

Vivian Cross sat in the smallest cage at the end of the row. Her black hair hung in matted ropes around her face. Dried blood crusted her arms, her neck, her torn clothes. The wound on her left side had reopened days ago and never closed again.

She reached up with trembling fingers and gripped one of the dark scales along the side of her throat. She pulled. The scale came away with a wet tearing sound, and fresh blood ran down her collarbone in a thin red line.

The beast in the cage next to hers went rigid. Its nostrils flared. A low, guttural sound rolled out of its chest.

Vivian pulled another scale. More blood. The second beast across the corridor slammed its body against the bars so hard the iron groaned and shifted in the concrete. One by one, every creature in every cage caught the scent, and the basement filled with the sound of breaking metal and howling rage.

Vivian watched the chaos spread with eyes that held nothing human in them anymore.

"I'm coming for you," she whispered, and her voice did not shake at all. "And when I find you, I will make you pray for the dead ones to take you first."

The lock at the top of the basement stairs made a sharp clicking sound. Kyle stood behind Riley at the entrance, rubbing his arms against a chill that had come from nowhere.

"Can you pick it any faster?" he hissed, his eyes darting to every shadow on the street behind them. "I feel like something terrible is about to happen."

"If you rush me one more time, I will leave you on this doorstep like a stray dog," Riley snapped back, her claws working the crystal core mechanism with precise, furious speed.

The lock gave. The door swung inward. A wall of hot, metallic stench rolled up from the darkness below, so thick it was almost solid, and behind it came the sound of beasts roaring, iron breaking, and something alive thrashing in the deep.

Riley's arm shot out and shoved Kyle behind her in one sharp motion, every muscle in her body coiled tight, her cat ears pinned flat, her blue eyes locked on the black staircase descending into the chaos below.