Page 2 of Taming the Beasts

Emma stared at the coin, her eyebrows pulling together. “So what color is its aura now? Is it gray too?”

“I’m not sure,” Kebe said. “Colors are still leaking out of the vault. I just need a minute.” She frowned as she stared at the vault.

“Kebe, we don’t have a minute!” Emma said. She looked like she was going to be sick. She turned to me. “How well did you say you knew King?” she asked.

“Sexually? Very well.” I winked at her.

“That’s not what I asked, Zoey!”

“He’s one of my cam clients. What answer were you expecting?”

“Knowing his sexual desires doesn’t mean he knows anything about cures,” Emma said. “We were so drunk when we came up with this plan.” She took a swig from the champagne bottle, as if getting drunk now would make everything make sense again.

“King is rich. And smart. He knows all about this stuff.”

“So you trust him?”

I nodded. I did. We’d already been over all this or else we wouldn’t be standing here in this bank after hours. King had no reason to lie to me. And I’d known him a lot longer than I knew Kebe. Kebe had only just shown up in our lives earlier this week. I didn’t trust her one bit. Especially because she kept hitting on Emma’s fiancé.

“Please,” Kebe said, as if she knew what I was thinking. She sounded frantic. “I need to ask my daddy about that coin. He’ll know. I just need to talk to him. Sort everything out. And you don’t want to get your boyfriends’ hopes up for no reason.”

She’d said her father was a curator. Or a professor. Or an anthropologist? Or all three? I guess either profession might have some insight on the coin. I pressed my lips together as I thought it over. I didn’t want to get the guys’ hopes up for no reason. The coin felt powerful in my hand though. I knew in my gut that there was magic here. “We can tell them that we think it’s the cure. But that we have to do more research. They’ll want to be a part of it…”

“But that does what I just said. It might just get their hopes up for no reason.”

I didn’t want that. They’d been searching for so long. The last thing I wanted was to tease them. Teasing was meant for the bedroom only.

“And we’re not thinking about the whole picture here,” Kebe said. “ What if the cure does work? And it changes them forever?”

I just stared at her. “That’s kind of the whole point, Kebe. I want to change them back. They’ve all been dying to be themselves again.”

“But what does that look like? Really?” She turned to Emma. “Suddenly Callum will only have 60 years left to live instead of 600? Don’t you think that might cause some kind of existential crisis? He only just proposed. It could change his whole outlook on…”

“He loves me,” Emma said. “He’s giving up a lot to be with me already.”

“I’m just saying that it changes things.” She turned to me. “Your boyfriends share you because they have to. Because they don’t trust themselves to be alone with you.”

“That’s not entirely true…”

“Do you really think they’ll keep sharing you if they don’t have to? They’ll make you choose one of them. It could tear them apart.”

I liked being with all of them. The situation was perfect for me. I thought it was perfect for them too. But what if Kebe was right? What if they didn’t love the situation and they were just doing it because they had to? All four of them gave me something I wanted. Something I needed. Well, maybe all five of them now. I pictured Titan staring at me while the other four devoured every inch of me. Maybe he gave me somethingI needed too. And I hadn’t even gotten to explore that yet.

“Just let me research it with my daddy before we do something we regret,” Kebe said. She tried to grab the coin from me, but I pulled back.

“I’m not giving you the coin.”

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked.

Not even a little, bitch.She pretending to look innocent, but I wasn’t buying it.

The brights on someone’s car lit up the glass doors.

“They’ll probably punish you by getting you naked,” Kebe said. “It’s basically a strip search. You have no choice but to give it to me.”

“Then I’ll give it to Emma.”

Emma held up her hands like she didn’t want it. “As if Callum isn’t going to ravish me when I come back home in this catsuit.”