Taming My Vicious Feral Wolf Slave

Kaylee's eyes snapped open in the pitch-black darkness.

Her lungs heaved, dragging in air that tasted sharply of copper, rotting leaves, and feces.

Cold sweat coated her forehead, matting her hair against her skin. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird, the frantic beats sending painful tremors down her arms.

She reached out her right hand, blindly searching for the smooth glass of her iPhone on her nightstand.

Her fingers didn't find glass. They scraped against rough, prickly straw and freezing, damp dirt.

Kaylee froze. The breath died in her throat.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her vision was completely blocked by the darkness, but the ambient sounds were entirely wrong. There was no hum of Boston traffic. No whir of her apartment's HVAC system.

Instead, the wind howled through wide gaps in what felt like wooden walls, rustling a thatched roof above her head.

Kaylee pinched the soft flesh of her thigh, twisting the skin hard.

A sharp, brilliant spike of pain shot up her leg. She gasped, her stomach violently twisting.

This was not a dream.

Before the full weight of that reality could crush her, a piercing, high-pitched electronic beep exploded inside her skull. She clamped her hands over her ears, but the sound wasn't coming from the room. It was inside her brain.

"Ding! Villain Redemption System activated. Host binding successful."

The voice was male, smooth, and entirely devoid of human inflection.

Kaylee scrambled backward, her bare legs tangling in a pile of foul-smelling animal furs. She pressed her spine against the rough, splintered wooden wall, her chest heaving.

"Who are you?!" she screamed into the dark.

"I am the Villain Redemption System, designated callsign 'Alex,'" the voice replied smoothly in her mind. "You have successfully transmigrated to the target dimension—the Beast World."

A translucent, holographic panel suddenly materialized in the air two feet from her face, casting a pale blue glow over the squalid, primitive hut.

Kaylee stared at the panel. Dead center, pulsing in a terrifying, blood-red font, was a countdown clock.

Time remaining until Host is executed by Elijah Cooper: 71 hours, 59 minutes, 42 seconds.

"Elijah Cooper?" Kaylee whispered, the name tasting like ash on her tongue. And then, like a dam breaking, the memories flooded back.

She had been reading. That trashy, addictive, so-bad-it-was-good grimdark beast-world novel she'd downloaded on a whim. She had devoured it in a single weekend, ignoring her backlog of blog drafts and unedited footage from her last camping trip. The book was called something ridiculous like "Beast World: Rise of the Cursed Kings," and it followed seven brutal, tortured, devastatingly powerful male leads who eventually succumbed to their inner darkness and laid waste to the entire continent.

She remembered finishing the last page and staring at her ceiling. What a waste, she had thought. They just needed someone to give them a chance.

And then she must have fallen asleep.

"Alex," she croaked, her throat dry. "Why am I here?"