Chapter 1

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?"

"Host has been selected by the Villain Redemption System," Alex replied. "One thousand years ago, the Primordial Black Dragon-the most powerful entity to ever walk this continent-was betrayed and sealed away by the united tribes of the Beast World. Its soul shattered into seven fragments, each carrying a portion of its power and its thousand-year grudge against all beast-kind. Those seven fragments reincarnated into seven individuals across the land.

Kaylee's mouth went dry. "The seven kings. The ones who-"

"-who, in the original timeline, each succumb to the residual darkness within their souls, triggering a cascade of destruction that reduces the Beast World to ashes," Alex finished. "Your task is to locate each of them, pacify their Chaos Index, and dissolve the Black Dragon's curse before they reach the point of no return."

"And if I don't?"

"The soul-detonation protocol is absolute. Your life force is bound to the seven targets. If the Chaos Index of any single target reaches 100%, the resulting energy backlash will erase you from existence. Permanently."

Kaylee closed her eyes. She was a food blogger, for God's sake. Her entire career, her entire brand, was built on making perfect sourdough boules and testing chocolate cake recipes until her kitchen looked like a disaster zone. She could break down a whole salmon with her eyes closed, whip up a béchamel from memory, and tell you the exact internal temperature for medium-rare wagyu. She did not know how to save seven cursed dragon-princes from themselves. She wasn't a therapist. She wasn't a warrior. She was just a woman with very strong opinions about proper stock-making and a deep, possibly pathological, need to feed people.

But survival was survival. And even if she was wildly unqualified for this, she wasn't the type to just lie down and die. If the universe wanted her to redeem seven doomed men, fine. She will try.

"Confirming Host identity," Alex continued. "You currently occupy the body of Kaylee Melendez. You are the designated cannon fodder villainess destined to be torn apart by the male lead in exactly three days."

A wave of intense nausea hit Kaylee. She leaned over the edge of the furs and dry-heaved, acid burning the back of her throat.

As she retched, the original owner's memories violently forced their way into her brain. It felt like someone was driving a rusty nail through her temples.

She saw flashes of a blood-soaked courtyard. She felt the heavy, leather grip of a thorned whip in her hand. She felt the sickening, euphoric rush of power as she brought the whip down over and over again on the back of a kneeling, black-haired boy.

But the memories didn't stop there. They ran deeper-past the whip, past the screaming, into a past that wasn't the original Kaylee's but belonged to the boy beneath her hand.

His name was Elijah Cooper. But once, in a city of obsidian towers and silver banners, he had been called Elowen of House Nightshade, the Crown Prince of the Moon Wolf Kingdom. His parents-the Alpha King and his Luna-had been betrayed by a rival house, struck down in a midnight ambush while their young son hid in a cabinet, watching through the crack in the wood. He had been eight years old.

The usurpers had sold him to traffickers. The traffickers, in turn, had dragged him across the wastes to the far edge of the continent, where he was bought and sold a dozen times before his wolf blood was even fully awakened. Starving, beaten, and half-dead, he had finally been picked up by the Melendez family's scouts and brought back to this miserable tribal village as a "gift"-a personal slave for the tribe's most pampered female.

The original Kaylee had been beautiful, spoiled, and vicious. She had wanted the attention of Drake Carpenter. And this morning, when Drake had come back from the forest carrying an unconscious beauty in his arms and publicly rejected Kaylee's advances, she had decided the slave was to blame.

She had beaten him on the path home, screaming that he was worthless, that he dragged her down, that she would kill him herself. And when she had raised a stone blade to follow through on the threat, Elijah-for the first time in ten years-had fought back.

He hadn't meant to hurt her. He had just shoved, a desperate animal reflex. But the original Kaylee had stumbled, hit her head on a tree, and crumpled.

Now she was dead. And Kaylee-the real Kaylee, the blogger from Boston who had read this story and wept for the broken boy with golden eyes-was in her place.

Kaylee clutched her chest, her fingers digging into the filthy animal hide she wore. The original Kaylee's sadistic pleasure clashed so violently with her own modern morality that her body physically rejected it. She couldn't breathe.

"Warning," Alex's voice suddenly spiked in volume, the holographic panel flashing a blinding crimson. "Target individual Elijah Cooper's Chaos Index is surging. The original owner attacked him with a blade this morning. The tribe is now converging on the plaza to witness his execution."

The panel shifted, displaying a live video feed of a tribal plaza bathed in the harsh light of a primitive morning.

In the center of the plaza, a tall, brutally scarred young man was suspended upside down from a massive wooden totem pole, bound by thick, thorny vines. Blood dripped from his black hair, pooling in the dirt below him. He looked entirely lifeless.

"The original owner beat him to the brink of death last night," Alex explained coldly. "The tribe is currently preparing to execute him for being a 'feral slave.'"

"Then let them!" Kaylee choked out, panic overriding her empathy. "If they kill him, he can't kill me in three days!"

"Negative," the system replied. "In this world, a male's life force is intrinsically bound to the female who claimed him. If Elijah Cooper dies now, the resulting energy backlash will trigger a soul-detonation within your body. You will be erased from existence instantly."

The blood drained completely from Kaylee's face. Her fingertips went numb.

She didn't have three days. She had minutes.

And even as terror flooded her veins, another thought surfaced-quieter, steadier. She remembered the novel. She remembered the boy in the cabinet, watching his parents die. She remembered the whip, the hunger, the years of silence and suffering. She remembered the moment in the book when, after killing the original Kaylee, Elijah had stood over her body, his hands dripping blood, and whispered, "I never wanted to hurt anyone."

He wasn't a monster. He was a shattered soul with a fragment of a cursed dragon lodged in his heart, and she was the only person in the world who knew it.

She had to save him. Not just because her life depended on it-because no one else ever had.

Kaylee didn't care about the stench of the furs or the dirt under her bare feet anymore. Pure, unadulterated survival instinct hijacked her nervous system.

She scrambled to her feet, her legs shaking so badly she almost collapsed. She threw her weight against the heavy, rotting wooden door of the hut.

The door burst open.

Blinding, primal sunlight stabbed her eyes. The deafening roar of a bloodthirsty tribal crowd hit her eardrums like a physical blow.

Kaylee sucked in a lungful of the hot, dusty air, ignoring the sharp pain in her bare soles as she stepped onto the rocky ground.

She forced her trembling legs to move. She broke into a dead sprint toward the plaza.