Chapter 5

Kaylee stared at the glowing blue text hovering above the unconscious man's chest.

[Identity: Locked - High-Level Bloodline Detected]

Her brain short-circuited. She sat back on her heels, her mouth falling open.

"A dormant bloodline?" Kaylee's thoughts stuttered. "So the royal bloodline from the novel-it's real. And it's still sleeping inside him right now."

She stared at the locked identity tag hovering above his chest. A cold tendril of unease coiled in her stomach. The novel had mentioned his royal awakening, but the system was treating this like classified data-something even the book hadn't fully revealed.

"What exactly is locked behind that clearance wall?" she demanded.

"Insufficient clearance," Alex replied with maddening indifference. "Furthermore, his hidden status is irrelevant to your primary objective of basic survival."

Kaylee clenched the damp linen strip in her fist. She knew who he was supposed to be. But if the system was hiding something even from someone who had read the book, then the story she thought she understood was only the surface layer.

Kaylee dragged her hands down her face, letting out a frustrated groan. It didn't matter what secret lineage he was hiding. Right now, he was just a patient bleeding out on her dirt floor.

She grabbed the wet linen cloth and moved down to his chest, gently dabbing at the horrific, bone-deep whip marks.

Every time she wiped away the blood, Kaylee's own chest ached. The sheer brutality of the wounds was sickening. What kind of psychopath was the original Kaylee?

Once the wounds were clear of mud, Kaylee grabbed the bottle of hemostatic powder. She tilted it, letting the fine white dust fall onto the deepest laceration.

The moment the powder touched the raw flesh, it emitted a faint, sizzling sound.

Elijah's body violently arched off the floor. A guttural, animalistic roar of pure agony ripped from his throat.

His eyes remained squeezed shut, trapped in some hellish nightmare, but his right arm lashed out blindly.

As his hand swung through the air, the bones in his fingers cracked and elongated. Thick black fur erupted from his skin, and his fingernails morphed into razor-sharp, curved wolf claws.

Kaylee tried to throw herself backward, but she wasn't fast enough.

The tip of his black claw grazed her cheek.

Kaylee cried out, tumbling backward into the dirt. She clamped her hand over her cheek, feeling the warm, sticky slide of her own blood. Her heart hammered so violently she thought her ribs would crack.

Her cheek stung, raw fear screaming at her to run. The metallic scent of her own blood filled her nose. But as she watched him thrash, the system's blinding red warning of a soul-detonation echoed louder in her mind than her own terror. If he tore those wounds open and bled out, she would be erased from existence. Survival shoved the fear aside, replacing it with a cold, desperate adrenaline. She couldn't let him die. She just couldn't.

She scrambled forward on her hands and knees. Ignoring the terrifying black claws, she slammed both of her hands down onto his bare shoulders, using all her body weight to pin him to the floor.

"Shh... It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you," Kaylee whispered frantically, her native English slipping out in her panic.

She didn't know if it was the strange, foreign words, the soothing tone of her voice, or the medicine finally taking effect, but Elijah's violent spasms slowly began to subside.

His breathing remained ragged, but his body went limp. The black fur and claws melted away, returning his hand to a human shape.

"Chaos Index steadily declining," Alex reported, its robotic voice cutting through the silence. "Target is currently unconscious. His threat perception is dropping passively. Index now at 80% and still trending downward."

Kaylee was drenched in sweat. Her arms shook as she quickly sprinkled the powder over his remaining wounds. Less than half the bottle remained.

She grabbed a relatively clean fur from her bed and draped it over his shivering body.

Exhausted, Kaylee slumped against the wooden wall.

Night had fallen. The temperature inside the hut plummeted, the cold seeping into her bones.

Drawing on her memories of camping trips, Kaylee grabbed two flint stones and some dry moss from a corner. After several frustrating, skin-scraping minutes, she finally managed to spark a small fire in the center fire pit.

The orange flames pushed back the darkness, casting long, dancing shadows against the walls.

Kaylee's throat was parched. She looked at the pomelo on the table. She tore off the thick rind and ate half the sweet, juicy flesh, groaning at the burst of sugar.

She glanced at the remaining half of the pomelo. It was a gift from Gus, a literal political hot potato in this tribal society. Rejecting it to his face was bad, but feeding his ultimate declaration of courtship to a lowly slave was an extreme insult that could get her killed if discovered. She hesitated, her fingers hovering over the fruit. But right now, the dying man needed the sugar and hydration more than she needed to manage a tiger warrior's fragile ego. Survival first, diplomacy later. She squeezed the juice from the remaining half into a clean wooden bowl, mixing it with a little warm water from the clay pot.

She crawled back to Elijah. Slipping her hand beneath his neck, she gently lifted his head. She pressed the rim of the wooden bowl to his cracked, bleeding lips, tipping it slowly.

Elijah's throat worked instinctively, swallowing the sweet, life-saving liquid.

Kaylee watched his face soften in his sleep. Without thinking, she reached out her free hand to brush a damp lock of black hair away from his forehead.

The absolute second her fingertips brushed his skin, Elijah's eyes snapped open.

They were not human eyes. They were the glowing, predatory gold of a wolf in the dead of night.

There was no confusion in his gaze. No grogginess. There was only absolute, freezing, murderous intent.

Kaylee's hand froze in mid-air. The golden eyes locked onto hers, and it felt like she was staring down the throat of a loaded shotgun. The blood in her veins turned to ice.