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.

"Nexus 2.0 System activated. Host binding successful."

The voice was male, robotic, 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 Nexus System 2.0, designated callsign 'Alex'. System binding successful," the voice replied smoothly in her mind. "You have successfully transmigrated to the target dimension."

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.

Her pupils dilated. Elijah Cooper was the male lead of the grimdark fantasy novel she had been reading before she fell asleep. He was a tortured, brutalized slave who eventually awakened his royal bloodline and slaughtered everyone who had ever wronged him.

And the person who had wronged him the most was the tribe's vicious, spoiled female-a cannon fodder character who shared Kaylee's exact name.

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

"Kaylee Melendez?" she thought, her mind reeling. "She even has my exact last name? And Cooper? Wainwright? Why do these primitive, feral shifters have standard modern surnames?" The sheer absurdity of the grimdark setting crashed into her.

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.

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 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.

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.