Kaylee gripped the edges of the water-filled clay pot, her knuckles turning white. She turned away from the stream, desperate to get back to the safety of her hut.

A massive shadow suddenly fell over her, blocking the sunlight.

Kaylee stopped. She slowly tilted her head up, her eyes meeting a pair of bright, amber-colored slitted pupils.

It was Gus Novak, a young Tiger Shifter warrior from the tribe. He was shirtless, his torso a landscape of thick, corded muscle covered in faint orange stripes.

Gus stared down at Kaylee's pale, clean face and the damp black hair clinging to her collarbones. His Adam's apple bobbed violently in his throat.

A chorus of low, encouraging whistles erupted from the other male Shifters watching from the tree line.

In this world, the biological rules were absolute. Females were the only beings capable of soothing a male's volatile energy. Because they were so rare, males were driven by a desperate, instinctual need to court them.

Kaylee cursed internally. She didn't have time for this primitive mating ritual. She kept her face blank and stepped to the side, trying to walk around him.

Gus immediately stepped into her path, his massive frame an immovable wall.

"Kaylee..." Gus stammered, his cheeks flushing a deep red. "You... you smell really good today."

He wiped his large, calloused hands nervously on his leather skirt. Then, with the eager expression of a dog presenting a bone, he reached into a pouch at his waist and pulled out a bright yellow, perfectly round fruit.

"This is a Sweet Pomelo," Gus said, holding it out to her. "I found it deep in the forest today. For you."

Kaylee knew the lore. Offering a rare, sweet fruit was the ultimate, formal declaration of courtship from a male Shifter.

She stared at the fruit, her stomach twisting with anxiety. She just wanted to save the dying man in her hut.

She opened her mouth to reject him.

"Recommendation: Accept the offering," Alex's voice chimed in her head. "Rejecting a tribal warrior's courtship in public will provoke hostility. Given your current lack of physical power, making enemies is highly illogical."

Kaylee snapped her mouth shut. The system was right.

She forced the corners of her mouth up into a stiff, fake smile.

She reached out her clean, pale hand and took the heavy fruit from his palm. "Thank you, Gus."

Gus's amber eyes lit up like fireworks. Behind him, a thick, striped tiger tail materialized out of thin air, wagging frantically from side to side in uncontrollable joy.

"Let me carry the water for you!" Gus offered eagerly, reaching for the clay pot.

Kaylee took a sharp step back, dodging his hands. "No need. I have to get back and... discipline my slave."

The word 'slave' made the joy instantly vanish from Gus's face. His lips curled back in a sneer of disgust.

"That feral monster is dangerous, Kaylee," Gus warned, his voice dropping to a serious growl. "You shouldn't keep him alive. He'll turn on you."

"I know how to break a beast," Kaylee said coldly, leaning into her villainous persona. "I don't need your advice."

Without waiting for his response, she pushed past him, clutching the pot and the pomelo to her chest. She practically ran the rest of the way back to her hut.

She slammed the heavy wooden door shut, dropping the heavy wooden bar into place.

Kaylee leaned against the door, exhaling a long, shaky breath. She tossed the pomelo onto the stone table and hurried over to Elijah.

She couldn't just use the raw water to clean him. She placed the heavy clay pot over the smoldering fire pit in the center of the room, adding a few dry logs to stoke the flames. It took agonizing minutes for the water to reach a rolling boil, but she refused to compromise. It wasn't completely sterile, but boiled water was infinitely safer than rubbing raw, bacteria-laden stream filth into his open wounds. Once it had cooled to a lukewarm temperature, she knelt in the dirt beside him. Tearing a strip of clean linen from the hem of her new robe, she dipped it into the cooled water.

With agonizing care, she began to wipe away the black mud and dried blood from Elijah's face.

As the grime washed away, his true features were slowly revealed.

He had a high, aristocratic nose, a razor-sharp jawline, and thick, dark lashes. Even unconscious and battered, his face possessed a suffocating, aggressive beauty and an undeniable aura of nobility.

Kaylee's breath hitched. Her heart skipped a beat.

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. She had already learned his full history from Alex's briefing—the Moon Wolf Kingdom, the murdered parents, the traffickers, the decade of slavery. The dragon fragment lodged in his soul was the real problem, and it wouldn't matter what bloodline he carried if she couldn't stabilize his Chaos Index. Right now, he wasn't a prince or a curse-bearer. 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.

Kaylee couldn't breathe. Her lungs felt paralyzed under the weight of that golden, predatory stare.

Elijah's gaze slowly tracked from her hand, hovering inches from his face, down to the clean linen robe she wore, and finally up to her face. He noticed the fresh, bleeding scratch on her cheek.

The murderous intent in his eyes didn't fade. Instead, it twisted into a look of extreme, hyper-vigilant paranoia.

He violently jerked backward, trying to scramble away from her.

The sudden, brutal movement tore at his freshly medicated wounds. A muffled groan escaped his lips as his face drained of all color, turning a sickly, translucent white.

Kaylee's instincts overrode her fear. She leaned forward, her hands outstretched. "Don't move! You'll tear the wounds open!"

The sound of her voice acted like a physical strike. Elijah's entire body went rigid, snapping taut like a bowstring.

He didn't look down at his bleeding chest. He kept his golden eyes locked onto Kaylee, watching her hands as if she were holding a venomous snake.

"Warning!" Alex's alarm shrieked in Kaylee's mind, the sound like shattering glass. "Target individual Chaos Index surging! 85%! 86%!"

Kaylee's stomach dropped. She didn't understand. She had just saved him. She had cleaned him, medicated him, and fed him. Why was his energy spiraling out of control now?

Elijah's voice broke the silence. It sounded like sandpaper grinding against stone, raw and broken. "What do you want?"

He looked at the clean fur covering his legs. He inhaled the strange, sterile scent of the medicine on his chest.

None of it brought him comfort. In his deeply traumatized mind, it only confirmed his worst fears.

In Elijah's reality, Kaylee Melendez did not do kindness. She did not heal. Therefore, this had to be a new, infinitely more twisted psychological game.

"You want to give me hope," Elijah rasped, a bitter, bloody smile twisting his lips. "You want me to think I'm safe, just so you can watch my face when you rip it all away again. Isn't that right?"

Kaylee shook her head frantically, holding her hands up in surrender. "No! I just... I cleaned your wounds. I saved you from Silas. I brought you back here to heal."

The mention of Silas caused Elijah's pupils to contract into tiny pinpricks.

He darted a look around the room, confirming he was indeed inside her hut and not hanging from the totem pole. He realized she had actually intervened.

But his twisted logic immediately found the darkest explanation.

"So," Elijah whispered, his golden eyes burning with a terrifying, hollow light. "You thought Silas was going to kill me too quickly. You want to take your time. You want to peel my skin off yourself."

"Chaos Index breaching 88%!" The system's voice was now a blaring red siren. "Soul-detonation critical threshold approaching!"

Kaylee's heart lodged in her throat.

She suddenly understood. The original owner had traumatized him so deeply that any display of genuine kindness was perceived as a horrific threat. Her gentle tone, her soft touches-they were triggering his PTSD. Her empathy was literally pushing him toward a mental breakdown that would kill them both.

If she kept acting like a nurse, they would be dead in less than five minutes.

She had to break his paranoia using the only logic his broken mind could accept.

Kaylee sucked in a sharp breath. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, burying her terror and her pity deep down in her chest.

When she opened her eyes, they were entirely cold.

She pushed herself up from the dirt floor, standing tall. She looked down at Elijah, who was curled in the corner, waiting for the torture to begin.

Kaylee crossed her arms over her chest, tilted her chin up, and let out a harsh, mocking scoff.