A new Srank serpent hybrid had just arrived at the highsecurity penitentiary.

The intake report labeled him feral, severely traumatized, and brutally aggressive after being abandoned by his former owner.

When I walked down to the subterranean isolation wing to conduct his intake exam, my footsteps ground to a dead halt.

Through the heavy steel bars, a familiar, icecold tail slithered out and coiled tightly around my ankle. "Well, well, Officer," a low, rasping voice murmured from the shadows. "You look an awful lot like my goddamn master." 1 "Looking that much like her makes me want to tear your throat out." Kaelen’s golden, slitted eyes were drenched in pure malice.

If it weren't for the heavy reinforced restraint harness pinning his torso to the stone wall, he would have lunged for my jugular the second I stepped into view.

I never imagined our reunion would look like this.

He was covered in jagged lacerations and dried blood, his prisonissued shirt torn to shreds, exuding an aura of feral, suffocating violence. "Seen enough?

Then get the hell out." Kaelen twisted his body sideways, trying to shield the grotesque, halfhealed scars lining his ribcage.

He jerked his tail back, but my fingers moved on instinct, catching the thick, muscular scales before he could retreat.

Through the iron bars, I pressed lightly against an infected fissure near his tail's dorsal ridge.

He hissed sharply in pain, his jaw unhinging slightly as a bifurcated red tongue flicked into the air.

Blood loss was stripping away his human facade, exposing his primal serpent physiology. "Are you deaf, Officer?

Or do you just have a death wish?" He bared a pair of translucent, needlesharp fangs, exhaling a warning rattle. Srank. Lethal neurotoxin.

I let out a slow, quiet breath. "Stop the act, Kaelen.

I know you recognized my scent the second I walked in." According to the warden's file, this serpent hybrid had been discarded the moment he reached adulthood.

He had survived years in the unforgiving underground rings, harboring a bonedeep hatred for humanity and an obsession with the master who threw him away.

Eventually, he mauled a handler and landed here. Unfortunately, I was that master. Even more unfortunately, I was the penitentiary's newest medical officer.

I couldn't just walk away and let him rot. Popping open my metal medical kit, I dipped a sterile swab into antiseptic and pressed it into his festering wounds.

Kaelen’s tail whipped impatiently against the concrete floor, every taut muscle radiating disgust at my touch.

I left a tube of clinicalgrade antibiotic salve on the ledge between the bars.

Before I could finish rattling off the dosage instructions, he slapped it off the rim with the back of his hand, sending it clattering into the drain. "Save your pathetic pity," he snarled, his voice vibrating with venom. "Enjoying the view?

Does seeing me locked in a cage make you feel proud of yourself? You threw me out like garbage, Kendra.

Don't pretend you give a damn now." I packed my kit with methodical, unhurried motions, keeping my face entirely blank. "I’d love nothing more than to leave you to rot, Kaelen.

But keeping you alive happens to be my job." The murderous darkness in his eyes deepened, making him look like a demon crawling out of the abyss.

He strained against the harness, the thick leather and carbonfiber straps groaning under his sheer kinetic force. "Right. I almost forgot.

A hypocrite like you only keeps pets when they're useful. You never gave a shit about me." He bared his fangs, his chest heaving. "Just wait until I break out of this cage.

You're the first one I'm going to swallow whole." 2 In this modern era, the emergence of humanbeast hybrids gave society an entirely new classification of companions.

On my tenth birthday, my father took me to the municipal hybrid sanctuary to choose a ward of my own.

Amidst a sea of playful, clamoring mammalian hybrids, I chose a quiet, sullen serpent boy sitting alone in the corner of a glass terrarium. I raised him with everything I had.

The first time Kaelen shed his juvenile fangs, he crept into my bedroom in the dead of night and tucked the tiny, pearlescent tooth beneath my pillow.

Back then, I was too naive to understand the sacred significance of that gesture—a serpent's eternal courtship vow—and simply locked it away in a velvet jewelry box.

Being an Srank hybrid, his shed skins and crystalline scales possessed rare, potent bioregenerative properties.

When my grandfather fell critically ill, it was Kaelen’s discarded scales that saved the old man’s life. Everything shifted when I left for college.

A suffocating, volatile possessiveness took root in him.

He would track my scent across campus, hissing and coiling dangerously whenever he caught the lingering trace of a classmate on my skin.

On the night of his eighteenth birthday, the boundary snapped. He drank spiked fruit wine, triggering his first full mating heat.

Using his massive serpent tail, he dragged me off the garden path and deep into the estate’s pine woods, coiling around me in an attempt to construct a breeding nest and claim me permanently.

My family found us. They dragged him off me and beat him within an inch of his life.

Instead of receiving the birthday gift he desperately wanted, Kaelen was left broken and bleeding.

A week later, I used my father’s master key to unlock the flooded dungeon where they kept him chained.

I looked down at his battered body, put on the coldest, most cruel expression I could muster, and told him he was disgusting.

Then, I drove him hundreds of miles away and dumped him on a desolate, frozen mountain ridge. I had to abandon him.

My father’s primary investor, a ruthless billionaire named Victor Crane, was dying of a degenerative bone disease—and he had put a bounty on Kaelen, demanding to harvest his living scales, layer by layer, until his heart stopped.

I set him free to save his life.

I just never realized that in doing so, I had planted a seed of venomous hatred that would fester inside him for eight long years. 3 Kaelen was an absolute nightmare inside the penitentiary.

Inmates were required to perform mandatory labor—either clearing quarry rock or planting timber.

Kaelen refused every order, starting brutal, bloodsoaked brawls with anyone who crossed his path. The facility was crawling with highranking predators.

Consequently, Kaelen was perpetually battered, his body an ongoing canvas of fresh lacerations. Near the end of my Friday shift, the infirmary door was kicked open.

The warden stepped in, his face tight with annoyance. "Doc, you need to head down to Cell 408.

The viper tore his bicep open in the yard." When I reached 408, Kaelen was curled tightly into a ball in the corner, his back turned to the door.

The sight struck a painful chord deep in my chest.

When he was little and lost a fight to the neighborhood kids, he used to curl into that exact same sullen, quivering ball, weeping silently into his knees until I came to coax him out.

I set down my tray, stepped inside the cell, and gripped his bloody forearm with firm pressure. "Don't touch me," he rasped, instantly wrenching his arm away.

His raw strength was terrifying, his eyes flashing a predatory gold.

If not for the heavy shock collar locked around his throat, I had no doubt he would have lunged forward to crush my windpipe. "Do you think I want to be here?" I countered, my voice flat as I clamped a sterile cotton pad drenched in iodine directly onto his open flesh. "My shift ended ten minutes ago.

If the warden hadn't ordered me down here, I'd already be on my couch." The chemical burned.

His complexion drained of color, his jaw muscles clenching so hard the veins in his neck popped, but he refused to let out even a whimper.

As I wrapped the medical gauze around his arm, leaning in close to secure the clip, his nostrils suddenly flared.

He leaned forward, sniffing the air near my collarbone. "What is that stench?" he demanded, his voice dropping an octave.

It was likely the lingering pheromones from earlier this afternoon, when I helped dress a wound for my neighbor's pet fox.

Before I could explain, Kaelen's expression turned murderous. His knuckles cracked as his fingers tightened into fists. "Kendra... you bought a replacement?

A filthy, cheap little fox?" "What does my personal life have to do with you?" I snapped, irritated by his venomous tone.

In a flash, his hand shot out, his long fingers clamping around my wrist with bonecrushing force. "You threw me away like trash, and then you went and bought another stray!" A feral, unhinged fury blazed in his golden eyes. "Fickle, selfish human...

I should have strangled you the day you left me in the woods." The indicator light on his shock collar began to blink furiously red, detecting a surge of lethal aggression.

Hearing the warning tone, the warden rushed into the cell, slamming his thumb onto the remote detonator. Highvoltage electricity surged through the collar.

Kaelen let out a strangled groan, his grip tearing away from my wrist as he collapsed to his knees, trembling violently from the current.

Yet even while writhing in agony, his slitted eyes remained locked on mine, sharp as obsidian blades, burning with a desire to rip me apart. "Are you all right, Dr.

Kendra?" the warden asked, stepping between us with his baton drawn. "I'm fine," I murmured, rubbing my throbbing wrist.

As the heavy steel door slammed shut behind us, Kaelen’s guttural, agonized roar echoed through the concrete corridor: "You better pray I never get out of here, Kendra!

You threw me out, you replaced me—I swear to God, I'll swallow you alive!" 4 For the next several nights, Kaelen's snarling, bloodstained face haunted my sleep.

The sweet, gentle boy who used to curl around my ankles while I did my homework had morphed into a terrifying monster I could barely recognize.

In my nightmares, his childhood self would blink up at me with wide, innocent eyes—only to suddenly wrap his hands around my throat, grinning with razorsharp fangs.

Oddly enough, Kaelen grew quiet over the following week. He didn't start any more yard fights. He stopped showing up at the infirmary.

I assumed the other Srank apex predators had finally beaten some sense into him.

With the lull in casualties, I spent my late shifts at the desk, working on my medical doctoral thesis.

Around two in the morning, while I was fighting off a wave of exhaustion, a guard slammed through the infirmary doors, his face ashwhite. "Dr. Kendra!

The Sblock... they breached containment!" My heart seized. "What about Kaelen?" "Gone!

They ambushed the guard station, beat the warden half to death, and dismantled the master grid!" I grabbed my emergency bag and sprinted toward the cellblocks to triage the wounded officers.

Cell 408 was in ruins. The steel bars were bent outward, and the crushed remnants of Kaelen's shock collar lay in pieces on the floor, ground into the concrete by a heavy boot.

My pulse hammered against my ribs. "Just wait until I break out of this cage.

You're the first one I'm going to swallow whole." The facility immediately went into lockdown, and citywide alerts were broadcast.

Every evening when I walked back to my apartment, my fingers stayed curled around the grip of a highpotency beastrepellent canister in my coat pocket. Three days passed.

Then four. The escapees seemed to have vanished into thin air. I began to tell myself that Kaelen had fled the state, heading for the lawless border territories.

On the fifth night, I unlocked my apartment door and immediately felt a cold chill in the air.

The French doors leading to the balcony were wide open, the sheer curtains billowing in the night breeze. Panic spiked through my blood.

I spun on my heel to bolt for the hallway— A thick, icy coil whipped out from the darkness, wrapping securely around my ankle and yanking me backward. "Caught you." A low, mocking whisper brushed against the shell of my ear. "My foolish little master." I desperately clawed at my bag, trying to rip out the repellent, but he shoved me hard against the wooden front door.

The contents of my purse spilled across the floorboards. His hot, ragged breath washed over my neck, his venomtipped fangs hovering a millimeter above my pulsing carotid artery.

My spine turned to ice. My voice shook uncontrollably. "Are you... are you going to kill me?" A dark, humorless chuckle vibrated in his chest.

His massive, cold tail slithered up my calf, parting my knees with effortless, terrifying strength. "Death is far too mercydriven for you, Kendra," he whispered, his tongue grazing my jawline. "Every single night I froze in that wasteland, I told myself the same thing.

One day, I would track you down... and make you beg for mercy."