GWENNY

"What about this one, Your Highness? Stag beastman, six-foot-five, built like a fortress wall—absolutely durable; whip him all week and he won't break!"

"Or this one? Fox beastman, see the amber eyes, the waist on him? His kind are the best you'll ever have in bed, I guarantee it."

The sales manager's shrill, fawning voice drilled straight into my nerves, and I pressed two fingers against my temple. Three days in this world, and I still hadn't fully digested the fact that I had transmigrated.

Into a book, no less—an interstellar beastworld novel.

I was now Gwendolyn Calloway, third princess of the Aurelian Empire.

Don't assume that waking up as a pampered princess was lucky.

Based on my hazy memory of this book, the princess's good days had an expiration date: two years. Then the story's real heroine—the true princess—would return, and I, the counterfeit, would be exiled to a barren border rock to starve to death in the dark.

I had no intention of blocking the true princess's homecoming. I just objected to the ending.

I knew exactly what starving felt like—the way hunger stops being pain and becomes a cold, hollow silence spreading outward from your stomach, the way your own body starts feeling like a coat someone else left behind.

Once was enough for a lifetime. Twice never.

Which was why I was here, in the slave market of Duskmoore's lower district.

Somewhere in this market was a weapon that could change the trajectory of my fate.

I scanned the rows of display pods around me: sealed capsules of frosted alloy and blue-lit glass, each holding a different piece of "merchandise," vitals and pedigree scrolling down the holo-screens beside them like spec sheets for appliances.

Disgust crawled up from somewhere deep in my chest. They reminded me of the little ones I used to take in at the shelter, in another life.

Nothing—no one—is born to live in a cage.

But in this world where I knew no one and owned nothing that couldn't be taken, I didn't have the power to change any of it. Not yet.

I pushed the feeling down and kept my voice cold. "Do you have convict slaves? Wolf-kind, preferably."

The manager froze for a beat. Nine out of ten nobles who bought convict slaves bought them as punching bags—something to whip when the mood turned foul. He clearly hadn't expected the empire's famously frivolous, famously weepy third princess to share the hobby.

Then his smile reassembled itself, oilier than before. "Ah—Your Highness has exquisite taste. This way, this way."

He led me deeper, past the showroom and into a dim corridor where the air went thick with old blood and slow rot, and stopped before a cage draped in black cloth.

He pulled the cloth away, still smiling that ingratiating smile. "This one isn't fully tamed yet, but the body's strong; takes a beating well. Young, fast healer too. You could play with him for a very long time—"

" Play?" A fist slammed against the metal frame from inside, and a voice came through, hoarse and edged with violence. "Come in here and play with me first. See how long you last."

"Insolent animal! How dare you open your mouth in front of nobility!" The manager spun toward the shock controls wired to the cage, flustered and furious. "I'll teach you some manners right now—"

"Don't hurt him." I caught his arm. "I'm taking this one. Name your price."

The manager's smile turned positively radiant—but before he could quote a number, another voice cut in behind me.

"Well, well. Now this is a rare sight."

Julian Marlowe came sauntering down the corridor with two friends in tow. All three were noble by birth, though nobility had apparently declined to accompany the title.

"Your Highness." Julian sketched a careless bow and flashed the smile he sincerely believed was devastating. "Fancy meeting you here. Don't tell me—you heard I've been wanting a slave, and came all this way to pick out a gift for me personally?"

The two young lords beside him laughed out loud, without a shred of respect for the crown.

Gwendolyn Calloway was famous across half the star system for two things:

First, her spectacular incompetence: a royal princess with Essence barely scraping C-rank, too weak to intimidate even a household tabby.

Second, her equally spectacular taste in men—for three years running she had thrown herself at Julian Marlowe at the Founding Ball, and for three years running he had rejected her—loudly, publicly, memorably. People joked that if Julian ever smiled at the princess twice in one evening, she'd sign the whole empire over to him on the spot.

But the woman standing in front of him now was not that Gwenny anymore.

"I'm busy, Julian. Don't bother me." I turned back to the manager. "How much? I'll pay now."

A crack ran through Julian's expression. "What did you just say? I'm bothering you?"

I ignored him. My gaze had already gone back to the shadow inside the cage—I could smell the blood on him now, dark and turning stale. He was wounded. Badly.

I was drawing out my credit chip when Julian's hand closed over mine.

I shook it off. "Manners, Julian. We are not on hand-holding terms."

"As it happens, I want that thing too." He shot the manager an irritable look. "I'll pay ten times her price."

"Two hundred thousand!" The manager's eyes nearly glowed with happiness. "Lord Marlowe, I'll have him delivered to your estate at once, cage and all—"

"I was here first!"

"But Lord Marlowe is offering two hundred thousand!"

My nerves throbbed. "Three hundred thousand."

Julian bared his teeth. "Three fifty!"

"Five hundred thousand!" It was nearly everything in my account, and I spat it out through my teeth before rounding on him. "Do you actually believe you can outspend the royal family? Is that a bet you want to make?

"Even when my account runs dry today, I'll swipe my second brother's card. Then my eldest brother's. And if it somehow comes to that, my father, the Emperor, and my mother, the Empress, will cover their little girl's debts."

It was known that the second Prince Callum Calloway spoiled his sister shamelessly. That much was true—and the first Prince Roan Calloway was the Supreme Marshal , the man half the Duskmoore galaxy's officers were afraid to breathe near.

"And if it does come to that—do you really think the Supreme Marshal will let it end there?"

In truth, I had absolutely no idea whether any of them would cover a single credit. But Julian didn't know that.

His fist clenched, unclenched, clenched again. "The beast is yours," he ground out at last. "You've changed, Gwendolyn Calloway. I'll remember today."

"Please do," I said. "Memory's free. Unlike him."

Julian stormed off with his friends scrambling after him, and I turned back to the manager, who was now looking at me as if I personally hung the stars. "Five hundred thousand, Your Highness—"

I paid without blinking, even though it ached somewhere deep in my thrifty little soul, and behind me the whispers rippled outward through the gathering crowd:

"The princess just dropped half a million on a convict slave? For what?"

"Her Essence rank is already a joke—now she's keeping a convict? What house is going to propose to her after this?"

"I don't know… didn't she look kind of magnificent, paying like that? If only someone ever did that for me?"

I tuned them all out, crouched down, and unlocked the cage door. And for the first time, I saw the man clearly.

Silver hair, matted with grime and blood, fell across half his face and hid one eye completely. What it didn't hide was almost unfair: a gold eye burning under dark lashes.

His jaw was made of clean, hard lines, and a body that even starvation and open wounds couldn't quite humble—all coiled muscle and terrible stillness, radiating heat like something barely contained.

Every instinct I had said predator, and some traitorous part of my brain added: Gorgeous.

And especially that one visible eye held nothing tame in it at all.

Good. That was exactly the edge the empire's future nightmare ought to have.

Kellan Ashford. The once-in-a-century SSS-rank wolf beastman.

In the story, he was meant to rot through years of the underground fighting pits before the true princess swooped in to save him and forge him into her sharpest blade. I'd simply completed her errand early. His loyalty would belong to me instead.

Operation Don't Starve To Death, step one: complete.

Only about two hundred steps to go.