Chapter 1

Elias Penrose froze.

The messages on his phone kept coming in. He opened the video the man had sent, and there was Adeline Kerrick, wearing revealing lingerie and crawling across the floor. A metal chain was fastened around her neck, and the man held the other end.

The look on her face, as if she were savoring every second of it, was one Elias had never seen before.

"You really thought your wife was some innocent little angel?"

"I've had her trained since college. She does whatever I tell her."

"Even marrying you was just part of our game."

As message after message flooded his screen, Elias felt the floor drop out from under him. He opened the first video, watched only a few seconds, and locked his phone. But the image of Adeline, tongue out and eyes glazed over, refused to leave his head.

Disgusting was the only word for it, and he'd never imagined he would one day use it to describe Adeline.

Once he'd calmed down a little, Elias searched "contracted pet" online. What came up made his jaw drop.

A woman who willingly became a contracted pet would obey her master's every command without question. Even if her master told her to die, she wouldn't complain. To prove her loyalty, a pet usually bore a slave tattoo that marked her as her master's property.

Elias had never seen Adeline's body. After a moment's hesitation, he swallowed his discomfort and reopened the man's video. Sure enough, there was a tattoo on Adeline's lower abdomen. It sat somewhere so private that Elias tightened his grip on his phone.

He took a screenshot and asked a friend who worked as a tattoo artist. His friend took one look and smirked.

"Whoa, that's a top-tier succubus mark.

"Stay far away from women who become contracted pets. They won't refuse anything their master asks for, and they've been used in every way imaginable. They're filthy."

Elias made his way home in a daze. Traces of the life he'd shared with Adeline were everywhere, and his eyes burned.

Like a man possessed, he grabbed whatever was within reach and hurled it to the floor. Once the house was wrecked, he collapsed onto the couch and gulped down hard liquor in long, desperate swallows.

Adeline had once told him she hated the smell of alcohol, so he'd never touched a drop. But in the video, the man slowly poured liquor from above, and Adeline opened her mouth without hesitation to catch it.

She even licked up every drop that landed on the floor. It was the look on her face that cut Elias the deepest.