She remembered her husband's hand.
Not in a fondly way.
The ceiling was going soft at the edges. Her vision was doing that cinematic blur thing she'd only ever seen in movies and always thought was exaggerated.
Turns out it wasn't.
I didn't see this coming…
And then, with the clarity of a woman whose brain refused to stop being an executive even while her body was actively shutting down, came her final coherent thought.
I should have read that prenup more carefully.
No matter how well you treat a man, he will leave you if he never loved you in the first place. She'd known that about other women's husbands, in other women's marriages, from the clean, comfortable distance of someone who thought she was different.
Who thought she was loved.
She was not different and she was not loved.
He's really doing this, she'd thought, almost calmly. My husband is actually strangling me right now. To be with his mistress with my own hard earned money.
That had been her last thoughts until... nothing.
Rule one of dying: It should be final.
Nobody had informed Lexianna of any exceptions. Nobody had sent a memo. There had been no clause, no footnote, no terms and conditions governing what happened after the nothing.
And yet.
Lexianna woke up at the bottom of a cliff. Not metaphorically. Not in inspirational, rock-bottom-is-still-ground sense. Literally...physically... with full, commited specificity. Jagged rocks pressed into her back, a forty-foot drop yawning above her head, a destruction trail carved into the earth that documented exactly how she'd gotten here, and a body that by every reasonable law of physics should have been a smear across the mountainside.
Still breathing.
Stubbornly, still breathing.
She sat up with a gasp. Pain bloomed through every joint at once, sharp and total and she groaned, almost immediately, they began to recede. Like her body was correcting itself in real time. Like it was annoyed at her being damaged and was fixing it out of principle.
Where am I?
She looked around.
Then she looked down.
Then she sat very still for a moment, the way you go still when your brain needs a second to catch up with what the fuck was going on around you.
The hands in her laps were not her hands. The nails were long and perfectly shaped, not her usual sensible, cut-to-the-quick executive nails. The robes pooling around her were red silk, torn and filthy. She raised one hand slowly in front of her face and turned it over.
"Who am I?" she whispered to herself.
Was this ancient China?
As if the name of the country was the trigger word, her head split open, not literally, though it felt close. Thousands of images, voices, memories that were not hers exploded behind her eyes all at once.
She clutched her skull, doubling over, and whatever sound came out of her throat moved through stages she had no control over.
A laugh, loud and melodious in a way her real voice never was. Then tears, sudden and streaming. Then a scream of pure rage that bounced off the rock walls and came back to her like an echo of someone she didn't recognize.
She was no longer on earth.
If anyone had been watching, they'd have backed away slowly for fear of being attacked by her.
When it finally stopped, she sat in the quiet like the aftermath of an explosion. Blinking. Breathing.
"Fuck," she said softly. "I am absolutely cooked."
Lexiana had been a five-foot-six woman with sensible hair, a gym membership she used religiously, and the kind of discipline that came from years of turning stress into something productive.
Just the thought of it made her scoff in irritation.
Her gym membership was about to expire.
He didn't even let her use her gym membership before he killed her!
The body she now occupied was something else entirely. Now that she had all the memories of the previous owner, she perfectly knew who she was.
She became aware of her hair first. Silver, obscene amounts of it, pooled across the rocks around her like someone had spilled moonlight without apology. She'd had never had hair past her shoulders in her life. This fell to her waist and beyond, and somehow weighed nothing.
Pointed ears poked through the silver curtain, swiveling slightly at a distant sound before she had even consciously registered that there was a sound.
Then, she took a long, quiet moment with this one, the tails.
Nine of them, fanned out behind her across the broken earth like the universe's most impractical fashion choice.
How comical.
She stared at them. They stared back, fluffy and silver and utterly unbothered.
Fox, you are a fox, Lexianna.
A demoness, specifically. Of all the bodies to wake up to, Lexianna. You decided to wake up in a demonic fox body.
Lexianna turned her attention to the sky. Too many moons. Wrong shade of everything. Stars that moved with slow, deliberate intention, like they had somewhere to be. She catalogued her situation methodically, without sentiment, because she hates the word, Panic.
Broken ribs: present, healing fast. Disturbingly fast.
Poison in the bloodstream: present. Something cold and patient threading through her.
A pressure, dense and pulsing, bloomd from her ribs outward. Her breath caught and groaned.
"Ngh..."
She looked down. Through the torn red silk, dark, damp circles were spreading.
The smell hit her a second later. Sweet, sharp and tropical, so specific, so vivid, so completely out of place in this rock pit of rot and ruin that it almost made her laugh. She knew that smell.
Pineapple.
The kind she drank every single morning before walking into a room full of people who'd underestimated her.
I'm leaking, she realized, looking at her damp palm, her eyes wide and her breathing jagged. She was apparently lactating in a pit in a demon fox body, in a world with too many moons, with poison in her blood, and no HR department to report any of this to.
Who could even believe her.
"What in the... corporate hell... is this?"
She pressed a hand to her chest. The pain spiked, sharp and immediate and she groaned again. She pulled her hand back and her palm was wet.
It wasn't a trick of the eyes.
How the fuck am I lactating in the middle of nowhere without a freaking child?
She groaned from the pain, doubling over. Beads of sweat were gathering on her forehead. She was trying to calculate her next move, get up, find water, figure out the poison, deal with the lactating situation later, when a pebble skittered down the side of the pit.
Lexianna went completely still.
The ears she hadn't fully claimed yet pinned themselves flat against her skull. The instincts she'd inherited moved faster than her thoughts, dragging her attention upward to the ravine's edge before she'd consciously decided to look.
She tried to duck down, but she stopped from the blinding pain that pulsed in every socket of her joints, fresh blood spilled from the corner of her lips.
Shit, this body is too weak.
A figure stood at the edge of the ravine, silhouetted against the violet sky. He didn't climb down; he descended. Seven feet of lean, dark energy landing softly in the mud ten feet from where she sat like a collapsed, silver-haired, pineapple-scented catastrophe.
She recognized him immediately. Her memories supplied his name.
Prince Arkin. The Wolf of the Wastelands. The name the Fox Clan spoke of in terrified whispers.
Lexianna looked at him, he had black hair and eyes that were the color of dying star, the specific quality of stillness that only very dangerous people had, and felt something she hadn't been expecting.
Not fear.
Irritation.
She was bleeding, poisoned, leaking, sitting at the bottom of a cliff in someone else's body, and now she had a brooding demon in her immediate radius. Of all the things she didn't have time for today.
She'd dealt with men who looked exactly like this, beautiful and dangerous and absolutely certain of their own gravity, in boardrooms, in negotiations.
She knew the type.
What if he wants to eat me? a small, very reasonable part of her brain offered.
Arkin stood five feet away, unmoving. His nostrils flared. His head tilted, slow, deliberate, like a hound catching a scent and not yet deciding what to do with it. His eyes, cold and flat as a January morning, dropped to the damp spreading across her chest.
The air between them was thick. Death, rot, and pineapple. An objectively unhinged combination.
Something shifted in those cold eyes. Not warmth. Something darker than warmth. A hunger that didn't have anything to do with food.
He took one step forward.
She held her ground, because the alternative was admitting she couldn't stand without her joints staging a full revolt, and she was not doing that in front of him.
He leaned down and reached out one large hand toward her silver hair. His fingers stopped an inch short. She could see them trembling with the effort of stopping.
"You." His voice came out low and fractured, a vibration she felt in her back teeth.
"What are you?"
[A/N: Welcome to another Delicious book, grab your pineapple juice!]