Reincarnated as a Villainous Beast-Girl, I Captivate Everyone

A warm tongue circled her n****e. A hand slipped beneath Lyra Moon's hide skirt, fingers pushing into the hidden place between her thighs, moving in and out with quick, deliberate strokes. The fingertips carried light calluses. When they grazed the most sensitive spot, they slowed on purpose, tracing the contours of her innermost depths as if committing them to memory. "Mm..." A tingling rush shot up from the base of her spine. Lyra shuddered, and her eyes finally opened all the way. The first thing she saw was a head of silver-grey hair falling to the shoulders. Its owner knelt at her side. Across the bronze-toned back, crisscrossing whip wounds split deep, carving flesh into something grotesque. The fresh cuts were still seeping. Blood trailed down along his body and dripped onto the short hide skirt he wore, yet the hand beneath her skirt never stopped. "You..." Lyra's voice came out hoarse and ragged, stripped of any authority. Kael Frostbane raised his dark-red eyes. The gaze that landed on her face was cold and full of hate. The motion of his fingers grew heavier. His fingertips pressed against a particular spot and ground down with a slow, deliberate twist, pushing Lyra's body over the edge. Her back arched sharply off the surface beneath her. She bit down hard on her lower lip, just barely swallowing the moan that tried to escape. Kael tilted his head slightly. His gaze dropped to the leather whip in Lyra's hand, and the faintest cold smile curved his lips. Contempt filled his chest even as the words left his mouth, "Princess, why so fast today? That's not like you at all." The moment those words reached her, a sharp pain tore through Lyra's skull. Memories crashed in like a wave, one after another. She finally remembered. She was already dead. One moment she had been an office worker who collapsed from overwork and died at her desk. The next, her consciousness had been ripped free of the modern world and dragged into the otherworld that existed inside a novel she had once read. She had taken over the body of the story's villainess, a woman who shared her exact name. In this world, women were called female shifters and men were called male shifters. They each possessed two forms: human form and beast form. Beast shifters were divided into seven ranks according to their strength, beginning at red rank and ascending through orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet rank. And this villainess had a father, the strongest man in any tribe, a violet-rank shifter. Wanting nothing but the best for his daughter, her father had, the moment Lyra came of age, forcibly seized five powerful male warriors and compelled them to form the ancient mate bond with her, sealing the mate mark. Once the mate bond was sealed, the bonded males were rendered incapable of harming their female shifter. They were bound to obey her every command. Yet this villainess had never spared a glance of genuine feeling for the husbands who had been forced upon her. She never treated them as mates. They were toys, nothing more, objects for her to vent her desires and temper on. Day after day she found new and crueler methods to torment them. Lyra's gaze moved to the silver-haired male kneeling before her. She had read his story. His name was Kael. His beast form was a white serpent shifter carrying lethal venom. He had been flogged and abused by Lyra without mercy, and his hatred for her ran bone-deep. After Lyra's father died, he and Lyra broke the mate mark. In the later part of the novel, once he was free, he would subject the powerless Lyra to brutal torture, snapping her fingers one by one. The thought sent a tremor through Lyra's entire body. The leather whip slipped from her grip and cracked against the floor. Kael went very still. His dark-red pupils contracted. In the past, if he paused during his service to Lyra, or dared to speak out of turn, this vicious woman would only raise the whip harder, or snatch up a charred wooden rod and press the burning end into his skin. But now she had let go of it? He stared at her, the cold smile still fixed on his mouth. "What new game are you playing now..." "Don't speak." Lyra cut him off. Her chest heaved. She forced herself to think. According to the plot, her father would not return from this journey. He was already gone. And once he was dead, these five men, pushed past every limit she had ever tested, would rise against her together. They would cut the mate marks from their own chests, even knowing it might kill them. But they would not die. They would survive. And then they would tear her apart and destroy her in ways a hundred times crueler than anything she had ever done to them. Lyra's fingertips went cold. She remembered the scene described in the novel. Her fingers broken one by one, the bones ground to splinters. Crushed into nothing, alive, in agony and despair. No. She could not die like that. Lyra forced herself to meet those dark-red eyes directly. She kept her voice as steady as she could manage. "Get up." Kael did not move. He only raised an eyebrow, the mockery in his gaze deepening. "What's this, then? A new way to torment me? Dissatisfied with the service I just gave you?" He tilted his chin up. The mate mark on his chest stood out in sharp relief, the dark violet mark like a shackle branded into his skin. It was the only reason he could not raise a hand against Lyra. Lyra drew a slow breath and turned toward the bamboo basket sitting in the corner of the stone hut. Dried herbs were piled inside, traded for by her father from the tribe. The Lyra of the novel had never once used good healing herbs on any of them. She preferred the poisonous herbs instead. They offered a kind of treatment, yes, but the real pleasure came from watching the men writhe and howl on the ground. Lyra searched through the basket for something to stop the bleeding and spoke without turning around. "Your wounds need to be treated. I won't..." "Don't bother." Kael interrupted her and rose slowly to his feet. His tall shadow fell over her, heavy with pressure. "Save your tricks," he said, his voice low and flat. "Don't pretend to care about me. You're probably waiting to jam a wooden rod into my wounds the moment I let my guard down. Or maybe you've already thought of something worse." Lyra's hand froze in midair, the blood-staunching herb still clutched between her fingers. She understood something then. The original Lyra had played this game before, more than once. She would soften her manner and let them lower their guard, then hurt them all the harder for it. The cruelty was the point. The false kindness only made the wound deeper. Everything this body had done to them had been burned into their bones like a brand. Every scar, every burn mark, was a testament to the violence she had inflicted. Whatever she did now, even dropping the whip, even reaching for herbs, would not read as goodwill to Kael. It would only look like the beginning of something worse. At that moment, footsteps sounded outside the stone hut. Three figures appeared at the entrance, all of them fixing Lyra with the same ice-cold stare. At the front was Serion Crane, his silver-white hair falling loose along his shoulders. He was a crane shifter and a priest, someone who should have been as clean and untouched as snow. But his face was drawn with exhaustion, and burn scars covered his body, each one pressed into his skin by a red-hot wooden rod, one mark at a time, by the Lyra of the novel. Behind Serion stood a red-haired man. His name was Caelan Fox. He was a red fox shifter. The face beneath that red hair should have been striking, its lines soft, its features fine, carrying the sly and alluring quality particular to fox-kind. But a knife scar had ruined it. The mark began at the outer corner of his right eye and dragged downward at an angle, clinging to his face like a centipede. When he saw Lyra, a smile rose to his lips. It was a beautiful smile. It made her spine go cold. Then the last man stepped inside. He was tall and broad, black hair damp and plastered to his forehead. His bare torso was a map of knife scars and whip marks. His name was Asher Leonhart. He was a lion shifter. Lyra looked around the room. Four men. Every one of them bearing scars she had left behind. Burns, cuts, welts from the whip. Those marks were like words carved into their bodies, each one telling the same story: what this woman had done to them, slowly, methodically, pushing them to the very edge of death. Something clenched around Lyra's heart and would not let go. She could barely breathe. All four of them were tall. All four of them were strikingly handsome. In another place, another time, she might have felt her face grow warm, might have felt something stir. But right now, Lyra felt nothing close to that. All she felt was danger. Five mates. Four were already standing in front of her. One was missing. "Where is Nereus?" Lyra asked. The air inside the cave dropped several degrees the instant the words left her mouth. "Forgotten already?" Caelan said pleasantly. "You said it yourself yesterday. You wanted to see what would happen if you pulled the scales off a merfolk shifter one by one and buried him in the sand. You had us carry him up the mountain and put him in the ground." The pain of having one's scales torn away, for a member of the merfolk, was worse than death. The scales were part of their body. Pulling them off one by one was like peeling back a person's fingernails, then stripping the skin away layer by layer beneath. Lyra's body shook before she could stop it. She remembered what the novel had described. Once Nereus was free of the bond's restraint, he would use a blade to flay every inch of skin from Lyra's body, making her suffer the same agony he had endured. Lyra forced the fear down. She looked up at Kael, her neck stiff with the effort. "Kael, go and bring Nereus back. I have something to say to all of you." "Lyra." Kael stepped closer. The smell of blood drifted forward with him. Those vertical pupils tightened to a point, the way a serpent's eyes fix on prey it is about to kill. "Tormenting us one by one isn't enough for you anymore? Now you want all five at once?" Lyra's fingertips were trembling. But she did not step back. "Let's make a deal." She held Kael's gaze without flinching. "Agree to my terms, and I will break the mate bond with all of you."