Reese becomes a bitch

Cheating bitch Reese Chan is turned into an obedient pet!

The knock at the front door interrupted Reese Chan's deeply committed afternoon of doing absolutely nothing.

She'd been sprawled across her couch for hours, one arm thrown over her face, her black hair fanned out behind her like ink spilled across the cushions. Since the breakup with Caleb, the world outside her apartment had started to feel like something that happened to other people. She hadn't left in days. Her phone had seventeen unread texts she had no intention of answering. A solicitor at the door was the last thing she wanted to deal with.

Except they kept knocking. Escalating past polite persistence into something that rattled the frame.

Reese exhaled through her nose, peeled herself off the couch, and padded to the door in her oversized tee and leggings.

She didn't realize how unwelcome until she opened it.

"Caleb," she said flatly. Six feet of blond-haired, broad-shouldered genetic researcher stood on her doorstep looking sheepish and sorry and too handsome for his own good. "I thought I made myself perfectly clear when I dropped off your things."

"You did," Caleb said, holding up a hand. His blue eyes had that look, earnest, a little desperate. "I know. But my office keycard wasn't in the box, and I lost my backup copy this morning. The security team is already breathing down my neck. Could we just check the key drawer? I'll be gone in five minutes."

Reese pressed her lips together. She knew exactly how unforgiving his lab's security protocols were. People had been terminated for less, lost access cards meant compromised research, and his genome work was the kind of thing that made institutional lawyers sweat. She didn't want him back. But she didn't want him fired, either.

"Stay by the door," she said. "I'll look."

Caleb stepped inside and leaned against the closed door, arms folded across his chest. Even through his jacket she could see the line of his shoulders, the build that had surprised her when she'd first tagged him as a quiet science nerd. Her body remembered him in ways her mind was trying very hard to forget, the weight of him, the warmth, the way he'd always known exactly what she needed before she'd had to ask. A month of nothing made those memories louder than they had any right to be.

She turned away before her expression could betray her and walked back toward the kitchen.

She heard his footsteps half a second too late.

The jab hit the side of her neck, sharp, precise, clinical. Cold flooded from the injection site outward like someone had poured ice water directly into her bloodstream, spreading to her shoulder, her chest, her fingertips in seconds. Reese gasped and spun, but her feet tangled beneath her. She grabbed for the countertop and missed clean, her shoulder catching the cabinet edge as she went down hard, landing solidly on the tile floor.

Caleb stood above her with a syringe.

"What the fuck?" Reese pressed her palm to her neck, staring up at him. "What did you do? What is that?"

"What I had to do," he said. His voice was completely level. "They're cutting my funding. I needed proof of concept." He paused, tilting his head. "Who better than the woman who ended things without so much as a real conversation?"

"Caleb." Panic wrapped itself around her chest and squeezed. She'd never actually known the specifics of his research. He'd always deflected with a small smile, *you're better off not knowing, Reese*, and she'd let it go because she'd trusted him. "What was in that vial?"

"A little something I made." He let the syringe fall from his fingers. It clicked against the tile. "Perfect for you, specifically."

The cold had nearly claimed her entire body now. Her limbs felt heavy and distant, like they belonged to someone she was only watching. She tried to force herself upright, but her muscles responded with the reluctant sluggishness of someone waking from deep anesthesia. Her mouth felt wrong, too full, too crowded. She pressed her tongue against her teeth and found four points she didn't recognize, bracketing her jaw like ivory stakes.

She was still processing that when she looked at her hand.

A sound came out of her that she hadn't known she was capable of, a thin, high whine rising from the back of her throat. The nails on her right hand had gone thick and black, curving forward into unmistakable points. Even as she stared, they finished their sharpening and the tingling moved inward, crawling up her fingers as fine golden-brown hair sprouted from her knuckles, her hand, spreading up toward her wrist.

"There she is," Caleb said quietly.

"What—" The word came out mangled. Her tongue was wrong, too large, brushing against those new teeth. She clamped her mouth shut and tried again. "What are you doing to me?"

"Exactly what it looks like."

Reese tore her shirt off over her head with clumsy, shrinking fingers, then fought her leggings down past hips that were starting to angle differently, her spine pitching her forward without her permission. What she saw stopped her cold.

Cream and tawny fur covered her torso, dense and soft at her sides, finer across her stomach, a paler cream running up her sternum between her breasts, which remained stubbornly, achingly human above the fur line. Variable lengths, longer at her ribs and hips, shorter velvet fuzz along her forearms and thighs, and still spreading. Her palms had gone rough and dark, soft pads forming where skin had been. Same at the soles of her feet.

Her face pushed forward.

It wasn't dramatic all at once, it was incremental and horrifying, her nose widening and lifting, her jaw extending outward by degrees, the architecture of her face reshaping itself into a muzzle that was unmistakably canine and yet retained every trace of Reese Chan's sharp cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, now amber-dark and enormous above the tawny snout. She snapped her jaws once and listened to the clean, alarming click of her new teeth.

Her spine finished its rotation and dropped her to all fours. Her hips had reoriented entirely, shoulders broad and quadrupedal, and the new tail, silky, tawny-gold, curling over her lower back, pushed free with a sensation like popping a joint back into place.

She fixed her eyes on Caleb.

He made her like this. Stole her shape and her dignity and her hands with a single syringe and a month of cold resentment. The fury that rose in her chest was volcanic, and her lips pulled back over those new teeth in a snarl that built in her throat like an engine turning over, deep, genuine, promising.

She took a step toward him.

"Sit," Caleb said.

Her haunches hit the floor so fast her teeth clicked together.

The snarl evaporated. She sat there blinking, the command ringing through her like a bell, and no matter how hard she threw herself against the instruction it held her like a hand pressed flat to her chest. A confused, miserable whimper slipped out before she could stop it.

"You didn't really think I'd only change your body," Caleb said, crouching down to her eye level. His voice wasn't cruel, which was somehow worse. "That wouldn't be very thorough of me."

She tried to lunge. Her body didn't move.

"You're my girl now, Reese. My pet." He reached out and scratched behind her ear with two fingers, slow and deliberate. "You're going to be good for me, aren't you? Speak."

The bark ripped out of her before the thought could form. Sharp and clear and completely involuntary. Her tongue dropped forward past her snout and she began to pant, chest heaving, every remaining piece of her human mind screaming at the parts that were already settling into something warmer and simpler and impossible to fight.

*He's my master*, some new piece of her thought softly. *I should be good.*

"Good girl," Caleb said.

Reese's whole body clenched and shuddered, orgasm crashing through her like a wave she hadn't seen coming, sudden and total and humiliatingly powerful, wringing a howl from her throat that bounced off every wall in the kitchen. Her tail lashed, her legs spasmed against the tile, and the pleasure was so complete it erased language entirely for a long, hovering moment.

When it faded she lay there panting, cheek against the cool floor, amber eyes turned up to him.

"I kept you half and half on purpose," Caleb said, standing. He looked down at her with something that wasn't quite warmth and wasn't quite ownership and was somehow both. "Didn't feel right otherwise. But you, Reese, you're perfect like this."

She rolled to her back and showed him her belly without being asked.

---

He took her to the bedroom.

Not with force, he didn't need it. He simply said *come* and she followed at his heel, padding silently across the hardwood floor, tail curled high, the tawny fur along her spine rising slightly with each step as her heartbeat climbed. The amber eyes that had once made Caleb lose his train of thought in restaurants and meetings were fixed on him with an intensity that was pure and uncomplicated and devastating.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at her. Really looked, at the cream fur spilling over a woman's waist, at the full curves that hadn't changed at all, at Reese Chan's beautiful face elongated into that elegant tawny muzzle, her black hair somehow still falling behind her ears, the silky tail flicking with barely contained anticipation.

"Up," he said quietly.

She was on the bed in one smooth motion, settling her weight against him, and the sound that came out of her was a low, rolling whine, not fear, not anger, just need, open and uncomplicated and aimed entirely at him. He ran a hand from the back of her neck all the way down her spine to the base of her tail and she arched into it, hips lifting, a sharp yip escaping before she could muffle it in his shoulder.

Caleb pressed his lips to the top of her head. "Good girl."

She shuddered all over.

He laid her back against the pillows and she went easily, pliant and eager beneath his hands, the new muscles of her body warm and vibrating under the fur. When his mouth found her neck she tilted her chin up and bared her throat to him with a trust that was entirely animal, entirely honest. He could feel her pulse against his lips, quick, rhythmic, steadily climbing.

When his hand moved between her thighs she made a sound that was half-human moan and half something lower and more primal, her hips rocking forward against his palm before she could think to stop them. She couldn't think to stop them. The thinking part was losing ground by the second, replaced by a warm golden haze that smelled like him and felt like *yes* and asked nothing difficult.

"Stay still," he murmured.

Her hips stopped moving immediately. Her whole body went rigid with effort, holding herself exactly where he'd left her, panting, eyes half-lidded, the effort to obey and the desperation to move creating a tension that ratcheted through her with every second he made her wait. A bead of sweat tracked down her temple into her black hair.

He made her hold it for a long moment. Then he said, "good," and touched her, and she fell apart.

She howled, she couldn't help it, the sound tearing free from her chest like something uncaged, her tail slamming against the mattress as he worked her through it, not stopping, not relenting, drawing it out long past the point where she would have begged him to stop if she'd been capable of the sentence. Her claws caught the sheets and pulled, and she buried her snout in his neck and breathed him in with that new, profound sense of smell and what she found there, sweat and warmth and him, specifically him, sent a second wave rolling through her before the first had finished.

He settled her against his chest afterward, and she curled there the way she couldn't have explained two hours ago, pressed close and breathing hard, the fur on her sides rising and falling, tail thumping a slow rhythm against the sheets.

He scratched the back of her ear with two fingers.

Her leg twitched involuntarily and she let out a long, contented huff, almost a sigh, and the last thin thread of resistance still knotted somewhere behind her amber eyes quietly unknotted itself and drifted away.

*Good girl*, he'd called her.

And it was the truest thing she'd ever heard.