Part 3Snake Bride: My Husband’s Regret After Sending Me to the Island

When I didn’t respond, a flicker of pity crossed Alexis’s face, but it was gone as quickly as it came.

“Lock her in the karaoke lounge with the snakes,” he commanded his men. “Don’t let her out until she begs for forgiveness.”

They threw me into the glass-walled room, followed by the squirming bag. Alexis stood outside, arms crossed, confidently waiting for my screams.

It was true, I used to be terrified of snakes. Even after the scientists at the Serpent Isle Institute had slowly, painstakingly remade my body, the sight of a snake still made me tremble.

But then, to complete my conditioning, to make me forget I was ever human, they threw me into a pit. A pit with thousands of snakes and no other food. To survive, I had to hunt. To live, I had to become the predator. In that pit, it was kill or be killed, devour or be devoured.

After two months in the pit, snakes were no longer a source of fear. They were a source of food.

As I sank my teeth into a green viper, the reflection in the glass showed Alexis staggering back.

“Jenny, are you insane? What are you doing…?”

He didn’t understand. One small rat couldn’t possibly satisfy my hunger. This bag of colorful, writhing snakes was the greatest gift he could have given me.

While Alexis and my parents watched, their faces masks of pure horror, I tilted my head back and swallowed the thrashing serpent whole.

With a strangled cry, Alexis burst into the room. He tore the half-eaten snake from my hands and threw it aside, then pulled me into a desperate embrace. “That’s enough, Jenny. Stop it. Stop torturing yourself like this. Please, can we just stop?”

I didn’t understand why he was taking my food.

But the scientists at the Institute, desperate for funding, had pimped me out after my transformation. They made me service men with… special interests. I learned that to get food, to fill my belly, I had to make men happy.

I parted my lips, letting my forked tongue taste the air, and obediently knelt before him.

I tucked my hair behind my ears and reached for the buckle of his belt.

Disbelief warred with something else in his eyes. His voice was a raw, broken rasp. “Jenny… what did they teach you on that island? Have you forgotten who you are? You are an heiress of this family.”

He grabbed my hands, his face contorted in pain. “How can you use these hands—hands that have won national piano competitions, hands that are as graceful as a goddess’s—for something so degrading, so base?”

His knuckles were white from the force of his grip. I didn’t understand, I only knew that he was hurting me, so I pulled my hands away.

He was the one who sent me to this island. He was the one who allowed my body to be twisted into a shape that pleased others, my mind to be broken and remolded into that of a snake. Every part of me—my hands, my mouth, my body—had been forced to perform the most depraved acts just to survive.

And now, he was calling me cheap.

I stared at him, my gaze unwavering, and he couldn’t even meet my eyes.

He pressed his lips into a thin line. “Find out,” he snarled to the empty air. “Find out what the hell happened to my wife on that island!”

While we waited, he pulled me onto his lap, cradling my hands in his own, trying to warm them.

He didn’t know that my blood had been replaced. That I was a cold-blooded creature now. He could hold me forever and never make me warm.

Half an hour later, two of his bodyguards dragged the nanny who was supposed to have cared for me onto the yacht.

“I entrusted my wife’s well-being to you,” Alexis said, his voice dangerously low. “Perhaps you can explain to me why, in just six short months, she has become this… thing. Not quite human, not quite snake.”

The nanny trembled uncontrollably.