Page 1 of The Bride Contract (Princes of Xaavia #1)
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Chapter 1 - Niska
“I’ll do it.”
Lois and Jaya stop arguing long enough to turn toward me, one looking grateful, the other looking pissed.
“No. Nuh-uh,” Lois says, shaking her head, making her auburn curls bounce with the movement. “They’ll eat you alive in that place.”
My bunkmate has a flair for the dramatic, but she is the only one out of the three of us that has been sent to Star Pleasures Club before. It’s been maybe six months since we’ve been abducted from Earth, and purchased by the human slave trader, known as Mama Z’rykby. There used to be four of us here in our holding quarters, but Kaycee was bought a few weeks ago.
God, I hope she’s ok. We didn’t even get to say goodbye.
“Thank you for offering, Niska, but I’m the one who bit that… thing. So I should be the one to-”
“No,” I interrupt Jaya. It’s true that she’s the one who bit the hand of that… ‘customer’ who had come to see if he wanted to buy any of us, but it’s not like Lois and I wouldn’t have done the same. The guy was covered in spiny spikes and had the jowls of a St. Bernard dog, complete with strings of saliva that nearly touched the ground. “If she notices that you’re alright with going to a place like that, she might try to scan for your age again.”
Jaya sighs and tips her head back against the cold metal wall of our cell. “She’s going to figure it out sooner or later. She’s gonna wanna get her money’s worth out of me. You two can’t protect me forever.”
When we’d first been brought here, Jaya had been a shell of a person. Her anxiety attacks had ranged from being curled into a ball, to literally trying to pull out fistfuls of her hair, and banging her head against the wall. That’s when she wasn’t crying. Lois and I had managed to convince Mama Z’rykby, and her cricket-like husbands that Jaya is under-aged, telling them that there must be something wrong with their scanning systems. We insisted that she’s sixteen, and not the almost twenty-year-old she actually is. I don’t know what the age of consent is here in whatever armpit of space we find ourselves in, but it seemed to do the trick. Z’rykby has got this strange obsession with appearing like a caring, ‘ethical’ trader to set her apart from her competition here at Moon’s Rest Space Station. Which is weird, considering she is literally selling people into all kinds of slavery. I’m not sure you could get any more unethical than that.
Either way, selling an under-aged human would not look good for Z’rykby, so Jaya has been spared.
For now.
Honestly, Z’rykby has been too preoccupied lately with the fact that one of her beloved husbands went to go and retrieve some ‘fresh stock’ from one of the auctions, and never returned. She was so upset by this, she decided to eat two of her other husbands just for failing to comfort her.
This little slip up of Jaya’s when ‘Mr. Slobber’ had tried to touch her, might bring the slave trader’s attention back to her, and neither Lois nor I want that.
It turns out, the drooly guy is one of the owners of ‘Star Pleasures’, one of a few seedy clubs here at Moon’s Rest Station. Z’rykby sometimes sends girls there to work off her or her various husband’s tabs, but I’ve not experienced that ‘delight’ yet.
Lois had. It didn’t seem fair to let her go again in Jaya’s stead.
“Tock-tick, humans. I’m afraid this is the best I could do, but one of you has got to make it up to Master Joolyx.” Yix, Z’rykby’s nicest husband opens our tiny cell. He’d apparently negotiated Z’rykby down from just outright giving one of us to ‘Master Joolyx’ free of charge as an apology for the bite, to letting us work off the insult at his club. The giant, cricket-like man leans on the doorframe and taps at his watch - a human gadget he’d gotten from the black market. I’m pretty sure the thing was once a promotional Halloween giveaway since the orange strap is covered in black cats and bats with the words ‘Bonnie’s Candy Store’. But Yix is tickled pink by the novelty skeleton on the face of the watch, his bony arms acting as the hands of the clock.
“I’ll do it,” I reaffirm, giving Lois and Jaya a confident nod.
Yix stands up straighter, his antennae twitching. He takes a deep breath and wipes his forearm across one of his big, buggy eyes. “Make sure you stay away from the Yoxxarii in there, they are not looking for home servants or pleasure slaves.”
I step out of our cell and into the narrow, metal corridor, wincing from the garish brightness of the blue-white lights overhead. “What are they looking for?” I ask, following Yix out from the human sleeping quarters and into Mama Z’rykby’s storefront.
He glances over his shoulder at me, his bug-eyes unblinking. “They are looking for their next meal.”