Melissa Emerald
The Bride Contract
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Copyright © 2025 by Melissa Emerald
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Melissa Emerald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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First edition
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Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1. Chapter 1 - Niska
2. Chapter 2 - Niska
3. Chapter 3 - Niska
4. Chapter 4 - Niska
5. Chapter 5 - Kiahn
6. Chapter 6 - Niska
7. Chapter 7 - Niska
8. Chapter 8 - Kiahn
9. Chapter 9 - Niska
10. Chapter 10 - Niska
11. Chapter 11 - Niska
12. Chapter 12 - Kiahn
13. Chapter 13 - Niska
14. Chapter 14 - Niska
15. Chapter 15 - Kiahn
16. Chapter 16 - Niska
17. Chapter 17 - Niska
18. Chapter 18 - Kiahn
19. Chapter 19 - Niska
20. Chapter 20 - Kiahn
21. Chapter 21 - Niska
22. Chapter 22 - Niska
23. Chapter 23 - Kiahn
24. Chapter 24 - Niska
25. Chapter 25 - Kiahn
26. Chapter 26 - Niska
27. Chapter 27 - Niska
28. Chapter 28 - Kiahn
29. Chapter 29 - Niska
30. Chapter 30 - Kiahn
31. Chapter 31 - Kiahn
32. Chapter 32 - Niska
33. Chapter 33 - Kiahn
34. Chapter 34 - Niska
35. EPILOGUE - Niska
36. EPILOGUE - Kiahn
About the Author
Also by Melissa Emerald
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Foreword
This is the first in an interconnected series that WILL converge with my Fated Mates of the Winged Barbarians Series. You do not need to have read that series to enjoy this book, but it will flesh out the world so much more - and you might catch some Easter Eggs I’ve dropped here and there! Enjoy!
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Acknowledgments
With thanks to Gina E A (Editing and Assistance) for helping get this book out into the world! Contact her on [email protected]
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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.
