Monsters treasure, p.1
Monsters' Treasure, page 1
part #3 of Rescued by the Monsters Series
Monsters' Treasure: A Why Choose Monster Romance
Book Three in the Rescued by the Monsters Reverse Harem Series
Alana Khan
Temptation of the Horizontal LLC
Copyright
Monsters' Treasure: Book Three in the Rescued by the Monsters Reverse Harem Romance Series by Alana Khan
St. Petersburg, FL 33709
www.alanakhan.com
Copyright © 2023 Alana Khan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by an information storage retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious and products of the author’s imagination. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or inferred and are entirely coincidental.
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Cover by Cameron Kamenicky
Contents
Trope Warning:
Episode One: Time to Go
Episode Two: Banished Down Below
Episode Three: Not What I Expected
Episode Four: How to Keep Her Alive
Episode Five: Consent
Episode Six: Mate Bond
Episode Seven: We Should Talk
Episode Eight: The Proposal
Episode Nine: The Hunt
Episode Ten: Ruin Our Lives
Episode Eleven: Humanity
Episode Twelve: Take Me Home
Episode Thirteen: The Game
Episode Fourteen: Highlight of My Life
Episode Fifteen: Hurry!
Episode Sixteen: A New Game
Episode Seventeen: Be Who We Want
Episode Eighteen: Love
Episode Nineteen: The Pinnacle
Episode Twenty: Rendezvous
Episode Twenty-One: Choices
Episode Twenty-Two: Insect-Man
Episode Twenty-Three: Green Giant
Episode Twenty-Four: Dhar
Episode Twenty-Five: Thinning the Herd
Episode Twenty-Six: Pegasus? Or is it a Flying Centaur?
Episode Twenty-Seven: The Two of Us
Episode Twenty-Eight: Alone Together
Episode Twenty-Nine: The Bath
Episode Thirty: Beg for More
Episode Thirty-One: Pierced
Episode Thirty-Two: The Smell of Affection
Episode Thirty-Three: Many Ways to Share
Episode Thirty-Four: Still Want to Go Through With This?
Episode Thirty-Five: The Third Mate
Episode Thirty-Six: How to Soothe Her
Episode Thirty-Seven: Three Mates
Episode Thirty-Eight: Such a Good Pack
Episode Thirty-Nine: Aftermath
Episode Forty: Here’s What You’re Going to Do
Episode Forty-One: The Lie
Episode Forty-Two: We’re All Going to Die
Episode Forty-Three: Build a Fucking Army
Episode Forty-Four: Flight Plan
Episode Forty-Five: The First Leg of the Trip
Episode Forty-Six: Another Apology
Episode Forty-Seven: Story of Loss
Episode Forty-Eight: Change of Heart
Episode Forty-Nine: Don’t Move
Episode Fifty: Robbery and… Abduction?
Episode Fifty-One: Discussion
Episode Fifty-Two: The Promise
Episode Fifty-Three: The Layout
Episode Fifty-Four: Journey Home
Episode Fifty-Five: The Cataclysm
Episode Fifty-Six: The Two of Us
Episode Fifty-Seven: Shared Pleasure
Episode Fifty-Eight: Homecoming
Episode Fifty-Nine: Do I Have to Do This Myself?
Episode Sixty: Whatever They Want
Episode Sixty-One: It’s All Good
Episode Sixty-Two: Big News
Episode Sixty-Three: Epilogue
Dear Reader & FREE Offers
Sneak peek: Monsters' Gift: Book Four
Many Thanks
About Alana Khan
Other Titles
Trope Warning:
This book is about a dystopian future that contains genetic alterations to humans. It is about three men and a woman who love each other in all ways.
There are references to dubious consent and an interrupted sexual assault.
Episode One: Time to Go
Nadira
“The senator wishes to see you in the breakfast room,” my wrist-comm informs me. “Immediately.”
At least he doesn’t want me in the bedroom. I guess that’s the point, though, isn’t it?
My thirty-sixth birthday is coming up, and it’s no secret he’s been shopping around for a younger wife to replace me. It doesn’t come as a surprise. I was his fourth wife. He doesn’t want a woman who’s anywhere close to forty.
I’ve been watching the parade of young girls he’s brought to our home since shortly after our marriage when I was eighteen. He’s never tried to hide it. Just as my father never tried to hide the same behavior from my mother.
That’s the way it’s done Up Above. Women are just something to be used, traded, and bartered. Agreeing to my marriage to a sixty-year-old senator got my father a fatter bank account that allowed him to move higher in Tower One. That earned my father more power, which helped him make even more money.
Only married women are allowed to have children.
The senator is one of the most powerful men in the Up Above. He didn't need daughters nor did he want to share his wealth with a son until the end of his life when he would use his DNA to clone himself. He kept all his wives on the pill that prevents pregnancy. Marriage was a way he bestowed favor on the men below him. He liked my father. I guess he found someone else with a daughter he likes more.
I was just a pawn, as are all women.
I put on one of the diaphanous pastel gowns he allows me to wear. It might as well be made of tissue paper it’s so thin. These see-through sleeping gowns are the only clothes, in fact, the only things, I own.
This one is the palest pink. I think it looks terrible against my red hair. That’s why I chose this one. I stopped trying to look pretty to seduce him years ago. He still hasn’t admitted to himself that the frequent loss of his fragile erections has less to do with his bed partner and more to do with his age.
Even though I’m not allowed out of our apartment, I hate being forced to wear clothes that leave nothing to the imagination. All the men coming and going get a good look at me. My husband the senator has never bothered to protect me from their leers, although he would kill me if any of them raped me. It would be my fault, at least in his eyes. Heaven forbid someone sullies his property without his approval.
He could only be summoning me for one of two possibilities. He might accuse me of something I didn’t do so he can punish me. That’s a daily occurrence, though, and is usually handled impersonally when my wrist comm tells me, a grown woman, I must stand in the corner. The other option is to inform me he’s replacing me with someone younger and plans to send me to the Punishment Tower.
The Punishment Tower. I shiver when I think about it. Of course, I know little about it, only what I’ve heard from the hired help. Who knows where they get their information?
I believe some of it, though. With a name like the Punishment Tower, it isn’t hard to believe the tales of abuse, or that screams can be heard all the way to the Down Below at any time of the day or night.
“Nadira,” he says when I reach the doorway. He doesn’t bid me enter, certainly doesn’t offer me a seat at the breakfast table, so I stand at attention, which is his rule.
His new head of security, Armstrong, is sitting with him, lounging with his booted foot across his knee, not even trying to hide his superior sneer. Yes, Armstrong, I get it. Born somewhere on the lowest three floors of this tower, you’ve worked your way up in the world to be breakfasting with a senator.
Let’s not mention how you managed that by your penchant for doing his dirty work without ever asking a question or breathing a word. So, yes, you’re supping with this century’s version of royalty and I’m standing, barely clothed, like a supplicant in my husband’s house.
Armstrong is casually looking me up and down from his deep-set, insolent brown eyes. That’s more than I can say for the senator. He’s fiddling with his computer pad, ignoring us both. I arrange my features to look submissive, stupid, and fearful. Just how men in the Up Above like it.
Finally, he sniffs like he smells something rotten, looks at me as if he’s forgotten I’ve been standing here for long minutes under his brutish hired man’s scrutiny, and says, “I’m in need of a younger wife.”
The only thing shocking about this statement is that it surprises me. I’ve known this was coming since the day I got here. For months, I’ve assumed this day was fast approaching. That it sends a bolt of fear up my spine is the only unexpected thing about it.
“I’d planned to send you to the Punishment Tower, but,” he gla nces down at his computer pad and shakes his head, “I’m informed they have no room.” He looks at Armstrong with a conspiratorial grin and says, “Must be a lot of misbehaving women out there.”
Armstrong laughs as if it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, then glances at me out of the corner of his eye. He knows something I don’t about what’s coming next. I’m not going to like it, which thrills him so much I imagine his dick is hard under his paramilitary camouflage pants.
Although the remains on his plate suggest he’s eaten his fill already this morning, my husband reaches the silver tongs toward the tray of pastries and makes a show of selecting the best morsel, then places it on his plate.
Since I’m only fed when he allows it, and I haven’t had anything to eat in more than a day, it’s quite obvious he’s enjoying his little torment.
There are only two choices for a wife when she grows too old: the Punishment Tower or death. Perhaps it’s because I’m ready for either of those outcomes that I’m thinking about the delicious-looking cheese Danish rather than what’s going to become of me.
I’m ready for death. If I were a more courageous woman, I would have found a way to kill myself long ago.
Too bad I’m a coward.
“With the Punishment Tower off the table, I’m in a bind. Your soft-hearted father drove a hard bargain when he sold you to me. He made me agree not to kill you when the time came. Made me promise the Tower instead.”
He shrugs as if he were a coquettish, sixteen-year-old girl instead of a seventy-eight-year-old bastard, then sips his coffee. He’s not going to eat that pastry. It was just a prop.
“I was discussing my quandary with Armstrong here when he offered me a third choice. It’s quite the solution. Tell her.” He lifts his chin to his head of security to give him the floor.
“We just made one of the senator’s other problems disappear by sending her Down Below. It seemed to do the trick, although when my predecessor went to retrieve little Alliana, the hover was set upon by mutants. It’s a shame, but at least the senator had me trained and ready to fill Bleeker’s boots.”
The smile he flashes belongs on an animal, a jackal perhaps. His eyes are dead.
It’s not surprising that while Bleeker’s fate is mentioned there’s not a whisper about poor little Alliana being set upon by monsters.
“You’ll be transported Down Below so the senator can keep his word to your father—”
My husband interrupts, his hand in the air. “My word is my bond.” So fucking sanctimonious.
“And he can make room for his new wife.”
The head of security stands and says, “Time to go,” without even looking at me. “I’ll see you in a few hours, senator.”
Episode Two: Banished Down Below
Nadira
As we hover Down Below, I keep my breathing steady, my gaze out the front viewscreen, and my back straight. I learned at an early age to reveal nothing. Showing emotions never fails to get me in trouble.
Women are nothing more than money and status machines for their fathers. Most families contain one son to carry on the family name—and shepherd generations of accumulated wealth—and as many daughters as possible. It’s a free resource. Create as many daughters as you can and sell them to garner money and status. It costs next to nothing to feed and clothe them. We’re all kept far too slender and given only these ridiculously thin gowns to wear.
I’ve grown so full of hate at the way things are, I’ll be better off when I’m finally dead.
Although that thought has been in my mind since I was young, facing the impending hour of my death is still terrifying. I wipe my sweaty palms on my gown as I shift in my seat, not wanting Armstrong to know prickles of fear are racing along my veins.
Maybe it would have been better if my father hadn’t extracted the senator’s promise not to kill me. What kind of world do we live in that forcing your daughter’s future husband to promise not to kill her is the most fatherly thing that man ever did?
Death by the senator would be far preferable to what he’s sentenced me to, though. Hundreds of years ago, we’d polluted our planet to the point it was killing everyone. That’s when enormous towers were built to house the rich.
The wealthiest, most powerful people lived on the top floors. Those with lower income and status were housed toward the bottom. Before anyone moved in, though, they realized they needed to bring some of the lower classes in. Who would clean their floors and serve their food and be their bodyguards?
Some poor people were allowed in, and in the intervening centuries, this system of buying women became one of the most useful currencies to move up the food chain in the Up Above.
Down Below was so befouled that the inhabitants mutated somewhere along the line, although I’ve heard more nefarious explanations for how the cataclysm happened.
I’ve heard rumors about what awaits me Down Below, but the rumor mill is short on facts. One word that comes up repeatedly has certainly lodged in my mind. Monsters.
Although I know little, I don’t have to know more than what I was told in the breakfast room. Alliana went Down Below for a two-week punishment and didn’t return. Even the powerful armed guards sent to retrieve her didn’t come back. That tells me all I need to know.
“Still full of arrogance?” Armstrong accuses as we leave Tower One behind and descend toward Earth.
I don’t need to glance at him to know his lip is curled into a sneer.
“Senator Quarren gave no instructions about your treatment other than I was to take you Down Below and leave you. You’re crazy if you think, even for a minute, that you could flaunt your body in front of me and not get what you deserve.”
He scrubs his mouth with his palm as he contemplates. “You may be too old for your husband, but you’re still ripe enough for me. That old bastard doesn’t pay me well enough for me to buy a nice piece of ass like you. Just once I’d like to see how the other half lives.”
I count my breaths, keeping the inhalations and exhalations measured. I don’t want him to see my rising panic.
“When we set down on that forsaken dead planet, I’m going to stick it to you in every hole, over and over, until I can’t get it up anymore. Then I’m going to leave you to the monsters.”
His rape threats barely register. What could he possibly dish out that I haven’t had to endure since I reached the age of consent at age sixteen and was given away like a party favor by my father, and then for the past eighteen years by my husband?
It’s the threats of mutants and monsters that chills the blood in my veins. I pray they kill me fast.
I glance at Armstrong. He’s a bastard. They all are, but some of them hide their baser tendencies. This man never bothered.
It strikes me that if I fight him, he’ll kill me. I heard his instructions myself. My husband gave him free rein. I’d rather be killed by Armstrong than torn to bits by whatever monsters inhabit the Down Below.
If I get to make one decision in my life, let it be how I die.
Episode Three: Not What I Expected
Nadira
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this beautiful wilderness we’re flying over. Beneath the thick canopy of tall trees are green bushes turning yellow, orange, and crimson. I’ve seen this on vids. They call it autumn.
What I’m seeing doesn’t fit with the tales we were told about air thick with pollution, and a planet so contaminated the people turned into monsters. Maybe all of that was a lie to give more power to the rulers Up Above.
Armstrong sets our hover down in a meadow surrounded by trees. My mind wanders to the plot of a dozen vids I’ve watched where people used to go outdoors whenever they wanted. They went on picnics and breathed fresh air. As I goad Armstrong into killing me, I’ll think about how pretty it is down here. It will be soothing.
But first, there’s Armstrong to contend with.
“Okay, Miss High and Mighty. I like the chase. Run. I’m going to catch you.” I hazard a glance at him. His expression is the most feral I’ve seen except on an animal.
Taking him at his word, I fling the door open and run, heedless of the direction. I have no shoes and only this ridiculous see-through gown.
