Bought By the Cerberus (Monsters’ Bride Market #3)

Prologue

Alia Terra

Welcome to the bride market! Monsters bid, you choose.

This is a spin-off series to Arranged Monster Mates. We’re back on Alia Terra with steamy stories told by your favorite paranormal romance authors: Eva Brandt, Lia Frost, Cara Wylde, and Ava York.

No one remembers the world before the Shift. It was thousands of years ago, all lost, all forgotten. Scientists and historians say that before, the world was better, brighter, and our planet belonged to us, humans. There were proud countries and bustling cities, and technology was at its peak.

We can hardly imagine all that. There is no proof, no written texts, no pictures of Alia Terra before the Shift. All we know is the face of Alia Terra now. The land haphazardly divided into territories, the walled cities, the poor living on the fringes, barely surviving.

The monsters.

The temples where young maidens can take a DNA test and be matched to one of them. Being owned by a monster is often the only way a woman can save herself or give her family a chance to not starve.

But for women who are not maidens, or whose blood never found a match, there is another path.

The bride market offers a desperate chance.

Here, women pay a small sum to enter a public auction.

Monsters bid, but in the end, it is the bride’s choice.

Will she go with the highest bidder, or will she choose the less monstrous?

This is Alia Terra. Their world, more than ours.

In the aftermath of the Shift, when the pyres of the old world burned out, the sheer weight of death settled upon the land.

In the territory that might have once been called Greece, the world itself tore open.

A wound in reality bled pure death energy, forming a dark lake and a toxic ring of land around it. The Blighted Lands.

It is said the deity Thanatos heard the echo of so many endings, and he answered. A divine trade was struck. The price was the immeasurable energy from all those Shift deaths. In exchange for this price, a new existence was granted his blessing.

From the world before, they came. The Moirae, three ancient weavers of fate, and Charon, the silent ferryman.

Upon an island in the lake, the Moirae set up their Loom.

They created a city of dark stone and memory.

They lined its streets with ghostly asphodel flowers and named the city Asphodelia in their honor.

They wove new forms of life, monstrous beings born not of flesh, but of this new form of energy.

It is a city where death is not an end, but the very source of life, a reality sustained by a divine artifact. It is a place where ordinary, mortal life cannot survive. Only the death-touched, those humans already marked by a final tragedy, can find a true home there.

For most, Asphodelia is a dark legend. For a desperate few, it is the only destination left.