Champion of Luna

Jody Lancer was ten when she understood that no one was coming to save her.

The ones who came for her came to harm her. Never to help. So she learned to sleep with a knife under her mattress and a pistol in her nightstand, and to check where the exits are in every room she walks into. Foster care taught her to move first and explain later, if there is a later.

Then a stranger walks into her locked apartment in the middle of the night and tells her, "I am not here to harm you."

Right.

Ezras Bonly, Crown Prince of the Luna, has known her name for two hundred years. When an alien ship comes to take her, he gets to her first, and he doesn't pretend it was anything but what it was. "I took you without your consent. I chose your anger over your death."

The Gods say she is his true mate. Ezras says she belongs only to herself.

Jody doesn't believe in fate, or princes, or love that asks for nothing. But her foster sister is alone in a cage on a ship between the stars; a dying world needs Earth's daughters; and the man she can't bring herself to trust keeps holding out his hand. He offers. He never demands.

He is the first one who ever came to save her. That may be the most frightening thing of all.

Champion of Luna is Book 2 of the Chronicles of Onus. Closed door. Happily ever after.