I crashed on his planet. He found me in the wreckage. Claimed me as his bride. Now the most dangerous warlord in the jungle says I'm his. And his jungle agrees.

I'm Elena Parks. Trauma nurse. Engineer. I flew twenty survivors off a dying planet and kept us alive through a crash-landing on an alien world. Twenty women. Twenty different biomes. Twenty alien rulers who claimed us after we arrived. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Combat nurse and engineer Elena Parks survived the fall of New Terra. She crossed through space with nineteen other women and a single plan—build a colony where humanity could begin again. Then their shuttle goes down on Xytheos, a world ruled by genetically engineered warriors, and an ancient AI called the Concord Stone names the survivors Starfallen Brides. For the first time in a thousand years, the Stone summons the planet's twenty most powerful rulers to claim a mate. Elena is matched to Rythar, Warlord of the Green Reach, a male who commands the jungle itself and has never been beaten.

Rythar expected obedience. He gets a brilliant, stubborn woman who rejects the bond between them and refuses to be claimed. He could take her by force. Her defiance makes him choose something no ruler of the Green Reach has offered anyone else: patience. He will guard her and prove himself worth wanting, until she sees him as more than her captor. But Elena and Rythar are not alone on Xytheos. A rival wants them both dead, and the arrival of the human women has woken something far older than the warlords beneath the planet's fragile peace.

The harder Elena fights the pull between them, the clearer the danger becomes. The Starfallen Brides are bound to one another, and to powers that would rather see them silenced than understood. As the planet closes in around the women who fell from the stars, Elena has to decide how much she will risk for her friends, and Rythar has to decide what he is willing to burn to keep her. Because some bonds are worth burning worlds to protect.

Intended for adults age 18+. Contains on-page violence, captivity and possessive dynamics, and explicit sexual content (intimacy is enthusiastically consensual). Pregnancy occurs late in the book. Includes fertility and infertility themes.