A must-listen prequel novella in the Stolen Warriors series from USA Today bestselling author Ella Maven. Contains mature themes.

Worn down by war and conflict, Commander Artek and his brothers - the soldiers under his command - have chosen to start a new life on a backwater planet. As hard work and peaceful surroundings start to heal old wounds, he realizes that something - or rather someone - is missing from his new life. None of the human females in the small town on the other side of the mountains appeal to him except for the shopkeeper’s daughter. She’s smart, sensible - and disturbingly attractive despite her shapeless clothes and brusque manner.

The job is supposed to be easy. All I have to do is deliver a spaceship of living cargo to the vile Uldani and they'll release my brother. If I fail, they'll take it out on him. Except the cargo is something I've never seen before - human females. The one called Frankie is beautiful and soft, and I've already spilled blood for her. Now how am I going to save my brother? Because this human female is mine. 

Xenoanthropologist Kennedy Black loves exploring new cultures with Space Corps. Everyone in her life has left her, so she happily fills the void with exciting adventures. When she’s assigned to escort the new ambassador to the planet Oron for an opulent ball, she’s thrilled to get an up-close look at the Oronis knights and their culture of honor and duty to their knightqueen. But she never expected her reaction to cool, controlled Knightmaster Ashtin Caydor, head of the Oronis Knightforce.

As the first humans allowed in Suevan space, there’s a lot riding on my all-woman team. Earth desperately needs their tech, and I’m determined to prove we can negotiate the price. Without their planetary defense systems, Earth is a sitting duck, ripe for invasion. Except the Suevan culture is nothing like ours. When I take part in what I think is a welcoming ceremony, I leave with more than I bargained for: a husband. A mate. Apparently, we’re there to marry them as payment—something the top brass on Earth doesn’t bother denying. Fantastic.

My owner has grown tired of me. After months of living inside a filthy cage like a pet hamster, I’m returned to where the nightmare of my abduction began—the wall on a planet called Tirius—to be auctioned off like a piece of meat. Instead of being visual entertainment, I’m sold to a disgusting alien who makes no pretenses about his lecherous intentions toward me and the four other human women he’s strung together on a chain.

My name is Alice, and I live in the Bugpocalypse. I survived my first post-apocalyptic winter, and spring is here. That’s bad news! With warm weather comes the endless swarms of deadly bugs. I need to forage for food, but there’s just one little problem. Okay, so “little” isn’t the best word to describe the fierce Xarc’n warrior who is obsessed with me. Kaj’k is freakin’ huge! And his sharp claws, pointy fangs, and massive horns are scary. I reject his gift of food and flowers, but my massively muscled alien hunter doesn’t get the hint.

R'jaal has waited many turns of the seasons for his khui to resonate, only to be disappointed time and time again. But when he is taken captive by strange beings hiding in the very tunnels of the fruit caves, he wakes up to find himself in a strange underground cage. Also in the cage? A very pretty unfamiliar human female. She says her name is Rosalind. She makes his khui sing. It's finally his time. There's a big problem, though—Rosalind has no khui of her own. And if she doesn't get one soon, she could die.

Desperate to escape the clutches of the alien lizard mafia, I accept a spur-of-the-moment job offer on a distant planet. A monstrous, grumpy alien is building a new home in a distant colony, and he’s looking for an assistant. He needs me to hold his hammer. I get it. It’s a big hammer. He's a lonely barbarian brute with a gruff exterior, but I soon learn that inside, he's hiding a squishy center. When he unexpectedly enters his mating frenzy, there’s no one around to handle the job—except me. He gives me two options: return home or stay and help him with a whole different kind of nailing.

This cruise is the beginning of something amazing, and nothing is going to stop me from going. But when things go wrong shortly after departure, it’s clear I have made a mistake.

I thought getting a linguistics degree would land me a decent job, not get me shipped off to an alien planet ruled by barbarian warlords with tails. But that’s exactly what happens when my own government kidnaps me, along with a bunch of other women, and drops us on a brutal desert planet in the name of research. But the mission goes wrong. Because of course it does. 

On the unforgiving planet of Dakkar, I did what all the humans in our village did: kept my head down, worked to provide for my family, and certainly didn’t break any Dakkari laws to risk inciting the alien race’s merciless wrath. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for my brother, and one careless mistake brings a horde of the nomadic, barbarian Dakkari straight to our doorstep, led by their powerful horde king - a cold, ruthless, battle-scarred warrior demanding retribution.

When I caught my fiancé cheating on me with my best friend right before our wedding, I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong. It got a lot worse. Like, alien abduction worse. Now I’m being held captive by a tribe of fierce alien warriors with striped skin, piercings, and horns. But when the leader of an opposing tribe comes to their village for peace talks one day, he takes one look at me and everything changes.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. One minute Alice was camping, trying to connect with nature, then there’s this blinding white light. Gravity must have quit because Alice and her sleeping bag were floating off the ground. Classic alien abduction. She wakes up on an alien planet full of, you know, aliens. Outlaws. Rules are optional and people are property. So not cool. Then there’s a train robbery and she's getting abducted. Again. But this guy? He’s a giant lizard man, just a solid wall of muscle, scales, and bad attitude.

Sub-Captain Eve Traynor knows a suicide mission when she sees one. With deadly insectoid aliens threatening to invade Earth, the planet's only chance of survival is to get the attention of the fierce Eon Warriors. But the Eon want nothing to do with Earth, and Eve wants nothing to do with abducting War Commander Davion Thann-Eon off his warship. But when Earth's Space Corps threaten her sisters, Eve will do anything to keep them safe, even if it means she might not make it back.