Lydia woke up caged, bound, and in pain. The last few hours were a blur to her, a mish-mash of sensory overload that left her head throbbing and her mind whirling incomprehensibly quick. There was very little that she could recall immediately – she knew she had been bound for a planet somewhere in Quadrant Eight, and that somewhere in the fray that had ensued in the middle of the deep, empty blackness of space, that she had hit her head when her small expedition shuttle had been intercepted by something most malevolent. She blinked her eyes, and her vision strained against an impossibly bright light that shone above her. Her throat was parched and dry when she tried to swallow and speak. It was a bit of groping that led her to realize that she was on the ground. When she tried to move, she then concluded that she was also chained up, an electromagnetic shackle bound tightly around her ankle. What the hell happened? AUTHOR’S This is a stand-alone story with an HEA, so no cliff-hangers! This story contains explicit love scenes and is intended for 18+ readers only.