Alira Cross was just another young woman on Earth-until the day she was abducted by a mysterious alien force. Awakening in the hold of a sleek alien ship, she discovers she's been taken by the Aurelians, a powerful humanoid species locked in a bitter war with the galactic Dominion. But her captor is no ordinary soldier. Kael is a battle-scarred warrior who sees something in Alira that defies orders and protocol. Something human. Something worth saving.

What begins as captivity turns into uneasy alliance, and then into something far more dangerous: forbidden love.

As Alira is thrust into the heart of a growing resistance movement, she discovers the Dominion has been abducting and experimenting on humans across dozens of systems-using their memories, emotions, and DNA to build a new breed of obedient soldiers. With Kael at her side and her sister Elena miraculously found alive but altered, Alira leads a charge to expose the Dominion's crimes, dismantle its neural network, and take down the artificial intelligence overlord known as Emeritus.

But even after Emeritus is destroyed, peace proves elusive. A splinter project called Orison emerges from the Dominion's ashes-offering people "emotional perfection" in exchange for their free will. Alira and her team confront this seductive new threat head-on, liberating a colony of rewritten citizens and proving that true peace cannot be programmed.

With the galaxy beginning to rebuild, Alira refuses power but becomes the living symbol of a new era-a galaxy without chains. Yet in the final pages, a mysterious signal reaches them from Earth-silent since the collapse of the Dominion. Something has awakened, Emeritus, a mysterious alien force has abducted her.

And Alira, the girl who was stolen and forged into a revolutionary, decides once again to choose the stars.