When a young lady from Earth falls deeply in love with a handsome stranger, she becomes a pawn in an interstellar war.

In the distant future, the Skolian Empire tips one third from the human galaxy, and is the most effective of all. For the ruling family gets the power of telepathy, and through it, the ability to communicate quicker than light, across interstellar space. But their most determined enemy, the traders, who flourish on human pain, have to interbreed having a Skolian to get their powers. And now they possess her.

Full of action, experience, space and time travel, and romance, this second installment in Catherine Asaro’s saga of the Skolian Empire is a gripping tale.