The Zhore Deception

She’s spent her whole life hiding what she is. Now they’re going to make her into something else entirely.


Trinity Knox has kept one secret since childhood: she can hear the thoughts of nearly everyone she meets. It’s a gift she learned to hide — until the one time she trusted a man with it, and he used her, robbed his employer through her, and handed her to the authorities to save himself.


Now she sits in a black-site interrogation room with no lawyer and no trial coming, facing a choice that isn’t one at all: vanish into the Consortium’s maximum-security prison on Titan, or let them remake her from the skin inward — surgically transformed into one of the Zhore, the hooded, secretive aliens no human has ever been permitted to see — and sent to walk unseen among them as a spy.


The Zhore are empaths; an ordinary agent would be exposed in an hour. But Trinity has spent her whole life reading minds while hiding her own, and she just might be able to pass. So she takes a stolen face to a world no human has ever set foot on, with one assignment: learn the secrets the Zhore have guarded for generations — and betray them.


What she doesn’t plan for is Zhandar, a grieving widower being pressed by his own people to love again out of duty, a man whose quiet, unbearable decency reaches something in her that no one’s lies ever touched. Every day she stays, the deception sinks deeper — into her skin, her mission, her heart — and every day, the danger grows that the Zhore will uncover the impostor among them.


Falling in love was never part of the plan. And the longer Trinity wears this face, the more she stands to lose: her cover, her conscience, and the last true thing she has left…herself.