The Mandala Maneuver

She built a wall of ice around her heart. He can feel exactly what’s behind it.


They call Ambassador Alexa Craig “the Ice Queen,” and she’s earned it — cool, controlled, untouchable, with a career built on letting nothing show and no one in. So when a routine flight seats her beside Ambassador Lirzhan of the enigmatic Zhore, a race so private no outsider has ever glimpsed the face beneath their heavy robes, she expects nothing but a few hours of polite silence.


Then something impossible tears their ship out of subspace and blows it apart, stranding them both on Mandala — a wild, beautiful world that isn’t supposed to be inhabited at all.


With no way home and only each other to trust, they have to survive until rescue comes. But Lirzhan is hiding something. His people are empaths, and from the moment he met her, he has felt what Alexa hides from everyone: the warmth, the loneliness, the fierce heart beneath the frost. The Zhore have a word for a bond like this — sayara — a once-in-a-lifetime resonance his kind was never meant to share with a human. He knows what she is to him. He simply doesn’t dare say it.


As Alexa's defenses begin to thaw, the two of them uncover the reason someone wanted them dead: a secret buried in Mandala’s wilderness that breaks every treaty holding the galaxy together, a secret that powerful people will kill to keep hidden. Now duty and desire pull them in opposite directions, rescue may be as dangerous as abandonment, and an Ice Queen and the alien who sees straight through her must decide what they’ll risk…for the truth, and for each other.