The Refugee Ruse

The empire is falling. For a deserter and a con artist, that collapse might be the only way out.


Captain Landon Beck has given the Gaian Consortium ten years he never meant to give. So when the empire begins to crumble and scavengers overrun his remote prison station, he sees his chance to take back his life: let them think he died in the attack, slip away in a stolen shuttle, and vanish into whatever rises from the wreckage.


The plan does not include a prisoner. But Dhani Warlow — a small-time grifter caught running a con just to stay alive — doesn’t belong in a cell, and some stubborn, inconvenient streak of decency won’t let Landon leave her to the pirates closing in. So he takes her with him, and the two of them run for Iradia, one of the first worlds to throw off the Consortium’s chains.


The trouble is, a fugitive officer and an escaped convict can’t stroll through a spaceport unnoticed. But deception is the one thing Dhani has never lacked — and with a stolen name, a borrowed gown, and the nerve to pass herself off as the daughter of Gaia’s richest oligarch, she can buy them cover and time. As long as no one looks too closely…and no one learns that Captain Beck is supposed to be a dead man.


As the Consortium’s crimes spill across the galaxy and world after world rises in revolt, an honorable man who’s finished lying for a corrupt government and a woman who lies for a living limp from system to system toward a freedom that keeps slipping out of reach — each learning to trust the one person with every reason to turn them in.


But the dying empire isn’t done with them yet. And in a galaxy coming apart at the seams, the safest place either of them has ever known might just be each other’s arms — if they live long enough to get there.


Note: This is the final book in this SFR series. Although each book has a standalone romance, the events going on in the background have built toward what we see in The Refugee Ruse, which is the looming collapse of the Consortium’s star empire.