Snaring the Huntress

In a far-future society governed by an Interstellar Council, Star is a respected Hunter, a judge empowered to pass sentence on offenders and to pursue and punish those who break the Council's laws. Ambitious and principled, she hopes to become the first of her kind to rise to the Supreme Court. When she is ordered to hunt down a rogue Jacian ambassador who has fled his mandated mating cycle, the law is unambiguous: the penalty for going rogue is death. Star intends a swift capture, but the man she is sent to find is Roark, who has deliberately abandoned his assigned partner because he wants Star instead, the very judge dispatched to destroy him. Complicating her resolve, Star has spent the past week haunted by vivid erotic dreams of a faceless lover, and when she confronts her quarry she recognizes the man from those dreams. What follows is an intensely sensual standoff between duty and desire, as the two indulge their mutual hunger across a single charged week, knowing that when it ends the law still demands Roark's life. The novella blends science-fiction premise with explicit erotic romance, weighing the cost of the law Star has built her identity around against the lover she was never supposed to want.