Guarded: Claimed by the Alien Protector in War

The colony is gone. Elara Kane is the only one left standing - and Vorrak, an alien warlord with blood on his hands and territorial instincts that run bone-deep, has just made her his responsibility.

She didn't ask for his protection. She's getting it anyway.

His quarters on the outpost are close and guarded, the air carrying the faint metallic tang of the station's recycled oxygen. There's nowhere to go. Vorrak controls who enters, who leaves, and who survives long enough to try anything else. It's absolute. Suffocating. And Elara's body, caught in the grip of a biological bond she can't reason her way out of, keeps responding to him in ways she can't afford.

She knows what he is. Ruthless, possessive, shaped by an empire that runs on dominance and breeding programs. His world operates by rules she wants no part of.

But wanting no part of it and escaping it aren't the same thing.

Rival warlords keep testing his claim. Someone inside the outpost is working against him. The danger keeps tightening, and Vorrak's response to all of it is the same: hold the line, hold her closer, and let anyone who threatens her find out exactly what he's capable of.

What Elara didn't expect was the devotion underneath the violence. Or the way his protection starts to feel less like a cage and more like the only solid thing left in her life.

She can keep fighting the bond - or she can ask herself what, exactly, she'd be fighting toward.

***

Ruthless. Relentless. And now they want a mate.

The warlords of the Dark Dominion didn't arrive with offers or treaties. They came from the cold void between stars to take what they decided was theirs - women, territory, control. Human space is fractured under their grip, and the rules have changed completely.

Women are chosen, tested, bound. Not to men who whisper soft words, but to massive alien commanders who know conquest and little else. The fluorescent lights of processing centers hum overhead as lives get rerouted without consent.

But possession is a strange thing. It gets complicated. It shifts.

Under the iron and the intimidation, something else moves - a hunger that has nothing to do with war strategy and everything to do with one specific woman. Each warlord finds himself recalculating. Each bond rewrites something in him he didn't know was there.

This is the Dark Dominion Mates series. Every story starts with a claim and ends somewhere nobody predicted.

Defiance ignites it. Fear sharpens it. And what grows between captor and captive doesn't follow any rules either of them planned for.

Once the Dark Dominion marks you as theirs, the question isn't whether you'll stay - it's who you'll become once you stop fighting it.

© 2026 Velvet Ink Press (E-bog): 6610001197742

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E-bog: 8. april 2026