Code of the Outcast - The Kyrennei Series, #4

When a masked gunman barges into a university acoustic-dynamics class and abducts Maya Gardener, she knows she has to fight for her life. But her supposed rescuers may want her dead and the kidnapper insists that the world as Maya knows it is a lie. It's present-day America and society is as dysfunctional as always. Democracy and even the "freedom to shop" is a sham. A powerful elite wields clandestine control over human will to maintain hegemony in every aspect of modern life. It's been that way for a thousand years, but today there are finally a handful of people who might possess the power to resist and to shield others.
if they only knew how. Maya isn't a fighter by nature, but the random chance of genetics chose her and now she'll have to learn to help herself and others. She was always an outsider-trapped in the borderlands between races, cultures and families. Now she's hunted through the biting cold of a Wisconsin winter, and the only thing that holds her body and soul together is her love for Kai Linden, the fierce-eyed musician and comp-sci major who claims there is one place she truly belongs. Kai, a twenty-year-old Meikan, is torn by grief after his parents are taken.
To safeguard the woman he loves, he must give up not only his innocent younger brother but also his place in Meikan society. Code of the Outcast is the fourth book in The Kyrennei Series. Reviewers recommend that readers read The Soul and the Seed (Book 1 of The Kyrennei Series) before this book in order to fully appreciate the world of the story.