The year is 1987, when Ava Martel, a history aficionado, and her best friend Carri, set sail to explore the world. They are on a journey seeking adventure, but their endeavor is met with calamity, and it concludes the loss of everything and everyone she loves.

Ava inexplicably finds herself catapulted back in time to pre-revolutionary France where she discovers that her survival has come accompanied by new powers, ones that she cannot begin to fathom the repercussions of.

Here she meets Gabriel Chabot, a part-time smuggler and a full-time nobleman. On a windswept night, he drags her broken body off the beach and offers her a life and a love she never dreamed possible. As France hurtles headlong toward open war and the rise of the guillotine; Ava finds her life in peril and finds herself torn between the man she loves in the past and the future where she belongs.