Seventeen-year-old Aeliana Lucia Gratius is the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Pompeii, and has always accepted the fact that she will be married to the man her father chooses, regardless of her own feelings. But a chance meeting with Cyprian, a poor city guard, causes her to question everything she was brought up to believe. As the two grow ever closer, she is visited by one of the Fates, a goddess named Pretia, who delivers an ultimatum: give up her love and marry the man her father chose—a quick-tempered and old-fashioned merchant the same age as her father—or lose the only home she has ever known to the power of Vesuvius. Nearly two thousand years later, Aeliana is alive and well, posing as seventeen-year-old Ella Young in a small high school, the only survivor of the destruction of Pompeii. Alone, she carries the knowledge and guilt that her selfish choice—to flee the city with Cyprian and abandon her home to the mercy of the gods—resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Until one night when Pretia returns to her and offers an impossible opportunity: travel back in time to Pompeii and prevent the eruption from ever happening. In a race against the clock, Ella is forced to revisit a home she never expected to see again, caught in the midst of a dilemma that ultimately pits love against fate.