Ella Stevens never knew a mother's love. Her fierce independence was the keystone of her whole identity-unfettered by romantic involvements or family demands-until the day she moved to Germany and her world began to unravel. There, she discovered the terrible secret her mother died to protect. There, she stumbled onto a hidden time portal that took her to 1620 Heidelberg where the brutal realities of life were not restricted to just the poor and the infirm. Fighting to survive in a world she's ill-equipped to understand let alone function, Ella is befriended by a convent of nuns who stand on the executioner's block of one of the bloodiest butchers in all of Europe: the Warlord Krüger. Determined to help her new friends, Ella, with the aid of a very sexy United States Marshal, learns the hard way that when it comes to the things that really matter-love, trust and friendship-sometimes the truth is the least important thing of all.