Two lives, fated to interact in some violent way. That was the prediction that Richard Shawcross had been raised believing. He had learned that he and an unknown lady from a French Family would encounter each other in a violent situation in her twentieth year. That encounter would be the means of saving each other; but from what, had not been disclosed. Richard had forgotten all about the prophecy made at his birth, when he had briefly returned from the Continent and fighting Napoleon. That same night, on his way home for just the one night, he had blundered upon a robbery. Three men were striving to rob an older gentleman and his passenger; a young lady, until he had ridden out of the fog with his saber drawn and had summarily dealt with them. After the carriage and its passengers had gone, their rescuer discovered a strange talisman threaded on a green ribbon on the ground. The young lady had lost it. The coin matched one about his own neck, and exactly matched another that his older sister had also been given. They were all part of that same prophecy from many years earlier. Then, two years later, another fate intervenes. In an act of revenge upon one villainous family, for what has happened to his sister, he kidnaps the daughter of the family from her bed in the dead of night. When he confronts her with the reality of her circumstance and what is to be her fate at his hands, she responds in a way that astounds him. This was not the person he had expected to be faced with, but someone else altogether. He begins to recognize that he must rapidly re-evaluate what his options are to save her from the situation that now faces them both. However, the matter is taken from his hands when a knife wound she had inflicted upon him overcomes him and strands them both in a remote mansion; she, knowing little of what has happened to bring about her violent abduction, and he, lying unconscious on the floor and likely to die without her assistance.