Flora Whitmore, a beautiful intelligent Connecticut university student, who lives with her family in New Haven. She seems to have it all: a promising medical career and a bright future. She meets a co-student, Mbeki, and falls in love with him. Despite the Whitmore are against her relationship with him, Flora has married Mbeki. A new husband who takes her to his native Africa to start a new life. Without warning, the man of her dreams turns into the worst nightmare - he sells her as a slave to settle a family debt. Beaten and raped by a new, brutal master Meneliki - Flora is traded on the slave market, and ends up on a ship - captured by the Somali pirates. Flora fights for her freedom against Abdullahi and those pirates with the help of a fellow captive, a French doctor Jean-Luc Cartier, with whom she discovers true love as they struggle to stay alive.