Britannia, 161 AD. Teyla has a plan. Marcus Varro is not part of it.
When she drags a Roman centurion off his horse and ties him to her hearthpost, the Red Daughters' leader expects leverage. What she gets is a man who fixes her roof without being asked, argues engineering at her in fluent Latin, and absolutely refuses to behave like a prisoner.
Marcus has spent his career building things that last for an empire that increasingly doesn't deserve him. He did not calculate for this - for her, for a snow-locked hillfort, for the specific disaster of wanting someone who would cheerfully start a war to be rid of him.
The blizzard keeps them close. The Legion is coming. And the line between captor and something far more dangerous has long since stopped being a line at all.
Because sometimes the most tactically unsound decision is the right one.
Red Daughters - Book One