Maya, a beautiful Russian ballerina, is pursued by the Russian mafia after they kill her husband, a successful American businessman, and financial documents worth hundreds of millions of dollars go missing. Maya is framed by corrupt cops and imprisoned, and then when she is due to be released, her daughter is kidnapped, and she must fight to save her life. However, those who seem to be her friends may really be her enemies...

Successful writer and scholar Jonathan Merrick falls under the spell of the irresistible, bewitchingly beautiful Ligeia. She's fighting a fatal illness and she will stop at nothing to defeat death, her one true enemy. She steals other people's souls and on her quest to immortality she tricks Jonathan into supporting her work, breaking him apart from his fiancé Rowena and pulling him into her dark, mysterious world. They settle down in an old manor by the Black Sea where Ligeia's everlasting presence slowly drives Jonathan to madness...