St. Petersburg, 1795. The glittering capital of Catherine the Great-a city of palatial wealth and abject poverty, where a single misstep can cost a life and a single glance can change a destiny.
Katya is nineteen years old, a floor-washer in the Winter Palace. Orphaned, illiterate, with nothing but her mother's river-pearl necklace and hands raw from lye, she expects nothing from life but more of the same: endless floors, endless servitude, endless invisibility.
Until the night a fortune-teller comes to the servants' hall.
The cards speak of a tower struck by lightning, a moon shrouded in deceit, and two lovers destined to walk on knives. Katya laughs-until she looks up and sees him standing in the doorway.
Baron Karl von Kleist is the Prussian envoy to the Russian court: brilliant, cultured, married to a woman he does not love. He has spent twenty years building a career, a reputation, a life of cold calculation. He has never once looked at a servant as anything but furniture.
But when his eyes meet Katya's across a candlelit room, something cracks inside him. Something he cannot name. Something he cannot control.
What begins as a stolen glance becomes a secret meeting in a moonlit garden. A kiss on a callused hand becomes a duel in a snow-covered forest. A forbidden love becomes a desperate flight across borders-and a choice that will cost them everything.
But in a world where nobles scheme and empresses watch, where Counts hunger for revenge and the Secret Chancellery hunts for spies, can a German baron and a Russian peasant build a life together? Can love survive the weight of empire?
Based on the timeless themes of passion, sacrifice, and the eternal power of the human heart, Love Upon Knives is a sweeping historical romance that asks the oldest question of all:
