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:
How far would you go for the one you love?
