A novel about the one thing money can never buy... and the one thing we will destroy to possess.
When the wealthy and powerful Boyarina Marfa witnesses a simple shepherd's love for a peasant girl, something inside her snaps. She has everything—status, land, the power of life and death over her serfs—but she has never been loved. Not truly. Not the way Mitri loves Natasha.
Then Cleopatra comes to her in dreams.
The ancient Queen of the Nile, dead for fifteen hundred years, offers Marfa the secrets of seduction that once made men drown empires. Milk baths. Forbidden perfumes. The art of becoming a treasure locked in a fortress, a prize worth pursuing.
But when every lesson fails, when the shepherd chooses his simple love over his mistress's wealth, Cleopatra offers one final gift: a small, withered apple. The Apple of Knowledge. Eat it, and he will forget everything but you. His past. His love. His soul. All burned away.
Set against the brutal beauty of medieval Russia—where winter lasts half the year, where peasants jump over Kupala fires in search of love, and where a woman's loneliness can curdle into something monstrous—this is a story about the difference between loving and possessing. About the fire that consumes and the sun that gives life. About the price of wanting what is not yours.
For fans of Russian psychological fiction, dark historical romance, and stories where myth and reality intertwine.
