Ling Shuang, an agent with China's Ministry of State Security, assumes the identity of Lin Wan, a Chinese-Russian woman, and infiltrates the inner circle of Russian oligarch Andrei to steal secrets about Project Polaris. In the skyscrapers of Moscow, she uses a gentle facade to hide a blade, but he loses control when she spills champagne. This girl, whose Russian carries a Northeastern Chinese accent, cracks open his frozen world.
The smell of pickled-cabbage noodles during a late-night shift makes her eyes water from the spice. By the fireplace in a snowbound mountain villa, he kisses away her tears, unaware that her fountain pen conceals poison. When her agent credentials land before him, Andrei roars, "Were all those embraces just an act?"
In Crimea's gilded cage, surveillance footage records her resolve as she carves into her wrist, and also captures his obsessive tears in the dead of night. But when an assassin pulls the trigger, he shields her with his body. Shrapnel tears through the donor tattoo on his back, the Nightingale mark he got to save her younger brother. "This time, it's not a mission. It's us."
From a blade drawn from its sheath to a Chinese knot left behind in Red Square, from lies to redemption, this cross-border love will finally reach its sharp-edged ending beneath the aurora.
