The Fire Beneath The Frost

A Love Story Born In Silence

The fire beneath the frost never dies.

Leningrad, 1990. The Soviet Union is collapsing, and Petyr has spent his entire life learning to disappear—safe in the margins, invisible to a state that would destroy him. A loveless marriage to a woman. Factory work that demands nothing of his soul. Silence.

Then he meets Dimitri.

A war veteran haunted by Afghanistan, Dimitri carries danger in his silence and hunger in his guarded gaze. He's everything Petyr has learned to fear wanting: impossible, reckless, destined to be taken away. In a country where men like them are erased, punished, destroyed, desire is the most dangerous rebellion.

Their sanctuary is a hidden nightclub, where for stolen hours they can be themselves. Where Dimitri's touch is both tenderness and fury, where their fire burns hottest in the darkness.

But even in the shadows, nothing stays hidden forever.

What begins in Leningrad's shadows becomes separated by continents, decades, and the iron walls of survival. Petyr and Dimitri are torn apart by forces beyond their control—by empires collapsing, by fathers desperate to save their sons, by the cruel machinery of history that doesn't care about two men in love.

But fire doesn't extinguish. It only waits.

Decades later, in present-day New York City, two old men encounter each other again. And the moment their eyes meet, they know: some loves don't fade. Some loves don't compromise. Some loves burn just as fiercely at sixty as they did at twenty-five, waiting all those years to be reclaimed.

This is a story about what survives—across oceans, across time, across a lifetime of separation. About two men who were willing to lose everything to be free, and who finally, impossibly, find their way back to each other.