Dimitri had first told Marya Antonova he loved her when he was thirteen years old. She’d been shading her eyes from the sun, giving him her narrowed, impatient look (at fourteen she was older, worldlier, more experienced), but he hadn’t dropped his gaze from hers, fearless, taking power from the sun’s rays and tilting his chin up to say the words without hesitation: Marya Antonova, I’m in love with you. You don’t know anything about love, Dimitri Fedorov, she’d told him, and it had made him love her that much more fiercely. He was a Fedorov, the son of Koschei. He was the son of a very great
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