Young St. Petersburg writer Sophie Domogatskaya, collecting material for her new genre novel, accidentally saves a seriously wounded man from robbers, who turns out to be the owner of a gambling house, a native of the slums, Mikhail Tumanov. They are uneven in everything and the feeling that flared up between them from the very beginning seems doomed. It is because of the connection with Mikhail that Sophie’s well-established life shatters into small pieces, like a broken mirror, it is because of him that she becomes involved in a long-standing and mysterious story with the theft from the mansion of the Meshchersky princes of the famous sapphire, known as the Eye of the Storm...