One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

It felt like drama of the vastest heights, his kiss the overture of all the greatest operas—the summit of every landscape’s peak, a rush of tides and fates and furies

when a kiss felt like this—like intoxication itself, like madness, so terribly impious and yet so purely, completely divine—it had to be stopped, and quickly, or else it would set fire to her every thought.

“I’m not here for a one-night stand, Sasha,” he told her. “The story we’re writing? It has chapters. Installments. I don’t want once.”

“I will always love you, I will love you until the day I die—and if you’re the one to kill me, then by all means, you should know without a trace of doubt that you will not have turned me away. I will have spent the final beat of my heart loving you, just as I always have. Only you, Masha,” he said, and she bent in anguish, resting her forehead against the still-sluggish motion of his chest while he gathered her in his arms, eternally hers. Even now, eternally familiar. “Only you, forever, I promise.”

“Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?”

His life’s purpose would be to create something that would be worthy of his eldest son.

“Then believe this, Masha: I choose you. I will always choose you.”

“Someday, Masha,” he murmured, “I will have done enough to give you everything you deserve, and perhaps then it will be enough to bring you back to me.”

Give me all of you, take everything of me, and let’s see who stands against us then.”

“I always knew you would be the death of me, Dima,” she managed to say, her voice delirious with gratification as she dragged the tips of her fingers to his mouth. “But still, didn’t you promise me forever?” Dimitri looked up at his father. His brother. Then Dimitri Fedorov looked down at Marya Antonova, watching her eyes flutter shut. Don’t you know we belong together, Masha? It’s inevitable. You might as well give in. “Don’t worry, Masha,” he said quietly, pulling her close, his hand still tight around the handle of the knife. “I would never make you go alone.”

“Sometimes an end is just a cleverly disguised beginning,”