One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

“Dimitri Fedorov,” the woman said, a name that, from her lips, might have been equally threatening aimed across enemy lines or whispered between silken sheets. “You still know who I am, don’t you?”

From the time Sasha was little, she’d known two things with utter certainty: There were monsters, and then there was Masha, who kept them safe.

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.

This is the important thing, after all: nobody fears a beautiful woman. They revere her, worship her, sing praises to her—but nobody fears her, even when they should.

She wanted to kill him, to kiss him, to love him with her hands around his neck.

It wasn’t a total impossibility. Played correctly, Marya Antonova and Dimitri Fedorov had always been a match set to burn, perennially mere breaths from disaster—two people born as much to oppose each other as to be made for one another.

At best, Dimitri Fedorov was Marya Antonova’s greatest weakness. At worst, she was his.

Could he really taste so sweet, being her enemy? There was no doubt that he was, now and always, and maybe the scathing cosmic joke of it all was that instinctively, like muscle memory, she’d known it all along.

“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?” she asked him softly.

“I’m your enemy in the morning,” he whispered. Fair warning. His hand traced the shape of her scapula, fingers brushing the length of her spine and then curling upward, possessive. “I’m your enemy tonight,” she said, and kissed him again.

Lev felt the precipice of the moment like a chasm yawning beneath his feet.

He could admire the witch sitting before him and still cut her off at the knees if it meant he would win.

He wasn’t a villain. He was pretty sure of that. But holy fuck, he was weak.

Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.

People believe shadows represent darkness, but that isn’t technically true. For one thing, a shadow can’t exist without light. A shadow, which is itself a slice of darkness, can only be seen when light persists, which is to say it can only be seen in the context of something brighter.

She was soft and unbending, delicate and impossible in his hands. She was power, and powerful, and full of little intricacies that he felt with a sudden thrill of fear he’d never fully know because it would be like counting the stars, like naming grains of sand, and there could never possibly be enough time for any of it. He could feel all her little fissures, the cracklings of fury and desperation underneath, and he reached up to tug her hair loose, letting it fall gently around her shoulders with a rose-scented sigh, her lips parting slowly.

The kiss between them was another promise, the swearing of an oath. Her lips were sure and supple against his as he traced the iron notches of her spine, hands fitted around the perilous blades of her shoulders.

Marya Antonova was as mighty as a strike of lightning, and as difficult to hold. She was as captivating as fear, as undeniable as hunger, and he had loved her then—and loved her now—for all the tremor and the fury that she was.

He had known he loved her like he knew he would rise each day, like knowing his lungs would fill with each breath, like knowing he could bleed with every puncture. With motions as practiced as each step he took. He had loved her with the whole of his being, as if he’d been made to do it; as if he’d been crafted that way by some divine hand.