One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

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.

So she tucked her smile into her palm until she could covet it freely later, disappearing around the corner and compelling herself not to look back.

My daughters are diamonds, Yaga so often said. Nothing is more beautiful. Nothing shines brighter. And most importantly, nothing will break them.

She was full of sharp edges; always a pointy little thing, a rose lined with thorns. Nobody got close to Masha unless she had already let them.

“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.”

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

“Dima,” she said again, and his grip on her tightened. “Dima, I swear,” she confessed to his chest in a whisper, “this love I have for you will be the death of me.”

Sasha I swear to fucking god nobody will ever hurt you, I will never, ever, let anyone hurt you, I won’t let them touch you, I’ll burn the world down myself before anyone ever lays a hand on you

“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.

His world had stopped for her, and hers for him. At least for now. Until the sun rose, and everything changed.

if I can only have you as a fire, Sasha, as a flame of what you are, then I want you to burn for me. Do you understand?

Is it too soon to love you, Sasha? Lev had asked her the night before, holding her in his arms between episodes of reprehensible choices; between moments of passion equally inadvisable and undeniable, all of which would surely haunt her for the rest of her life.

“I will love you even when I wrong you, and for that—for everything—I’m so fucking sorry.”

he only heard her voice, a solitary strand in the midst of his furious pulse, like a solemn whisper in the night.

What exactly is your connection to Marya Antonova, Dimitri Fedorov?” She is my entire soul, Dimitri didn’t say. “We knew each other once.”

“you are not incomplete because a piece of your heart is gone. You are you, an entire whole, all on your own. If you have loved and been loved, then you can only be richer for it—you don’t become a smaller version of yourself simply because what you once had is gone.”

my eyes open and I know, somewhere in my bones, that I have formed myself to the shape of waking up beside you. Sometimes I smell your perfume on a breeze and wonder how it’s possible that I still know the scent of you so well. Sometimes I wake up with the taste of you on my lips,”

“You gave me your heart, Marya Antonova, and I will keep it safe until my dying day,” Dimitri promised, and took her free hand gently, placing it against his chest. If he only ever made her one vow, it would be this one. “I’ll keep it safe,” he swore, his pulse and hers in synchronicity, in truth beneath her palm, “and in return, you’ll have my heart, forever, until someone cuts it out of my fucking chest.”

“I would burn down the world for this love, Dima,”

When he opened his eyes again, she was smiling down at him, mean and victorious and cruelly beautiful, and she was everything, everything he had ever loved. She was the sun, the moon, and the stars.

He had been her warmth, Marya thought, so that she could remain cold. She hadn’t forgotten that.

To touch Marya Antonova was to grasp a strike of lightning.

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.

“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.”

“The past is nothing. We are everything.”

Now that he held her, though, he remembered the truth: that 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.

“I keep my word,” he rasped against her mouth, and his kiss was a pulse of strange familiarity; a strike of dull impossibility; a moment that folded over itself in time to bring her a glimpse of perfect synchronicity, newness and repetition all at once.

“Let tomorrow come tomorrow,” he told her. “Tonight, I want tonight.”

blood was never as beautiful as sacrifice prescribed. In reality it was carnal and human and real, and for that, it was everything he’d always sworn he’d give up for her. It was life itself, and death; it was forever, and so were they—and briefly, with the last of her strength, Marya managed to smile.

“Imagine thinking something is cursed simply because others would die for it. What’s love, then?”