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.

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

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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 man, and someday he would be a great man himself, and only one woman would ever be fit to stand beside him. Only one woman was ever bigger and more alive than he was.

“No.” Dimitri’s voice was audibly final. “You can’t have her, Roma. You won’t take her from me twice.”

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