One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Many things are not what they appear to be. Some things, though, try harder.

And they were right; Koschei did not want customers. At least, not the kind of customer who was looking for him on Yelp.

The Fedorov sons had a habit of standing like the points of an isosceles triangle.

“Tell Koschei that Baba Yaga sends her love,” she said simply. Translation: Your move.

He might have been handsome, she thought, if he weren’t so ruthlessly irritating; as it was, she had to stifle a general need to shove him down several rows of the theater-style chairs.

We can’t curse all the men in the world, can we?” “Not in a single day, at least,”

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.

No one would ever know the assassination of Dimitri Fedorov had been ordered by the cherub-cheeked manufacturer of overpriced hand soaps.

she knew enough (and had certainly been warned by her older sisters six times over) to know that 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.

“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.”

“You really are impossible.” “I’m actually extremely easy,” he informed her regretfully, heading to the door. “I just want this more than you think I do.”

“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.”

To believe in destiny, one must also believe in succession. If the world is ruled by predetermination, then it must also be ordered, measured, paced out from first to last:

“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?”

“Sashenka,” Marya said, “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.”

“Sometimes, Masha, my eyes open and I know, somewhere in my bones, that I have formed myself to the shape of waking up beside you.

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. She was fantasy incarnate, and she had chosen him.

“Five minutes,” the man warned, “and then I’m coming after you.” “Well, knock first. That’s just polite.”

“Be well, Dima,” he said to his brother, wherever he was. “Keep him in line, Masha.” He either imagined a nod, or felt it. Then Lev Fedorov turned, half smiling, and let his feet carry him down the sidewalk, traveling the newness of his path.