One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

“Are you cold?” she asked him, and he cleared his throat. “Freezing,” he assured her, and she nodded gravely, reaching up to brush her charmed fingers across his lips. She waited for a moment, drawing the tip of her index finger back and forth along the line of his mouth, until finally his lips parted, his breath warm and tinged with a smoky hint of whisky. “This,” he said, her fingers still hovering above his lips, “is what they call mixed messages, Sasha.” She blinked, startled, and drew her hand away. “Right.” She exhaled. “Right, of course, sorry, I was just, I wasn’t—” “Oh, hell,” Lev rumbled softly, and before Sasha could respond, he had pulled her into him, wrapping one arm around her waist to slide his free hand beneath her jaw, tilting her face up toward his. He leaned close, pausing a matter of breaths from her lips, and then he stayed there, his nose poised delicately alongside hers. She felt his swift exhalation like a breeze against her cheek, the pounding of his heart visible beneath the line of his throat. The implication was clear; he’d come as close as he was going to. He’d come close enough to imagine her, to taste the proximity of her in the air between them, but no closer—that was up to her. She paused for a moment in the stillness, in the paralysis between motions, in the cliff edge between what was and what could be, and for a pulse or two of time she simply luxuriated there, feeling the warmth of his breath against her lips and thinking, foolishly, t...

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 am not afraid,” Masha had said, and Marya knew it to be true. She and her daughter were one soul in two bodies, and that was how she eventually built an empire.

Marya understood. There would never be another love for Masha like the one she’d had for Dima, and rightly so. That love had made her soft, and like her mother, Masha endured no softness.

“Well, better terrible,” Marya assured her, rising to her feet. “It’s the wonderful ones you have to watch out for.”

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

“Why didn’t you let me choose you?” he asked hoarsely. “I would have gone to you, Masha, if you’d asked. You would’ve only had to ask, and I would have chosen you over everything.”

“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.”

“Twelve years I’ve been without you and done nothing but lose myself.

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.”

“This will be complicated,” he warned her, though it was meant to remind them both. “Oh, definitely,” she agreed. “We really shouldn’t do it,” he said, as she tilted her head up, brushing her lips against his. “No,” she said, “we really shouldn’t.” “Fuck,” he sighed, feeling the last of his already highly compromised reservations give way. “But we’re going to, aren’t we?” “Yes, Lev,” she confirmed, reaching up to tangle her fingers in his hair. “Yes, we definitely are.”

She only asked him questions if she required an answer; she didn’t trap him into conversation, as other people were prone to

Before that night, Dimitri Fedorov would have given his life to hold Marya Antonova again, even for one last time. Had he known that doing so would cost her life, though, he would have gladly sent her away.

He could see the razor edge of a narrow sword, a blade that had burst from her heart, and before it was gruesome it was beautiful; surreal. As if she’d cracked open her own ribs just to give her heart to him, destroyed herself just to prove her love to him, and in the moment before he realized, before he understood what happened, he knew like all their lives unlived that no curse had ever been truer. That however certain their doom, they would have only said yes, yes, yes.

“Power isn’t given, Dima,” he said. “Power is taken.

Don’t you know we belong together? It’s inevitable. You might as well give in.

LEV: this story we’re writing sasha LEV: it’s going to be epic LEV: that, or a disaster

Dimitri was frustratingly easy to love, after all, and Roman loved him as everyone else loved him—with helpless reverence, and with genuine awe.

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.

“You’re my brother, and that’s the worst part.”

“I won’t give you up, Romik, but that’s it,” Dimitri said. “I’m keeping you from death, not letting you live. There’s a difference.”

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

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. Maybe the hilarity had always been in ever thinking she could have him, and now it curdled in her throat, the acidity of a mirthless laugh.

“Don’t be a gentleman right now.” She pronounced the word gentleman like idiot. “We might not have time for an entire book.” “Don’t say that,” he managed, mouth dry. “Please don’t say that.” Sasha leaned forward, lips against his cheek. “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.

“I want you,” he murmured, twining her fingers with his, “and you have me so easily, without lifting a finger. But don’t use me.”

“If it were me, Sasha, I’d want to strike down everything in my path, just like this, so believe me, I understand—but 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.

“You want me to burn for you?” she asked. “Then watch me burn.”

“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.

If she had been in his place, would one kiss, one collision, have been enough to rearrange her stars?

He had betrayed Marya Antonova despite the minor possibility that he had loved her.

“Whatever choices you make, Lev, just be sure you can live with them.”

She’d found the blur of his morality amusing.

waist. “Don’t forgive me, Lev, if you can’t, and certainly don’t love me. You’ll only make fools of us both.”

“I do love you. I will love you.” He laughed again, hoarsely this time. “I will love you even when I wrong you, and for that—for everything—I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Lev,” she spat after him. “Lev, you’re heading for a fucking trap!” “I fell in love with you, didn’t I, Sasha Antonova?” His laugh, the set of her jaw, they both said I love you, it’s over, we’re doomed. “I was always going to be trapped.”

He could empty Roman’s veins, let them drain onto the floor below. He could whisper something, a few words, and cause a clot in Roman’s brain. He could slam Roman’s head backward into concrete, into smithereens. He could stop Roman’s heart, stop Roman’s breath, stop everything and watch as vacancy inevitably set itself in Roman’s eyes, like the deadness in Marya’s. In Masha’s. And then Roman would be like Masha, and would be nothing, and gone from Ivan’s sight.

And now Ivan was letting him go. The anger Stas had not permitted himself to feel about the loss of his wife flooded through him in a rush, draining him of his cooler senses and igniting his pain like a burst, a throb of grief. It was sharp and unopening, knives that tore up from his limbs, and he shoved Ivan aside to bring himself face-to-face with Marya’s murderer, gritting his teeth in anguish. In loss.

Lev closed his eyes, pressing a kiss to the tips of her fingers. “I’ll find you, Sasha,” he said, and felt himself swallowed up by sightless, endless volumes of nothing, of everything, as if he’d merely drifted off to sleep. III. 18

(This one is not for you, he knew, but please, please, may I borrow her from someone else’s fate? May I have her until her stars change, or mine? May I worship her until I die, and may I give her all of me, for better or worse, or worse, or surely worse?)

“My youngest daughter sought restitution for my Masha’s death,” Yaga said, and though Koschei was not a man to flinch, he almost couldn’t breathe for hearing it. Her Masha. To lose his Dima would be to cut the lungs out of his chest and she knew it, must have known it. “One of your sons,” she added as if she could read his thoughts, “owed it to her.”

She is my entire soul,

“You and I, we’re not just one of many. We are parts of an indivisible whole. If

“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.”

“Each time we bid farewell to a piece of ourselves we become different than we were. But each time we rise again in the morning, it’s a victory,”

reminded him. “Ergo, my obligation to be helpful is highly dependent

“Every piece of you, body and soul, remembers what it is to love me, don’t they? Whether your heart is in your chest or not. I know you do, because I do,”