One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

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

“and let me have my secrets, too. Give me nothing. Deny me everything.”

Hate and love were really not so different, Ivan thought.

Both were intestinal, visceral. Both left scars, vestiges of pain. Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.

Give me all of you, take everything of me, and let’s see who stands against us then.”

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.

“This life is a thief, Sasha. It takes and takes, and then maybe you die or maybe you don’t. But either way, this life will try to leave you empty-handed unless you learn to strike first.”

You chose yourself over your father,” she clarified, aiming the blade at Roman before swinging it pointedly to Koschei, “and you chose one son over the other. You both chose, as I once chose, and now you’ve both known loss as I have known it, because neither of you can ever forget what you’ve done.”

When had Dimitri Fedorov known he loved Marya Antonova? He had known it like the voice of his soul, the sanctity of every prayer. With certainty equal to the changing of the seasons, borne on devotion as relentless as the tide. 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. She was in his blood, beating in his chest, racing against it. He felt the ache of her now, pressed flat against the bone of his sternum. With each moment since he’d begun racing to reach her, a fraction of her heart had shattered more, each sliver of shrapnel as much his doing as hers. As much his pain as it was hers.

He wondered if he shouldn’t have guessed it sooner, decades ago, that it would eventually come to this. Time seemed to run in circles, chasing its tail.

“Sometimes an end is just a cleverly disguised beginning,” he’d replied, seeing that he was someone who would know.

superstition.” Bryn rolled his eyes, annoyed all over again. “Imagine thinking something is cursed simply because others would die for it. What’s love, then?” His mother fixed him with her brightest smile. “Idiocy,” she said, “in its loveliest form.”

“Lev,” says Sasha, “if I were a better person, I’d say you deserve someone a little nicer.” “But since you’re not?” he prompts. She tilts her chin up for his kiss. “Since I’m not,” she agrees, “I’ll just keep on ruining your life.”

Sasha. Everything, and everywhere, and all the time, thinks Lev, who knows he is lucky to have earned a love of such agonizing softness.