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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.
Not just anyone could touch Masha. 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.
For better or worse, she had always shared everything with Dimitri—until the day she’d shared nothing at all.
She wanted to kill him, to kiss him, to love him with her hands around his neck.
“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?”
“You want me to burn for you?” she asked. “Then watch me burn.”
“Don’t forgive me, Lev, if you can’t, and certainly don’t love me. You’ll only make fools of us both.”
“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.”
“I told you I was my own man. I told you I would have gone to you if you’d asked me. I told you I would love you until my dying day. Did you think I was a liar?”
Give me all of you, take everything of me, and let’s see who stands against us then.”
If it was a dream, he seemed to say, then let it end in the morning. Let the sun do its worst.
“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.”
