One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Lev had a keen sense of danger, and he was certain it had just walked in the room.

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

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“We are only witches, Dima. Not gods.”

“This baby is named Lev,” Dimitri reminded his father, holding the child out for Koschei as Roman looked on, rigid with apprehension, and their father kept his hard gaze turned away. “He is called Lev, as Mama asked for him to be. Lyova, like a lion. I’m this lion’s brother. I will protect him with my life, Papa, but I am not his mother, and I am not his father. If you will only be his father for me,” Dimitri pleaded, “then I will be his brother. If you will not fail him, Papa, then neither will I.”

At best, Dimitri Fedorov was Marya Antonova’s greatest weakness. At worst, she was his.

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

“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?”

“I don’t want your anger,” he said. She recoiled, irritated, though he didn’t release her hand. “What do you want, then?” she said. “My grief? Is that it?” “If it’s real, yes,”

“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.

“Don’t you dare die, Lev Fedorov,” she snarled, her voice as nightmarish as always. “Don’t you dare. Not yet, Lev, not yet. We were supposed to have more time,” she gasped, pressing her forehead to his. “We were supposed to have a book, Lev, you promised me a long story—and for fuck’s sake, you idiot, you owe me, you can’t die while I’m furious with you—while I—” She choked slightly, anguished. “You can’t die while I haven’t told you how I—how I feel, Lev, fuck!”

“I’ll find you, Sasha,”

“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.”

“Your hair is getting long again,” he murmured. “It’s almost like it was when you loved me.”

Hate and love were really not so different,

hate and love were so very similar. 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.

“Dima,” she said softly. “You know Stas never took your place.” He swallowed, saying nothing. “How could he?” she pressed him. “You were all I ever wanted. From the day you told me you loved me, there has never been anyone else.”

He marveled that for him, she could be crime and punishment both; vice and virtue all at once.

“Dimitri Fedorov, I already gave you my useless heart. Now, have everything else that matters. Have my loyalty, my right hand. Have everything that was once my mother’s,” Marya offered fiercely, “and give me everything you once swore to Koschei. Give me all of you, take everything of me, and let’s see who stands against us then.”

“I’ve loved you through so much distance it seems strange to hold you now,” he said quietly. “Like something could so easily take you from me.”

The kiss between them was another promise, the swearing of an oath.

“You’re not real,” she said, voice muffled. “You can’t be.”

“If you just found out the love of your life was alive,” Lev ventured slowly, “what would you do?”

“Listen, I always knew we were a long story,” he told her neutrally, “but I think I underestimated it. Can you imagine, love after death? Even I couldn’t have guessed that. And I really am an optimist.”

“Tell me what I said to you.” He reached out to brush her hair back from her face, fingers soft and inconceivably corporeal. “What was the last thing I said to you, Sasha?” She shivered. His palm kissed her cheek fleetingly, gently, while he savored her with a glance, scouring her face like something precious, lost and found. “You said,” she began, and swallowed. “You said, ‘I’ll find you, Sasha.’” “Yes. I said I would find you.”

The world had looked so different without Lev Fedorov in it—with him, it was suddenly brighter and fuller. The air itself was thick with anticipation, crowded with possibility, the night an inky shade of rapture and relief.

“I expected you to tell me you don’t need saving,” Lev commented, shifting to look at her, and felt Sasha’s lashes fluttering against his chest as her eyes floated open. “I think I did, this time,” she confessed. “This time, I do. Not from the world, though.” She paused, letting him toy with her hair. “From myself.”

“That is simply what this life is, Sashenka,” Marya reminded her. “Sacrifice and loss. So long as you remain a part of it, that’s all you’ll be capable of feeling. It’s all you’ll be able to do. Your only gifts will be what you can take, what you can break, and what you can ruin.”

“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.”

“Don’t worry, Masha,” he said quietly, pulling her close, his hand still tight around the handle of the knife. “I would never make you go alone.”