One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Dimitri Fedorov fixed his gaze on the enemy and let the world carry on at his back.

If Dimitri was the Fedorov sun, Roman was the moon in orbit, his dark eyes carving a perimeter of warning around his elder brother.

If his brothers were planetary bodies, Lev was an ocean wave. He was in constant motion, a tide that pulsed and waned.

Counted the hours until it was reasonably ‘tonight’ enough for me to show up here.”

“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’re nothing until somebody wants you dead, Bridge, remember that,” she informed him, pulling her coat over her shoulders. “Until then, you’ve done absolutely nothing worth a damn.”

information that was passed to her in whispers only shadows would hear.

“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.

“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.”

own heart, which for some reason had not stopped beating despite the stillness where Marya Antonova’s should have been. He’d been so sure that it would, for having loved her. He’d been positive, once, that it would break, shatter, deliver itself to oblivion, all for love of her.

If I ever decide to give my heart to you, Dima, she’d said, holding his hand palm up, then cut it out of my chest and keep it somewhere safe, where no one else can find it. Keep it locked somewhere,

“I thought you said the wait was part of the book,” she reminded him, giving him a shove. “What was it you said again, about us being a long story?” “Biblical, at this rate,”

If it were Roman, he would have made certain a man like their father never had cause to doubt the loyalty of his sons. But was that not admirable, too?

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.

“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?”

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.

Only Stas had possessed the fortune of loving the woman herself, of knowing her as she truly was, and thus only Stas could know what torment it was to lose her. It clawed at his chest to watch Ivan martyr himself, as if only his devotion had mattered in the end.

Bryn’s was the kind of power you could feel rather than point to, some atmospheric sixth sense tipped off by the buttery richness of his leather furnishings or the first editions lining his shelves.

Occasionally a very poor negotiator, Bryn, on account of an erotic sort of craving. Like all fae, when he wanted, he wanted powerfully. When Bryn’s interest was piqued, it was like sensuality itself, mouth wetting for another taste, another hit.

Dimitri looked up, traveling a long distance through his thoughts to let his gaze fall on Lev’s before softening then, slightly.

“What does it mean to be this family or that, if loss is the only thing that comes from it?”

What would it be like, Sasha wondered, to live in a world where no meant no?

she said with the venom he’d been drawn to from the moment her story collided with his, her gravity filling up the life he hadn’t known was empty.

“I will love you even when I wrong you, and for that—for everything—I’m so fucking sorry.”

and tore himself from her side, allowing himself a single glance to look back at her face—to burn the outline of her rage into his memory, in case it was the last thing he saw of her. In case his punishment would be to live with the outcome of his choice.

“Do you really believe people are so isolated that when they’re gone, nothing grows in their place? To really kill something, you have to kill everything. You have to raze it to the ground.”

Blood for blood. The most elementary of principles. The most ancient of reparations.

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.

“What did she look like?” Stas asked coldly, staring at the man who could only be Roman Fedorov. “When you killed her. Did you see her face?”

Dimitri had once told Lev he had the gift of timing. Always perfect, Dimitri had joked, ruffling the hair atop Lev’s head, right at the sweet spot, when one moment after would be too late, and one moment earlier would be too soon. When Dimitri had first said it, he’d been referring to the way Lev would pull him to the sidewalk just as the ice cream truck went by or, as they got older, how Lev could always find a taxi, one going by with its lights on just at the moment he raised his hand in the air. One of your little magics, Dimitri had said, smiling as he’d said it, and it was what went through Lev’s mind the moment he saw Stas Maksimov turning, his fingers extending slowly, as if time itself had been stretched.

Stas wished he could have said he didn’t love her right then, or that he hadn’t felt a sense of urgency, some absurd need to hold her, to press her body close to his and murmur his devotion through the night. He wished he hadn’t wanted to know her thoughts, to understand each tiny story of the freckles beneath her eyes, to learn to translate each spare degree of interest from her mouth. What did she look like when he made her laugh? When he held her hand, what would it sound like? How would her breath respond when he slid his hand between her legs and whispered, Not yet, not just yet, not when I want so badly for this to last—?

(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?)

“I promise you I’ll never see him again,” she said, cutting him off with the briefest, most subtle of motions from her hand, “because if I ever do, I may never come back to you at all.” A pause, and then, “Knowing that, Stas Maksimov, can you love me still?”

How little she had aged compared to him. It seemed for the moment that the whole world was frozen, with only Koschei as proof that time went on.

Marya Antonova’s heart had started a war. Somehow, it would end one, too.

The universe spoke a language, if you were paying close enough attention. Many languages, even. Stars, leaves, flowers, cards, dirt—the universe was constantly spelling things out, though people rarely listened.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

“No ifs,” Koschei said, cutting him off. “The devil lounges in the word if, Roma. The circumstances of our conditions are not for us to ponder without slowly losing our minds.”

I understand, Marya wanted to say—because truly, she understood few things better than the crippling taste of a lost name on her lips—

“Because nobody will deny you anything the moment you stop denying yourself. Who could possibly have sovereignty greater than yours?”

“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.”

“Strength comes from struggle,” Marya said. “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,”

“one piece of advice, Dimitri Fedorov, from me to you. When you spend enough time with someone, as I have, you begin to learn them like a muscle. You learn their little ticks, their eccentricities, their thoughts. You learn the signs and read them like stars, like lines in a book. And after a time,” he murmured, tapping his fingers pointedly on the counter, “you learn them like a pulse. Like your own pulse.”

but power is knowing what you’re capable of and choosing if and when you give it to the world. Power is knowing when to be delicate and soft, like my sister, and when to make foolish, small-minded people think beauty and goodness are the same. She has this look,” Sasha said, lost to her reverie now, “where she makes you feel you are the only thing in the universe. She can make you feel like you are resilient; like you are enormous, and omnipotent, and that’s where her power comes from. Her power comes from knowing she can make you feel powerful, and while you’re sitting docile in her gaze, she can crush it, and crush you, and tear everything out from under you before you can even remember who and what you really are.”

she’d worn her hair long and loose, and a prior version of him had fallen asleep with his nose buried in the waves of it, breathing in nothing but the petal-soft scent of her.

She wore a dress that was a muted shade of sage, and he wondered for a moment if she’d chosen it specifically for him; if she’d woken up that morning and put it on, thinking nothing of it, or if she’d reached into her closet and thought, I wonder what Dima will want to see me in today.

“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. Sometimes I smell your perfume on a breeze and wonder how it’s possible that I still know the scent of you so well. Sometimes I wake up with the taste of you on my lips,” he said, fingers stretching out to match the motion of her breath, “and I know, Masha, that the only reason you ever gave your heart to me to begin with was because it would never belong to anyone else, and neither of us could ever forget it.” Only then, when her lips parted, did he lift his eyes to hers.