One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Because she wanted him to love her, and because he would, without fear, for as long as he lived. For as long as his heart still beat beside hers, and for long after. For all of the afters, happily or not.

Marya Antonova stepped out into the night covered with Dimitri Fedorov’s fingerprints. She was bathed in his touch, head to toe.

To touch Marya Antonova was to grasp a strike of lightning. She was an electric shock, and Dimitri, paralyzed for having touched her, lay bare and alone in the twisted landscape of his sheets until the feeling returned to his limbs.

He had wanted an inheritor for everything he had built, but that day, he realized his calling was something much, much larger. His life’s purpose would be to create something that would be worthy of his eldest son.

How many nights would it take to know her again, to know her at all? At least another, and another, and another. And then forever after that.

“Let tomorrow come tomorrow,” he told her. “Tonight, I want tonight.” If it was a dream, he seemed to say, then let it end in the morning. Let the sun do its worst.

“I think I always knew my brother loved someone,” he admitted slowly. “It’s strange, saying that in the past tense and never having known my brother while he was in love. He just always had an air of heartbreak to him, and I think it’s what made him so … vast. So untouchable.” He paused. “He always had this grace about him, like a man who had lost everything and still refused to be hollowed out.”

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.