One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

We can’t curse all the men in the world, can we?” “Not in a single day, at least,” Marya replied, “much as I try.”

“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?”

Unfortunately for Raphael, he wasn’t the only man in the room with some experience with coercion, which was why Raphael was presently being dangled outside his own window with one of Dimitri’s hands clamped tightly around his throat.

“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,”

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