One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

More often than not, the man called Koschei was, unlike the death belonging to the Slavic character whose name he bore, relatively easy to find, though not especially easy to speak with.

Killer character intro

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.

“Well, better terrible,” Marya assured her, rising to her feet. “It’s the wonderful ones you have to watch out for.”

“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.”

his 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.

“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. Do you understand? I’ll hold you if you want me to,” he whispered, his voice a crook of a finger to the tired tendrils of her heart. “Want me to keep you close, Sasha, keep you safe? I’ll do it. But if I’m going to know things—intimate things, like how you prefer to be touched,” he said, firmly, in a man’s voice—a lover’s voice—“things I know I’ll never be able to rid from my mind—then do me a favor and let me be selfish. Let me imagine you might have come to my bed for me,

If it had been Stas in Ivan’s place, could he have brought himself to love her still, knowing perfectly well there was not one man before him in her esteem, but two?

If she had been in his place, would one kiss, one collision, have been enough to rearrange her stars?

“What does it mean to be a Fedorov son if we destroy ourselves in the process?” Dimitri asked, and his expression was nothing Lev had ever seen on his face before. “What does it mean to be this family or that, if loss is the only thing that comes from it?”

“Whatever choices you make, Lev, just be sure you can live with them.”

I like that we’re already settling into our relationship problems,” he added with a bitter laugh. “You know, you’re messy, I’m neat, our families insist on bloodshed, I chew with my mouth open sometimes—”

Lev I love u

“Do you know what happens,” Ivan posed softly, “when you kill something someone else loves?” The Fedorov said nothing. “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.”

(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?)

What exactly is your connection to Marya Antonova, Dimitri Fedorov?” She is my entire soul, Dimitri didn’t say.

“The devil lounges in the word if, Roma. The circumstances of our conditions are not for us to ponder without slowly losing our minds.”

“Because nobody will deny you anything the moment you stop denying yourself. Who could possibly have sovereignty greater than yours?” she asked, insistent. “Who on earth could have the right to refuse you, if you do not permit them to?

“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.”

“Every piece of you, body and soul, remembers what it is to love me, don’t they? Whether your heart is in your chest or not. I know you do, because I do,” he said softly, the two of them leaned so close the words brushed the fabric of her dress. “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.”

It was no whispered confession. It was no gentle murmur in the dark. It was the truth, plain and bare, and she wasn’t vulnerable for having said it. Instead, she wore her love like a shield, like armor, and he ached for her; for what she was to him; for what they might have been together.

She wasn’t afraid, of him or of love or of anything, and for that he capitulated to her, kissed her. Bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers, to prove that he was strong for her, because he could be weak. 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.

“I thought I was weak for you, Dima, but I was wrong. I’m Marya Antonova,” she told him, meeting his eye, “and I am loved by Dimitri Fedorov, and for that, I could never be weak.” “And I’m the man who possesses Marya Antonova’s heart.” His breath quickened as Marya’s hands traversed his chest. “Nothing will ever stop me.”

Since Marya Antonova had been small, others had always feared her. She’d had a bodyguard, that hulking Ivan, but nobody had ever shrank from him. If anything, Ivan was like the cloak of the grim reaper. Just a decoration to indicate that Death Herself was on her way.

Dimitri had given Lev freedom from a life he’d never wanted. He’d given him choices. Last words would have been paltry in comparison to this: the Antonova witch who kissed him goodbye with the words let me go, because she would be back. She would be back, and she would be his.

Senator Attaway, like most of his kind (i.e., white male politicians), would live to see a decent age.

Unfortunately

“Imagine thinking something is cursed simply because others would die for it. What’s love, then?”