One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“Don’t forgive me, Lev, if you can’t, and certainly don’t love me. You’ll only make fools of us both.”

“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.”

“Each time we bid farewell to a piece of ourselves we become different than we were.

“A tragic backstory doesn’t make you sympathetic,” Lev said. “Nope,” Eric agreed. “Some people are just shitty, don’t you think?”

“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.

“Sometimes an end is just a cleverly disguised beginning,”