One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs, Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with loving tears. What is it else? A madness, most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.

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

From the time Sasha was little, she’d known two things with utter certainty: There were monsters, and then there was Masha, who kept them safe.

He bit a smile into his palm again, tasting Sasha’s kiss one more time, and then dug for the phone in his pocket, hoping to prove to himself she hadn’t been a dream.

Such is the case when time goes by: emptiness.

Masha’s eyes were wide and keen and sharp, and she was every inch the beauty Marya had been;

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.

Masha was a young girl then, subject to youth’s indiscretions; when they took on the shape of a handsome, golden-haired, broad-shouldered boy, even Masha struggled to resist. Marya could see that every time Dimitri Fedorov walked into a room, her daughter’s knees went weak, Masha’s unbending spine softening instantly in his presence.

What else is there to know about Marya Antonova, in the end? Only that now, she is called Baba Yaga, and of all her many trinkets, her daughter remains the greatest treasure of them all.

“The story we’re writing? It has chapters. Installments. I don’t want once.”

He’d always been so golden, like a storybook prince. His hair was swept across his forehead in his enchanted sleep and she brushed it back, tracing the shape of his nose, his cheeks, his lips. He had been hers, once. She had known every motion of his face and true, it was older now, but still it was the same, as perfectly preserved in half-life as it had been in her memories.

“You chose. But you didn’t let me choose, did you?”

“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,”

“Only you, forever, I promise.”

She wanted to kill him, to kiss him, to love him with her hands around his neck.

She fell into his kindness, into his tenderness, letting herself be lured back into his arms as she had always hatefully known she could be if he ever so much as tried.

His eyes were wild, filled with nothing but the sight of her, and she let out a terrible, desperate sigh, resigning herself to ruination, to the ascendancy of devastation as he pressed his lips to hers, holding what little remained of her in his hands.

if she had loved Dimitri Fedorov so fiercely she could feel it now in the vacancies of her spine, plunged into the caverns of her heart.

But for now, in his arms, she felt like his—and it wasn’t something he could ignore.

Roman Fedorov knew nothing of the stars at his birth, but if he’d been told they stood for loyalty, for duty, for immobility of faith, he would have easily believed it. For Roman, destiny was a vehicle for purpose. If this, then this.

They were the Fedorov brothers, the three sons of Koschei, which Roman had always considered the singular truth that mattered most of all.

Could he really taste so sweet, being her enemy?

“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.

This, her baby, was her most hesitant child; the only one whose heart Yaga felt she didn’t truly know. She wondered if it might have been a mistake not to try to know it sooner.

“Dima is something very rare, something very bold, something that catches in the light. Romik is like me, a man of duty. A watchful man. But you are very honorable.” He turned, glancing at Lev. “You are the most loyal of them all, I suspect.”

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

“I fell in love with you, didn’t I, Sasha Antonova?” His laugh, the set of her jaw, they both said I love you, it’s over, we’re doomed. “I was always going to be trapped.”

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.

Dimitri Fedorov was the sun, the moon, and the stars. His mother had whispered it to him when he was a boy: Dima, you are the sun, the moon, and the stars. She’d meant that he was her entire universe, and probably he was. Her world was very small.

She is my entire soul, Dimitri didn’t say. “We knew each other once.”

“Sashenka,” Marya said, “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,”

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.

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

When he opened his eyes again, she was smiling down at him, mean and victorious and cruelly beautiful, and she was everything, everything he had ever loved. She was the sun, the moon, and the stars.

He’d always had patient hands; they took their time. They were hands meant for mastery. His fingers were tireless, steady, certain. He had the hands of an artist, a craftsman. Hands like the rays of the afternoon sun: slow, but sure. Constant. Heated in every place they touched.

“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.

She touched the features of his face, one by one, to prove they were his, to prove she hadn’t dreamt him, and he tangled his fingers in her hair, holding himself captive by the sanctity of each blessed strand.

To remind her of this, here, with his hands digging into her waist so she’d suck in a breath, to prove her lungs could fill. Here, with his lips near her ear, to remember her blood could rush. It was a silence that spoke volumes, that made promises; a rush of urgency they both knew would have no patience for the luxury of a mattress, of permanence and sheets. When the blades of her scapulae hit the wall behind her, Lev thought only here, now, this.

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.