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.

hope that boy from class didn’t give you any trouble last night.” “He did, unfortunately,” Sasha said. “But then I punched him in the face.”

A kiss, sure, and then, I don’t know, maybe I go down on you behind that counter,”

“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.”

“Why didn’t you let me choose you?” he asked hoarsely. “I would have gone to you, Masha, if you’d asked. You would’ve only had to ask, and I would have chosen you over everything.”

“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.”

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

“Dima, I swear,” she confessed to his chest in a whisper, “this love I have for you will be the death of me.”

“If you can check your secrets at the door,” she suggested, forcibly returning his hands to her hips, “then I can do the same.”

He knew the stiffening of her shoulders when she was angry. He knew the weary roll of her neck when she hadn’t slept well, which was often. He knew her pride from the tilt of her neck, the danger that lived in the angling of her spine. He’d sat just behind her for nearly twelve years and had seen every version of her, both public and private, to learn the little indicators of her state of mind.

“Anywhere.” A different life, a different world, somewhere under different stars. Any place but here and now. “Nowhere.”

“Don’t be a gentleman right now.” She pronounced the word gentleman like idiot. “We might not have time for an entire book.”

“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?”

“I’ll never make you sad, Marya Antonova,” Stas whispered to her. “I’ll never take what is yours. I’ll never demand anything from you. If you were mine, I’d take such care each day not to lose you. I’d give you my affection when you wanted it, my devotion when you needed it, and space to breathe when you did not. And you will always have my love, Marya Antonova,” he’d sworn to her, “whether you wish to possess it or not.”

“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.”

“Strength comes from struggle,” Marya said. “Each time we bid farewell to a piece of ourselves we become different than we were. But each time we rise again in the morning, it’s a victory,”

“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,”

“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.”

Marya beckoned, and then she slid her hands under the fabric as her heart ran riot beside his own, reducing him perilously to a shiver.

that hate and love were so very similar. Both were intestinal, visceral. Both left scars, vestiges of pain. Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.

“Not everything is a plot, Solnyshko,” she said, and Lev tilted his head. “Little sun,” he translated. “Funny. I always think of my brother as the sun.”

below her hips. “Do I trust you, Masha?” he echoed, fighting a bitter laugh. “More than I should.”

After a few weeks, Sasha had picked up a habit of taking a little time out of each day to plague Roman Fedorov to festering hysteria. Before long, it was as compulsory an act as brushing her teeth or washing her face: breakfast, lunch, scaring Roman half out of his wits, dinner. All regularly scheduled activities. All equally contributing to the improvement of Sasha’s health and well-being.

Thus, she was surprised, and perhaps a bit disappointed, to find that Roman was in the midst of full psychological disintegration well before she’d expected to see her plans bear fruit.

My daughters are diamonds. Nothing is more beautiful. Nothing shines brighter. Nothing will break them, and then, with a twist of the knife: Because I am the one who taught them how to be this cold.

“I hope your peace serves you well,” Marya said, “because I am no longer willing.”

“I expected you to tell me you don’t need saving,” Lev commented, shifting to look at her, and felt Sasha’s lashes fluttering against his chest as her eyes floated open. “I think I did, this time,” she confessed. “This time, I do.

Life doesn’t flash, he realized abruptly. At the end, it’s a sticky sort of glue, lining the back of a single image. It seemed foolish to bother with regrets.

This life will try to leave you empty-handed, she heard her sister say, unless you learn to strike first.

Why had he loved her? Not for her strength, though she had plenty of it. For that, he’d admired her. She was untouchable for it, for her courage, for her unyielding surety. It was easy to love. It was why anyone would be drawn to her. Still, it wasn’t why Dimitri had loved her. No. That had been for her goodness. For her loyalty. For her heart. Dimitri Fedorov had loved Marya Antonova with his entire being for his entire life, which was how he’d somehow come to miss the now-obvious signs that his plans and hers weren’t entirely the same.

Burn the world down. She hadn’t meant the whole world. Just the world she’d been forced to live in.

Solnyshko, the note said. The plan was always that the sun would rise.

After all, the gift was obvious, wasn’t it? Marya and Dimitri had given Sasha and Lev the simplicity—the beautiful normality—that they themselves had been denied. Dimitri had given Lev freedom from a life he’d never wanted. He’d given him choices.