Page 104 of One For my Enemy

Lev grimaced. “I take it you mean Roma?”

“In part.” Marya was careful, tiptoeing around as her lies took shape. “But still, it’s Koschei’s fault Sasha must remain dead, isn’t it? No one can know you’re alive,” she warned him, “or the deal struck between Koschei and Baba Yaga will disintegrate. The damage would be catastrophic, to both your family and mine.”

“My father,” Lev echoed, looking stunned. “He made a deal?”

Marya nodded.

“But—” Lev swallowed hard. “But if he’s responsible for her death, then you realize what you’re saying.”

Again, she nodded.

“You’re asking me not to be a Fedorov?”

“Yes.” And she was. “But seeing as no Fedorov could have possibly brought you back, you owe your life to the Antonovas. Do you not?”

Lev hesitated. “But my brothers,” he began, and stopped, clarity or something like it dawning on his face. “You didn’t kill Dima,” he recalled, frowning slightly. “You saved him when you could have left him to die.”

Marya said nothing.

“Marya Antonova,” Lev said, blinking once. “Are you, by any chance… good?”

The laugh came bitterly, burning in her throat.

“No,” she assured him. Had her heart been in her chest, it might have stuttered with guilt, but it wasn’t, so it didn’t. “I’m just a woman with a dead sister. I’m just a weapon,” she clarified, “aimed at the man who caused me pain.”

Lev considered it.

“What would you have me do for you, then?” he asked, and she told him.

She told him, and he nodded.

After some discussion he extended his hand, and they agreed.

And then Marya Antonova slipped out in the night, heading straight for her mother.

She was about to knock on the door, waiting outside the frame, when she paused, hearing voices. It was a strange echo of what had happened earlier; the resurrection waiting for her inside her bedroom. Marya waved a hand over herself, obscuring her own shadow, and slipped into the room, listening quietly.

“—so should we not, perhaps, bury our differences?” an elderly man was asking. “I remember you, Marya, as you once were. You thought I never saw you, or that I saw you as something to be owned, or to be used, but I saw you precisely. I saw a woman unloved and unvalued. I saw a witch capable of far more than her sycophantic husband ever was. I saw a partner, Marya. I knew you could be Baba Yaga before you did, and I was ready, and waiting—”

“Lazar,” Yaga said softly. “Don’t you think I would have been relieved to have you by my side?”

Marya swallowed hard, curling one hand to a fist. She hoped it was a trick. Or a lie.

But her mother, who had never revealed any softness for her, certainly looked soft now. Nostalgic, even.

“What fools we were,” Koschei said, as Marya’s nails bit into her palm. “Could we not bury our differences, now that we have both lost so much?”

“Make amends, you mean?” Yaga asked him, and sighed. “It would be easier, Lazar. Much easier, to work with you instead of against you.”

Marya’s throat burned.

The faint memory of her heart seared in her chest.

“We have only suffered for our differences,” Koschei said, reaching out to rest his hands on Yaga’s knuckles, and Marya, who couldn’t bear another moment, tore swiftly from the room, reaching through thin air to drag herself back home.

They believed they had suffered.

They believedtheyhad suffered.

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