Page 111 of One For my Enemy

“Because,” Lazar said angrily. “Because you are more like me than anyone, Marya Antonova. Because you built all this from nothing, as I did! Because—” He began, and sputtered. “Because we could have had everything, you and I.”

She waited a moment.

Pressed her lips together.

“I am capable of having everything without you, Lazar,” Yaga said coldly. “Haven’t you figured that out by now? I don’t need you.”

“No, you don’t, but look what being against me has cost you. What it has cost me, as well,” he pressed, leaning towards her. “We have paid far more than we ever wished to simply by standing apart—so should we not, perhaps, bury our differences? I remember you, Marya, as you once were,” he said, hearing the touch of pleading to his voice; the softness he’d kept to himself for decades. “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 as you were. I saw a woman unloved and unvalued; I saw a witch capable of far more than her husband ever was. I saw a partner, Marya. I knew you could be Baba Yaga before you did, and I was ready, and waiting—”

He stumbled to a halt, and she shook her head, finally sparing him a look of sympathy.

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

“What fools we were,” Lazar lamented, shaking his head. “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.”

“We have only suffered for our differences,” Lazar said, reaching out to rest his hands on Yaga’s knuckles. “I only told you this to prove to you I have always been on your side. Always, Marya, I swear to you,” he said, and looked up at her, swallowing hard. “Always.”

She considered him.

He had first met the witch called Baba Yaga when she was a girl of sixteen years old, newly married. Now she was close to fifty, and age had burrowed itself into the lines around her eyes, but she was just as lovely as she always was. As lovely, and as calculating.

“Lazar,” she eventually said, “there is no reversing the pain we have caused each other. Our losses cannot be undone.”

Marya Antonova is not in the land of the dead,Lazar heard The Bridge telling him, that teasing gleam of pleasure in his eye at the havoc he could cause. Who was likely lying? Was it the fae who had nothing to gain but mayhem?

Or was it the witch who already knew what it was to play everyone for fools?

“Yesterday is as it was,” he told her, gambling that she could be trusted. “We have already paid, Marya, blood for blood. But what will tomorrow be?”

What more, after all, could he stand to lose?

Around him, the shadows danced with warning. They flickered and waned, restless. They were subtle creatures, always coming and going. Like Lazar himself, they were creatures of darkness who could not exist without light; without some promise, at least, of light.

But where he was a shadow, Baba Yaga was stone.

“I suppose, Lazar Fedorov,” said Marya Antonova, “we will both have to wait and find out.”

V. 2

(Poisoned Wells.)

“If you want my help taking down Koschei,” Dimitri said to Sasha Antonova, “I’m going to need to know what you have in mind.”

“Koschei has too many friends among the Borough witches,” Sasha said, which wasn’t quite an answer. “He’s too protected, and as long as the others continue to revere him or fear him, there will be consequences to my family for his loss. I don’t just want to kill him,” she clarified. “That would be too easy, or at least easier than I’d like.”

True. The trouble was always in the consequences, not the doing.

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to destroy him. I want to watch him lose everything the way I lost everything.” She paused, testing him with a glance. “How firm is your loyalty to your father, Dima?”

He bristled at the informality. “It’s Dimitri.”

Doubtfully, she remarked, “Surely you don’t prefer it.”

He didn’t, but that changed nothing. “This isn’t a friendship,” he reminded her. “This is business.”

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