Page 36 of One For my Enemy

“You married Stas.” His voice was gravely pained. “You shut me out. You gave your life to someone else.”

“Because I know, above everything, you are your father’s son,” she began, but Dimitri cut her off.

“No. No, Masha, I am my own man.” He stroked a line down the back of her neck, loosely cupping his hand around it. “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.”

“Don’t,” Marya warned, swallowing hard. “Dima, please don’t—”

“Are you happy, Masha?”

The question stunned her, quite unwillingly, to silence.

“Are you? I don’t mean with Stas,” he said quietly, and despite her fervent wish to feel nothing, she was helpless not to flinch. “I remember how joy looked on you, Masha. I rememberlife,and I don’t see it now. I certainly didn’t see it when I saw you last, carrying out your mother’s wrath—so tell me, are you happy? Being the great Marya Antonova,” he murmured, securing her within the insufficiency of his fingertips. “Being Yaga’s enforcer, her right hand—Masha, is it all you thought it would be?”

She couldn’t answer. To answer would be to betray herself, her livelihood, her family. It was to confess far more than she was willing to give, either to him or to herself or to anyone.

She did not answer, but her silence was answer enough.

“I love you,” Dimitri reminded her, and reached up, touching her cheek as she stared at him; willing him, impossibly, to stop talking, or even less likely, compelling herself to go. “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 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. “Only you, forever, I promise.”

“Stop.” She buried her fingers in his clothes. “Dima, don’t do this to me—”

“We could run,” he whispered to her. “We could leave, we could leave all of this behind us. Your mother has six other daughters, Masha. Haven’t you served long enough? Haven’t I? Twelve years we’ve done this,” he said, calibrating their loss with the tapping of his fingers along her vertebrae. “Twelve years I’ve been without you and done nothing but lose myself. In twelve years you built your mother an empire,” he reminded her, half-reverent, “and still, will it ever be enough?”

“We could never run.” She knew that much. No fantasy could make it true. “Not now, Dima, it’s too late—”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“It does.”

“Why?”

She wanted to kill him, to kiss him, to love him with her hands around his neck. Even as a boy, he’d always thought he understood everything. He’d always believed, frustratingly, that all things could be so simply explained.

“Because itdoes.Because of what we’ve done, Dima, whatI’vedone—”

“Then we’ll find a way to undo it.”

He paused, and for lack of better weapons, she clung to him in the silence. “If this world isn’t what you thought it would be, Masha, I won’t let you down. I won’t disappoint you.”

“Dima, don’t do this. Please.”

Marya Antonova, enforcer of Baba Yaga, the girl who had not cried and the woman who did not beg, was pleading now; in hearing it, despite suffering the repulsion of her own weakness, she could feel Dimitri soften in sympathy. He stroked her hair, permitting her the relief of silence, and then he bent carefully over her, sheltering her in his arms as she sank lower, falling to her knees beside his bed. She sighed, sliding her arms around his waist, and he curled himself around her, his heart beating steadily, thrumming with futile oaths beside her ear.

“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.”

For a moment, he froze—battling with himself, most likely—but then he pulled back, fumbling, having given up the fight to take her face in his hands. 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.

In nearly the same moment that he pulled her up to him, Marya felt a jolt, a blinding stab of pain, and wondered if that was what the absence had done to her; if she had loved Dimitri Fedorov so fiercely she could feel it now in the vacancies of her spine, plunging into the caverns of her heart. She gasped into his mouth, crying out in anguish, and he pulled back—but his eyes were different now, his fingers clinging tightly as she registered slowly, too slowly, that the pain wasn’t from his kiss.

Not at all.

“Dima,” she whispered, struggling to see, and felt her breath stagger and fail.

“Masha!” he shouted, the sound of it buried beneath the dull roar in her ears, and she closed her eyes, still seeing him in her mind; once with his face pressed to the bloodied floor, voiceless and pleading, and then again with his chin tilted up in sunlight, spinning his golden promises in her ear:

Masha, Masha, Masha.

II. 17

---