Page 39 of One For my Enemy

“We really shouldn’t do it,” he said, as she tilted her head up, brushing her lips against his.

“No,” she said, “we really shouldn’t.”

“Fuck,” he sighed, feeling the last of his already highly compromised reservations give way. “But we’re going to, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Lev,” she agreed, inescapably tangling her fingers in his hair.

“Yes, we definitely are.”

II. 18

(Rearview.)

Ivan had been Marya Antonova’s bodyguard for a very long time; ever since the first time another witch had tried to kill her. She’d been only twenty then, before she’d married Stas Maksimov, and Ivan had been sitting in a popular witches’ tavern with his back to most of the crowd when he’d seen the witch aim a curse at Marya’s back. The young girl had been about to leave, most likely after distributing a punishment or a debt levied by her mother, and Ivan had stood without thinking, yanking her to the side. In the blink of an eye, he’d saved her life, and young Marya Antonova looked up with her dark bird-of-prey eyes and registered what he’d done.

“You saved me,” she commented neutrally, after she’d dispatched the witch who’d attacked her with the most breathtaking of ease. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Ivan said, though he did. It wasn’t that he’d guessed she was weak; it was that he’d known she was strong. She was more than strong, her head held high like the finest of military generals, but still, she was a girl who hadn’t learned to watch her back, so he had watched it for her.

“Would you like a job, soldier?” she’d asked him, and Ivan nodded. With Marya, he would learn that he never needed to speak much, which he liked. She only asked him questions if she required an answer; she didn’t trap him into conversation, as other people were prone to do.

“Then you have one,” she’d said.

Ivan had always been a soldier, with a soldier’s loyalty, and he studied his view of Marya Antonova’s back like it was a map of her behavior, each contour indicating some landscape of interest. 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.

Which was how Ivan knew, observing in silence while Dimitri Fedorov nearly bled out on his living room floor, that something he’d never seen before was happening to Marya.

She’d kept her voice steady, hard, cold. Everything she did and said was edged in ice, always, and she did not fail now, only there was something else to her, too; something forlorn, and Ivan had watched her hold herself back, her knuckles white as they dug into the tapestry of the chair.

Ivan had never seen Marya Antonova suffer someone else’s pain before, but he saw it that day and knew, somehow, that everything else would now be different.

He also sensed something would soon go wrong when she’d sent him home for the evening.

“You’ll have your work cut out for you with Sasha,” she’d said wryly, reaching up to touch his shoulder with affection. “You might as well have a night off, Ivan. I won’t be doing anything tonight.”

“Are you sure?” he’d asked uncertainly, noting she seemed distant and distracted. “Is Stas home to stay with you?”

“Hm? Yes, of course,” Marya had replied absently. “Stas is… Stas is here, Ivan. I’m fine.”

He’d hesitated. He’d never had too many magical gifts; his intuition was always more refined than supernatural. Still, if this were some sort of half-formed foretelling, he felt he was obligated to warn her.

“Marya,” he’d said, “I don’t wish to leave you.”

She’d given him a slow smile.

“You worry too much, Ivan,” she said. “I won’t need you to watch my back tonight.”

“Promise,” he said, and she blinked. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” she assured him, sighing it out and waving him impatiently to the door. “And anyway, Ivan, if anything happened to me, I have six other sisters. You’d have a job watching one of their pretty necks, or even my mother’s—”

“Marya Antonova, I work for you,” he told her, swearing it like fealty to a king.

Her smile had been as bright as it was fleeting.

“You serve one Antonova witch, Ivan,” she’d replied, “and so you serve them all.”

Now, though, having served one so loyally and so dutifully for such a very long time, he was certain something was wrong.

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