Page 63 of One For my Enemy

“Sasha,” Lev said when he saw her, frowning with bemusement at her approach. She’d asked to meet him outside the concert venue, and he noticed now that she was wearing a familiar garment; the same coat that her sister Marya had worn right before she’d nearly killed his brother Dimitri. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have a lot of time—”

“Did your brother ask you to meet him somewhere tonight?” Sasha asked him, and he blinked.

“What? Sasha, I—”

“Your brother,” Sasha repeated. “Roman. Did he ask you to meet him somewhere? A warehouse,” she suggested, unsmiling. “Near the river?”

How could she possibly have known?

How else could she have known, unless…

“Sasha.”No, Sasha, please,“What are you saying?”

“I need you to stay here, Lev,” she said, taking his face in her hands. “I need you to stayaway,okay? Can you do that for me? I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered, and he wished he could have fought it when her lips touched his; he wished, fervently, that his hands had not slid so easily to her waist, resting gently on the flare of her hips. “I don’t want to hurt you, Lev, and I don’t want to lose you—”

“Then don’t,” he pleaded, tightening his grip on her. “Sasha, we don’t have to be like this, it doesn’t have to be this way for us. I like that we already have relationship problems,” he joked, half-laughing. “You know, you’re messy, I’m neat, our families insist on bloodshed, I chew with my mouth open sometimes—”

“Don’t do this,” Sasha said, her nails digging into the notches of his vertebrae. “Don’t pretend it can be so easy. Wasn’t this what we were born to? We won’t get out unless it stops, and it won’t stop until the debt is paid. Your brother killed my sister, Lev,” she murmured, the words burning at his lips, “and there’s no hope of peace between us until the scales are even.”

“But does it have to be you?” Lev asked her, pained. “I don’t know if I could forgive you, Sasha—I don’t know if I could—ifwecould—”

I can only hope,Koschei’s voice said in Lev’s ear,that you will not abandon your brothers now, when they need you most.

“Then don’t forgive me,” she said, and kissed him again, her incisors scraping brutally against his lips as he slid his hands under her coat, clinging desperately to her waist. “Don’t forgive me, Lev, if you can’t, and certainly don’t love me. You’ll only make fools of us both.”

“Sasha,” he exhaled breathlessly, shaking his head and tilting her chin up for her to look at him, “I do love you. I will love you.” He laughed again, bitterly this time. “I will love you even when I wrong you, and for that—for this—I’m so fucking sorry.”

She went rigid, hearing the change in his voice. “Sorry for what?”

“For this,” he said, and forced her wrists against the chain-link fence, twin threads of metal winding tightly around them as she let out a growl of impatience, glaring at him. “I can’t let you do this, Sasha, I’m sorry—”

“This won’t hold me, Lev,” she snapped as he took a step back, already dazed by what he’d done. “You know it won’t, Lev!”

“No, but it’ll give me some time,” he said, and then kissed her swiftly, brutally. “It’ll give me the time I need to make sure I get there before you.”

“He’s notalone,” Sasha snarled. “I’m not that stupid, Lev—”

“Fine. Fine, Sasha, then maybe my brother will die, but at least it won’t be you who does it,” he said, and tore himself from her side, permitting himself a single moment to stare at her face; to burn the outline of it into his memory, in case it was the last thing he saw of her. “At least it won’t be you who kills my brother, Sasha. That’ll be enough for me.”

“Lev,” she spat after him. “Lev, you’re heading for a fucking trap!”

“I fell in love with you, didn’t I, Sasha Antonova?” Lev said with another bitter laugh. “I was always going to be trapped.”

She let out a snarl, a half-scream of fury, and he forced himself not to look back, disappearing into the night.

III. 15

(The Sanctity of Tombs.)

Proximity to the Hudson always made everything seem more like a tomb. Everything was darker, more damp, grievously contained. For that, the warehouse Sasha had told The Bridge to report back to the Fedorov brothers was strikingly unlike anything Marya would have chosen. It was more than private—dangerously secluded, in fact—and a place where people went to die, not to make deals. The actual location, the concert venue, was safe because it was in plain sight. Marya would never choose something like this, with so many access points, bottlenecked down to one escape: the river.

If the Fedorov had known Marya Antonova a little better, Ivan thought, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so easily fooled. Perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Strangely, Ivan felt an intriguing sense of calm as he stepped out from behind one of the recently-constructed beams, catching the silhouette that appeared from the shadows.

“So, you’re the Fedorov rat,” Ivan noted impassively, and aptly, the man turned, nothing but his eyes and teeth glittering in the dark.

“I see,” he said, and Ivan was almost certain Sasha’s instincts had been correct; it was Roman, the middle brother. Dimitri was famously golden-haired, while the youngest, Lev, was slighter, younger-looking. This one had the body of a second-in-command, his posture stiff from looking over his shoulder. “So this is a trap, then.”

The Fedorov pulled a gun from his waistband with ease, but Ivan was quicker. He disarmed him with a motion from his thumb, quick as a trigger pull, and shook his head, tutting softly.

---