Page 99 of One For my Enemy

(Old Souls, Old Soldiers.)

Ivan sipped slowly at his drink, contemplating things.

Marya and Dimitri.

Sasha and Lev.

Hate and love were really not so different, Ivan thought. He wondered if Koschei and Baba Yaga knew it just as well; that hate and love were so very similar. Both were intestinal, visceral. Both left scars, vestiges of pain. Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.

Ivan checked his watch, shaking his head; Marya wasn’t back yet.One hour,she’d said,and not a minute more.

He didn’t ask questions; largely because he didn’t want the answers.

He’d had a dream the night before. He was back at the spot by the river, hands raised in the air, looking at Roman Fedorov.

So, will you kill me then?

And Sasha’s answer:He asked me not to.

What tangled webs, Ivan lamented, shaking his head.

And in the light around him, he could have sworn he saw the shadows nod.

IV. 16

(Not the Lark.)

Marya Antonova stepped out into the night covered with Dimitri Fedorov’s fingerprints. She was bathed in his touch, head to toe. He’d always had patient hands; they took their time. They were hands meant for mastery. His fingers were tireless, steady, certain. He had the hands of an artist, a craftsman. Hands like the rays of the afternoon sun. Slow, but sure. Constant. Heated in every place they touched.

His mouth, by contrast, was restless. He had the lips of a vagabond, never long in one place. A pilgrim’s tongue, seeking holy ground. He would touch his lips to hers and it would be like home for a moment, for a breath, but then home would become the smooth stretch of her jaw, or the curve of her neck. Home would be the hollow of her throat. His mouth could make a home from the lines of her torso; buried in the twist of tension at her back. He could linger for a beat of time beside the delicate bone of her ankle, his penitent fingers wrapped around her heel, and she would think,That is your home, too, and mine.

She shivered in the night, pulling her coat tighter around her, and looked for Ivan.

“Did you get what you needed?” Ivan asked, joining her on the sidewalk.

No.

Yes.

“I got what I came for,” Marya said, which was less an answer than a truth. Ivan glanced at her, arching a brow, and gruffly, she clarified, “He wants his brother resurrected.”

“And I presume you told him only the holy rise again,” Ivan said, half-smiling, and in reply, Marya spared him half a laugh.

“I made no promises,” she assured him. “I have my sister to worry about. I have my own problems without adding Dimitri Fedorov’s grief to the list.”

Which was a thing she could say, she knew, only because her heart pulsed somewhere out of sight; somewhere above her, where she’d only just been. Being without it wasn’t faultless, of course; she still knew the motions of it, the decisions it might make, when she tried. The difference was she was no longer pressed to rely on it. Her heart had been beyond her control, once. Now it was more like an elbow. It would bend only if she wished.

“How is she?” Marya asked, drawing her attention back to Ivan. “Sasha. Have you noticed anything?”

Ivan hesitated.

“She seems sad,” he said. “Though I think if I hadn’t come to know you through a decade of your own sadness, I may not have caught signs of hers.”

Marya cut him an impatient glare. “You lessen me, Ivan.”

“No, I don’t,” he assured her. “Why would I lessen you by humanizing you?”

“Because I’m an Antonova,” Marya reminded him, lifting a brow. “I’m not some lovesick girl, Ivan, and neither is Sasha. She’s a diamond. Nothing can break her. Nothing shines brighter.”

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