Page 109 of One For my Enemy

“Why?” Dimitri asked.

Lazar hesitated.

Because she’s strong. Stronger than me.

Perhaps I admire her for the same reasons you love her daughter.

“I want her business,” was all Lazar said. “She’s positioning herself as my rival. I want to stop her before she succeeds.”

“But I love her daughter,” Dimitri said, frowning. “Are you asking me to put that aside?”

“No,” Lazar said. “I’m not asking you anything, Dima. I’m telling you I’ve made the decision. I’ve done what is necessary.”

Dimitri blinked. “But it will cost me Masha.”

“Why?” Lazar asked, impatient. “It’s just an arrangement, Dima.”

“An arrangement which Masha will hate,” Dimitri said. “You’re trying to swallow her up, Papa, and she will know it. She’ll know.”

“It isn’t Masha’s decision,” Lazar said.

“It is,” Dimitri argued. “She and her mother are as good as one woman. Believe me, if Baba Yaga refuses you, it will be because Masha refused,” he prophesied darkly, “And then I will lose her, Papa. I will lose her.”

“She won’t give you up,” Lazar insisted. He had never refused his son; how could she, the girl who was so enamored with him? Even Lazar could see little Masha had been in love with his eldest son for all of her youth. “She won’t.”

But she did.

And for exactly one day, Dimitri looked like a ghost, shell-shocked and frozen.

The following morning, however, Dimitri woke up renewed.

“She’ll come back to me,” Dimitri said. “Someday, she’ll come back. I know she will.”

“And until then?” Lazar asked.

“Until then,” Dimitri said slowly, “we will build something for her to come back to.”

Dimitri channeled his pain into progress. Lazar, who had suffered a loss of control for the first time since he’d been a boy, took a less active role. He continued to give instructions as Koschei, but withdrew from the activities of the Borough witches. He sent Dimitri on his errands. Within a year or two, very few could reach Koschei directly anymore. He was said to have retreated to the basement of one of his buildings, where he oversaw his illegal creature trades.

In truth, the man called Koschei was waiting to be impressed by something; to feel something other than numbness in his veins. He waited and waited to be moved but, for years, he felt nothing.

The rest of the story has been told. How Lazar nearly lost his eldest son to Marya Antonova, the daughter of a useless Borough witch who grew up to hold Koschei’s most precious treasure hostage. How Lazar nearly lost his second son Roman to Roman’s own folly, and the unwise deal he’d made for selfishness’ sake. How Lazar finally gave up his youngest, the son from whom he’d intentionally detached, to make peace with Baba Yaga. How he’d finally drawn to an end the series of mistakes which had cost him little bits of everything, only to find the decision he’d made to undo the others had been the most painful blow of all.

Whathasn’tbeen told is that the amount to which Lazar could see he was losing—his influence over the Borough witches, the unexplained silence from clients who had regularly sought him, the loss of income with its corresponding lack of explanation—was almost nothing compared to the vacant look on Dimitri’s face, or the frustration in Roman’s brow. What no one knew of Koschei, they knew even less of Lazar Fedorov, always the shadow of a man. He was withering away to nothing, slowly losing everything he’d built.

“Yaga,” he said when he finally came to her, swallowing twelve years of pride. “Marya.”

She looked up from where she sat. “I wondered when you’d come to find me, Lazar.”

He sank into the chair opposite her, shaking his head.

“Is it you?” he asked. The money. The Boroughs. Everything that was going wrong.

She fixed her solemn gaze on him. “If it was, you would deserve it.”

He sighed.

“That’s not an answer,” he said.

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