Page 92 of One For my Enemy

“I’m looking for Marya,” Dimitri cut in, “and I’m cleaning house. And seeing as you can help me with neither,” he determined, arching a brow, “I don’t think you’re much use to me at all, Ivan.”

Ivan raised his glass carefully to his lips, draining the tankard and setting it back down on the table.

“Maybe not,” Ivan agreed, and glanced down at Dimitri. “Though, for the record,” he added, dropping his voice, “one piece of advice, Dimitri Fedorov, from me to you. When you spend enough time with someone, as I have, you begin to learn them like a muscle. You learn their little ticks, their eccentricities, their thoughts. You learn the signs and read them like stars, like lines in books. And after a time,” he murmured, tapping his fingers pointedly on the table, “you learn them like a pulse. Like your own pulse.”

He tapped his fingers again, rhythmically.Duh-duhn.

“Like a heartbeat,” he clarified.Duh-duhn.

Duh-duhn.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Dima?” Ivan asked.

Duh-duhn.

Dimitri cleared his throat.

“Tell her,” he forced out, “that I’m looking for her.”

Ivan stood straighter, smiling slightly.

“She knows,” he said, and turned away, drumming the sound of Marya Antonova’s heart against the side of his thigh as he walked.

IV. 11

(Hauntings.)

Roman stared at Dimitri’s closed door for nearly an hour, waiting, before he eventually rose to his feet, letting them carry him to the last place they’d put Lev to rest. The ground was mossy, covered in leaves and vines. It looked like a fold between universes; like a page in a book of worlds. It couldn’t belong in this one, not here, but couldn’t belong to another. It was foreign and still; a place that had never felt an echo. Roman wondered if it had been like this when they’d lain Lev to rest here, or if it had become that for the benefit of having goodness in the soil.

“Lev,” Roman said, crouching down at the place they’d marked. “Things aren’t going so well without you.”

Silence, of course. Consequences of Roman’s mistakes.

“You know I’m sorry, don’t you?” Roman asked, pleading. “You know that I… that I was the one who should have died instead of you. I was always less than you, wasn’t I? I worried so much about being less than Dima I didn’t even consider the finest man I’d ever known was looking to me for guidance.”

He paused, struggling to swallow.

“How did you manage it?” he asked desperately, pressing his fingertips into the earth. “Becoming the kind of person you were, it couldn’t have been easy. Maybe I’m the one who had it easy.” He let his chin fall. “Maybe that’s why I was so much less than you, in the end.”

There was a breeze that rustled the trees around him, stirring the leaves, and Roman let out a matching sigh, letting it carry on the wind.

“Lev,” he said, and then looked up, catching the sound of something coming from the motion of the trees.

Roman paused, straining his ears, and after a moment, he blinked, catching a vision of white from somewhere out of sight; a dress, he thought. A dress, long dark hair, a pair of grey-blue eyes, framed by darkened lashes—

“Sasha,” Roman said, blinking as he looked into the trees. “Sasha, is… is that you?”

He got to his feet, stumbling towards her. “Sasha, forgive me,” he said, scrambling in her direction as she took a step back, brow furrowing. “Please, forgive me,” he begged, and stumbled in the weeds and vines, dropping to his knees. “Please.” Every few breaths, “Please, Sasha, please.”

She only watched him, face eerily frozen, the ghost of her still and unmoved.

Was it a dream? A nightmare?

A haunting?

Roman struggled to his feet, half-running, and glanced over his shoulder. She didn’t follow; didn’t take her eyes from him. She only watched him go, and he picked up his feet, running and running, until there was nowhere left to run.

IV. 12

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