Page 96 of One For my Enemy

“Oh? In what way has he wronged you?” Bryn asked, feigning impassivity.

She gave him a doubtful look that read, in no uncertain terms, that she had no interest in getting personal. “Try again, Bridge.”

“Fine.” He leaned back, considering it. “Why Koschei?”

“Think of it as trickle-down vengeance,” Sasha advised. “When Koschei is brought down, his sons will go down with him.” She paused.“Son,”she amended quietly, and glanced at where Roman had been.

A chuckle stretched out and leapt from Bryn’s throat.

“Rusalka,” he murmured to her, and she gave him a warning smile.

“He isn’t wrong about the suffering I want for him,” she said, referencing Roman’s vacancy. “He’s going mad, it seems, which is highly welcome and an added plus. But he certainly isn’t wrong.”

“You won’t need much to destroy him, if that’s really what you want,” Bryn advised. “He’s falling apart at the seams. I imagine you could easily kill him now and have it done with.”

“Death is no suitable punishment for him,” Sasha said darkly. “I’ve done it myself, and I’m no worse for wear.”

“Aren’t you?” Bryn asked, sparing her some skepticism this time, though she was much too good to flinch.

“Death,” she said, “isn’t enough. I want him to have what he loves most ripped away from him, and I want him to know it was his own doing.” She leveled her grey gaze at Bryn. “Don’t you think that’s justified?”

“I hardly have any expertise in the matter of vengeance,” Bryn said. “I keep to a very specific code of not getting personally involved in anything.”

“Is that why you love things and not people?” Sasha asked.

“Ah, no, that’s a separate matter. I’m materialistic by nature,” Bryn said. “Treasure, et cetera. Fae inclinations.”

“I meant power,” Sasha corrected. “Magic. You chase the things you don’t have because, why? You deserve them?” she asked him, guessing. “You’ve never had a place in this world, and so you want all the places in all the worlds? Is that it?”

“You underestimate me,” Bryn sighed. “I’m hardly so superficial.”

She watched him for a moment, all darkened eyes and tilted mouth.

“What does power look like to you, Bridge?” Sasha asked eventually. “When I was a girl, it looked like my mother. Like my sister Marya.” Her gaze slid carefully over his face. “I remember creeping downstairs as a little girl to my mother’s workshop and seeing the beautiful things my sister would create, but it took me years to understand that wasn’t her power. It’s magic, yes, and it’s talent and ability, butpoweris knowing what you’re capable of and choosing if and when you give it to the world. Power is knowing when to be delicate and soft, like my sister, and when to make foolish, small-minded people think beauty and goodness are the same. She has this look,” Sasha said, lost in her reverie now, “where she makes you feel you are the only thing in the universe. She can make you feel like you are resilient; like you are enormous, and omnipotent, and that’s where her power comes from. Her power comes from knowing she can makeyoufeel powerful, and while you’re sitting idly in her gaze, she can crush it, and crush you, and tear everything out from under you.”

Sasha returned her attention to Bryn, fixing him with a smile. “My sister Marya is the most powerful person I’ve ever met,” she said, and Bryn, much as he hated to say it, had to agree with her. He knew precisely what Sasha spoke of when it came to Marya, having long admired it himself; having longed for it, he amended internally, himself.

“It is not superficial,” Sasha told him, “to want it. Whatever she has. Whatever she is.”

Her attention shifted to the desk drawer again.

“I can help you come close,” Sasha murmured. “I can help you use what you have, if you find me the connection I need.”

Bryn considered it. Marya had already promised him the same.

Still, it could be interesting to watch.

“I think I have just the person,” he mused aloud, and slowly, Sasha smiled.

IV. 14

(It is the Nightingale, Reprise.)

“I hear you’re looking for me,” came a voice behind him, and Dimitri turned to find Marya waiting near the window of his bedroom. She looked unchanged, not at all like someone who’d unnaturally clawed her way back to the living; she appeared as she normally did.

Or, at least, as Dimitriassumedshe normally did, though outside the occasion of her death it had been some time since he’d known her. He wasn’t sure which version of Marya Antonova stood before him now, but he imagined he caught little echoes of the familiar.

Her hair was growing long again, he noted. Before she’d taken on her signature hairstyle—those meticulous 1940s waves—she’d worn her hair long and loose, and a prior version of him would fall asleep with his nose buried in the waves of it, breathing in nothing but the petal-soft scent of her.

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