Page 10 of The Immortal’s Mark

She tilts her head. Something in her expression shifts—still amused, but watchful now. Calculating.

Good.

I can work with calculating.

“You are going to help me find who paid for this,” I continue. “The trail you mentioned—you will follow it. The conspirators in my court, the money that funded this attempt, the source behind the sources. You will uncover all of it.”

“And in exchange?”

“You live.”

She considers this. Her chains clink softly as she shifts position on the bench.

“An interesting offer,” she says. “Unusual, for an emperor. Most rulers in your position would simply torture the information out of me. More traditional. More satisfying, I imagine, for someone who was recently poisoned.”

“Would torture work?”

“No.” She smiles. “But they usually try anyway.”

“I do not waste time on ineffective methods.”

“Ah.” The smile widens. “A practical emperor. How refreshing.”

I should end this conversation. I have made my offer; she can accept or refuse, and either way I should return to the war chamber, to my advisors, to the endless work of ruling an empire that someone is actively trying to destabilize. I have indulged this… whatever this is… long enough.

I do not move.

“Why?” The question escapes before I can stop it. “Why take the contract? Why risk coming here?”

She is quiet for a moment. The longest she has been quiet since I entered. When she speaks again, the relentless humor has dimmed—not gone, but banked, like a fire settling into coals.

“Because I have been alive for eight centuries, Your Majesty. Because I have died six hundred and forty-three times and woken up six hundred and forty-three times and not one of those deaths has been permanent.” She pauses. “Because I am very, very tired. And I thought, perhaps, an emperor with dragons might finally be dangerous enough to make it stick.”

The words land like stones in still water. I watch the ripples spread.

She wanted to die. She came here hoping I would be capable of giving her the one thing she cannot give herself.

And instead, she killed me. And I did not stay dead. And now we are two impossible things, facing each other across dungeon bars, both of us failures at the one death that should have mattered.

Interesting, Tianlong says again. But this time, there is no humor in it. This time, the word carries the weight of something ancient and knowing—a dragon’s recognition of significance beyond mortal understanding.

What do you know? I ask him.

Not enough. Not yet. A pause. But I will say this, little flame: do not let her leave.

I was not planning to.

The thought surfaces before I can examine it, and I push it aside. There will be time later—for the journal, for meditation, for the quiet work of understanding what is happening to my controlled existence.

For now, there is only this. Her. The offer hanging in the air between us.

“I have a proposition,” I say.

She leans forward slightly. The torchlight catches the angles of her face—the sharp features, the sharper eyes, the mouth that seems perpetually on the edge of a joke she has not yet told.

“I am listening.”

“You will be assigned as my shadow. Where I go, you go. Access to the court, to the records, to everything you need to trace the conspiracy. In exchange, you help me find the traitors, and when it is done…”