Page 104 of The Immortal’s Mark

“She did,” I say.

“I like her more every day,” Tianlong says.

I open my mouth to defend myself. To explain that this was strategic, that I was maintaining our cover, that I did not cross a crowded room because some merchant’s son put his hand where my hand should—

She kisses me.

Not like the first time. This is slower. Deliberate. Her hand cups my jaw, fingers gentle against my cheek, and she kisses me like a question—like she is asking something she does not know how to say out loud.

What are we doing?

Is this real?

Do you want this too?

I answer the only way I know how. My hand finds the small of her back. I pull her closer. I kiss her like I have been dying to kiss her since the moment she opened her eyes this morning and found me watching.

She tastes like tea. Like wanting. Like the first uncomplicated thing I have felt in twenty-two years.

When she pulls back, her thumb traces my cheekbone. Her eyes are soft in a way that makes my chest ache.

“We should talk about this,” she says.

“We should.”

Neither of us talks about it.

We walk back to the inn in silence, her hand brushing mine. Twice, my fingers reach for hers. Twice, I stop myself. The space between us feels different now. Smaller. More dangerous. Full of things neither of us is ready to name.

That night, she does not face away.

She faces me.

We lie on our separate sides of the bed, Dumpling a warm weight across our feet, and she is looking at me in the darkness. I can see the gleam of her eyes, the shape of her face in the moonlight through the shuttered window.

Only inches between us. The same as every other night. Except now I can see her, and she can see me, and neither of us is pretending to sleep.

“This is dangerous,” I say.

“Yes.”

“I do not—” The words catch. I have never been good at this. At wanting things out loud. At admitting that I am more than duty and discipline and the weight of a crown I never asked for. “I am not certain I know how to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Want something for myself.”

She is quiet for a long moment. The moonlight shifts across her face, and I watch the thoughts move behind her eyes—all the centuries of running, all the people she has lost, all the reasons she should climb out of this bed and disappear into the night.

“I don’t do this,” she says finally. Her voice is rough. Unguarded in a way I have never heard. “I don’t stay. I don’t let people matter.”

“I know.”

“It always ends the same way. They die. They leave. They grow old while I stay exactly like this, and then I’m alone again, and every time—” She stops. Swallows. “Every time, I tell myself never again.”

“I know.”

Her hand moves across the sheet. Slowly. Deliberately. Finds mine.