Page 107 of The Immortal’s Mark

The pins are borrowed. Not stolen. I’m trying to be good now. They slide into my hair with the weight of unfamiliarity—two silver birds, wings spread, the kind of thing a successful merchant might buy his wife for their tenth anniversary. I don’t know whose anniversary they commemorated. Probably better not to ask.

The silk settles against my legs like a warning. Too light. Too soft. The fabric moves when I breathe, shifting against my skin with every motion. There’s nowhere to hide knives in this. No reinforced seams, no concealed pockets, no place for the small sharp things that have kept me alive for eight centuries.

I hate this.

I hate how exposed I feel. Hate how the silk clings and flows and makes me look like someone who has never needed to run, to fight, to kill.

I hate how it makes me look like someone worth looking at.

I don’t look in the mirror long. Just long enough to confirm I look like someone’s wife. Someone who belongs at a lantern festival. Someone who has never killed anyone, never died, never woken up in her own blood wondering why she keeps coming back.

“Are you planning to emerge?”

“Give me a moment.”

“You’ve had several.”

“Give me more.”

From somewhere, probably near Ren’s collar, Tianlong decides it’s time to commentate on my life once again. “She is stalling. It is painfully obvious.”

“I am preparing.”

“You are afraid he will look at you and feel things. He will. This is the point.”

I’m going to drown that dragon in his teapot.

I take a breath. Count to three. Smooth the silk one more time, though it doesn’t need smoothing. Touch the pins, though they’re not going anywhere.

And, finally—

Step out from behind the screen.

He stops breathing.

I know because I’m watching for it—the expansion of his chest, the rhythm of someone who’s just been handed something unexpected. He was expecting the merchant wife. He got… whatever this is.

His hands, which had been adjusting his sleeve, go very still. His eyes, which had been focused on something practical and emperor-like, snap to me and don’t move.

The silence stretches.

It’s the wrong kind of silence. The kind that makes me want to fill it with noise—a joke, a threat, something to break whatever is happening in the space between us.

“Say something.” My voice comes out sharper than intended. “You’re staring.”

“I—” He clears his throat. Tries again. “You look—”

“If you say ‘nice,’ I will stab you. I’m not currently armed, but I will improvise.”

“I was going to say like the reason empires fall.”

The words land in my chest like something thrown.

My face does something I can’t control. Something that has no business happening to an eight-hundred-year-old assassin in borrowed silk and someone else’s hairpins. Something that probably looks like vulnerability, or worse, like hope.

“That’s…” I search for the appropriate response. Deflection. Mockery. Something armor-shaped. Find nothing. “Acceptable.”

His mouth twitches. That almost-smile that’s more devastating than anyone’s full grin. The one that says he knows exactly what he did and is quietly pleased about it.