Page 12 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 3

The Devil’s Bargain

Chapter 643: In which our heroine discovers that some cages are made of silk, and some chains are worse when they’re removed.

The chains fall, and I’m not sure what to do with my hands.

Strange. Eight hundred years and I still haven’t figured out what freedom’s supposed to feel like. The iron hits the stone floor with a clatter that echoes through Cell 14, and my wrists are bare, and the guard who unlocked them is staring at me like I might bite.

Fair. I might.

I touch my throat instead. Smooth skin where there should be scar tissue, where there should be the memory of a crossbow bolt punching through cartilage and spine. Twelve hours ago, give or take. My body’s already forgotten. Erased the evidence like it never happened.

Eight hundred years of dying and regeneration still feels like cheating.

The guard who watched me die is the color of old parchment. His hands haven’t stopped shaking since he fitted the key into the lock. Poor bastard probably drew the short straw—someone had to unchain the prisoner who came back from the dead, and apparently that someone is a boy who looks barely old enough to hold his sword without cutting himself.

“Problem?” I ask.

He flinches. Doesn’t answer.

The emperor watches this exchange with the particular stillness I’m beginning to recognize as his default setting. Standing at the cell entrance in black robes embroidered with dragons so subtle you’d miss them if you weren’t looking, hands clasped behind his back, every line of his body saying I have all the time in the world and I’m choosing to spend it here.

We’ve made a deal. In this cell, in the dark, with the smell of torch smoke and old fear hanging between us.

I agreed. Partly because the alternative was being executed every morning until I cooperated, and partly because—

Well.

Partly because he looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving, and I haven’t been looked at like that in longer than I want to admit.

And there it is. The traitorous little part of my brain waving its little stupid flag: He sees us! He SEES us!

Shut up, brain. That part gets no vote. That part is why Death #89 happened. And #114. And the one in Jiangzhou I still can’t think about without wanting to drink.

“Shall we?” he says.

I rub my wrists where the chains were. Already fading. Always fading.

“Lead the way, Your Majesty.”

We walk.Up from the dungeons, through corridors that transition from rough stone to smooth, from damp to dry, from the smell of fear to the smell of incense and old wood and the particular mustiness of a palace that’s been standing since before my grandmother’s grandmother was born.

Assuming I had a grandmother.

Assuming I remember.

I don’t. The curse took that along with everything else.

The emperor walks like someone who’s never had to rush. Measured steps. Shoulders level. That impossible stillness even in motion. I fall in beside him—not behind, not ahead, beside—and wait to see if he objects.

He doesn’t.

Interesting.

Guards watch us pass. Their faces cycle through a predictable sequence: confusion, fear, more confusion, a flash of something like horror when they recognize me. Word has spread, apparently. The assassin who died is walking beside the emperor, unchained, unguarded, like she belongs there.

I catalog their expressions. File them away for later. The court will have opinions about this arrangement, and opinions in a court like this tend to have sharp edges.