Page 121 of The Immortal’s Mark

“Might be?” I say carefully.

“Don’t push it.” But her hand finds mine in the darkness. Cold fingers. Warm grip. “We should sleep. Tomorrow will be complicated.”

“Today was complicated.”

“Today was revelations about centuries-old conspiracies, apocalyptic rituals, and your mother’s comb being a villain’s wedding gift.” Her voice carries a ghost of her usual humor, and something in my chest loosens. This is who she is—the woman who jokes when the world is ending, who uses laughter like armor, who has survived eight centuries by refusing to let anything be as heavy as it should be. “Tomorrow might just be bandits. That would be refreshing.”

I find myself almost smiling. “Your optimism is concerning.”

“My optimism is survival.” She shifts closer, her warmth pressing against my side. Her fingers interlace with mine, and she holds on with a grip that suggests she has no intention of letting go. “Sleep. I’ll keep watch first.”

“Lián—”

“Don’t argue. You got stabbed.”

“It was barely a scratch.”

“It was a sword wound. I watched it happen. I—” She stops. When she speaks again, her voice is softer. “I did not like watching it happen. So let me keep watch. Let me make sure it doesn’t happen again tonight.”

I should argue. I am the emperor. I should insist on taking the first watch, on protecting her, on maintaining some vestige of the control that has defined my existence for twenty-two years.

But her hand is in mine. And her head is on my shoulder. And she is warm and alive and here, despite seven hundred years of fate trying to make her a sacrifice.

“Wake me in two hours,” I say.

“I’ll wake you when I’m tired.”

“That is not—”

“That is how this works now. We take care of each other.” Her thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Taking care of each other?”

I think of the Hungering King. Of love that became hunger that became destruction. Of a man who wanted so badly to keep what he loved that he unmade himself in the trying.

I do not want to be that.

I want to be the kind of love that lets go when it has to. The kind that protects without possessing. The kind that chooses, every day, to stay.

“Yes,” I say. “That’s what this is.”

She presses closer. Her breathing evens out. The fire burns down to embers.

And for now—for this one night in the ruins of an ancient temple, with the weight of prophecy and conspiracy and fate pressing down on us both—for now, that is enough.