Page 124 of The Immortal’s Mark

“I’m not going to let him have you,” he says quietly.

“You might not get a choice.”

He just stares at me, and I see something change in his eyes. A promise, maybe. Or a vow.

I fold the manifests carefully, slide them into my pack. Evidence. Proof. Liu and Huang, their names signed clear as confession.

Eight hundred years of survival instincts are screaming at me to run.

I don’t move.

The heat of the fire touches my face, my hands. The cold of the coming night presses against my back. Between them, I sit and watch the flames dance and try not to think about anything at all.

Tianlong has curled on a rock near the flames, eyes closed, very deliberately not watching us. He’s about as subtle as a thunderstorm.

Dumpling vanished into the tall grass along the riverbank the moment we stopped. Hunting moths, probably. Or communing with the darkness. With Dumpling, you never really know.

I sit across the fire from Ren and feel the words building in my chest like pressure before a storm. They’ve been there all day, growing, taking up space I don’t have to spare.

I’ve been rehearsing arguments for miles. Good ones. Logical ones. The kind of arguments that make perfect sense if you don’t look at them too closely, if you don’t notice the fear stitched into every word.

I’m making excellent arguments. He’s going to agree any moment now.

Any moment.

“I should leave.”

They come out too fast. Too practiced. Like I’m reciting lines from a play I’ve been performing.

“If he wants me—the Hungering King—I’m putting you in danger just by being here.” The words tumble over each other, filling the silence before anything else can slip through. Before he can say something that makes this harder. “He’s patient. He’s had over a thousand years to learn patience. Longer than I’ve been alive—dying—whatever it is I do. He can wait for an opportunity, wait for me to get comfortable, wait for me to stop looking over my shoulder, and when he finds his moment—”

“At least with me, you have—”

“What? An army?” I laugh. It sounds wrong. Too sharp. Too bright. Like glass breaking and pretending to be bells. “I’ve killed armies. I’ve faced down dynasties. I watched the Ming fall and I’m still here. Whatever you’re about to offer, I promise you, it’s not going to be enough. The smart thing, the logical thing, the thing that anyone with half a brain would do, is for me to disappear. I’m good at disappearing. Eight hundred years of practice. World champion. I just—”

“Me.”

I stop.

One word.

Quiet.

Not a command—and I know what his commands sound like. I’ve heard them delivered at court, to generals, they fill the space between heartbeats until nothing else can breathe. His commands leave no space for argument or refusal.

This isn’t that.

This is softer. Smaller. More dangerous than anything I’ve ever faced.

This is just… him.

Offering himself.

Not his empire. Not his army. Not the weight of the dragon throne or the power of ten thousand soldiers or all the resources of a dynasty that’s stood for three hundred years.

Just him.

The fire crackles. The river moves, dark and endless, not caring about empires or curses or two people sitting on its bank trying to figure out what they are to each other. Somewhere in the grass, Dumpling yowls at something only he can see.