Page 126 of The Immortal’s Mark

Something soft crawls under my ribs. Dangerous and warm and nothing like anything I’ve let myself feel in centuries. The kind of feeling I’ve spent centuries running from.

I let it stay.

In the grass, Dumpling emerges triumphant from his moth hunt with one of his victims stuck to his face. It flutters weakly against his whiskers, not quite dead, not quite escaped. He looks profoundly offended by its existence.

I notice. I don’t say anything.

The silence holds us both.

I climb into his lap.

No plan.

No strategy.

No carefully constructed argument about why this is a terrible idea.

Just—this. Just him.

Eight centuries of walls.

Coming down.

His hands find my waist. Careful. So careful. Like I’m something precious instead of something dangerous. Like I might break, this woman who’s died six hundred and forty-nine times and keeps coming back. Like I might run, this woman who’s spent centuries doing nothing but.

I’m not running.

Not anymore.

“I’m scared,” I say.

The words fall out. Unplanned. Unarmored. No joke attached, no deflection, no sharp edge to keep anyone from getting too close. The most honest thing I’ve said in decades, maybe centuries, and I don’t even mean to say it.

He looks at me.

Firelight on his face.

Shadow in the hollows of his cheeks.

Patience in the way he holds still, waits, doesn’t push. And underneath all of it—something bright, something terrified, something hopeful. Something I don’t have a name for.

“So am I.”

Something loosens in my chest. A knot I didn’t know was there, unwinding like silk, like rope, like everything I’ve been holding tight for eight hundred years. Not because he isn’t scared.

Because he is.

Because he’s here anyway. Offering himself to a woman who’s been running since before his grandparents were born. Terrified. And not leaving.

“Good.” I hear myself laugh, soft and strange. Nothing like my usual sharp-edged deflection. Nothing like armor. “Then we’re even.”

And I kiss him.

This kiss is different.

The first was surprise—his mouth on mine, both of us too shocked to pull away, too confused to understand what was happening. We stood there frozen. Two people caught in something neither of us expected.

The second was hunger—his hands in my hair, wanting something I refused to name. Desperate. Devouring.