Page 127 of The Immortal’s Mark

This one is choice.

Decision.

Deliberate surrender.

His mouth is warm against mine. His hands steady on my waist—not holding me in place, not trying to keep me from running. Just there. Present. Solid. Like he’d wait forever for me to decide what I want.

I want this.

I want him.

I want mornings full of arguments and his terrible poetry and the way he looks at me like I’m something worth looking at. Like I’m not just a curse wearing a woman’s body, not just a weapon, not just a convenient assassin. Like I’m someone. Like I’m worth staying for.

I kiss him like I mean it.

Like I’m not running.

Like I’m staying.

Because… I am.

We sleep tangled together.

My head on his chest. His arm around my waist. The fire burned down to embers, painting the darkness in warm orange light. His heartbeat steady beneath my ear—slow and sure and alive in a way that feels like a promise.

Like we’ve been doing this for years. Like we’ll do it for years more.

The river sings its endless song. Somewhere a nightbird calls and another answers. The stars wheel overhead, the same stars I’ve watched for eight centuries, and tonight they look different. Brighter. Like they’re paying attention.

Dumpling, affronted by the reduced space in what he clearly considers his bedroll, yowls once—an announcement of profound betrayal—and stalks over to Tianlong’s warming stone with the dignity of a dethroned monarch.

The tiny dragon opens one golden eye as an orange cat begins kneading his scales with single-minded determination.

“The creature is sitting on me.”

“That’s his love language.”

A long pause. Dumpling settles into a loaf shape directly on Tianlong’s coils, purring like a small, furry earthquake. The ancient dragon who has survived centuries, who has watched dynasties rise and fall, who has incinerated armies—lies pinned beneath a cat who believes himself royalty.

“…I suppose I have survived worse.”

I smile against Ren’s chest. Don’t bother hiding it.

His breathing has evened out—not quite asleep, but close. Drifting. The tension that lives permanently in his shoulders, that I’ve never seen him without, has finally, finally eased. He looks younger like this. Softer. Like the boy who was never supposed to be emperor, who just wanted to write poetry and be left alone.

I could get used to this.

The warmth of him. The steady rhythm of his heart. The way his arm tightens around me when I shift, unconscious and instinctive, like he’s afraid I’ll disappear even in his sleep.

I’m not going to disappear.

Not this time.

I don’t know what happens next. The Hungering King is still out there—patient, hungry, waiting for his moment the way he’s waited for centuries. Prince Liu and Huang, their signatures on manifests, funding a cult from inside the palace. The ritual that needs a willing death, fueled by love.

I’m trying not to think about what that means. About the fact that I’m falling for someone, and the monster hunting me needs exactly that.

But right now—with the fire dying down and the river singing its endless song and a man who offered himself like it was nothing, like he was nothing, breathing soft and warm beneath me—

Right now, none of that matters.

Right now, I’m staying.

For the first time in eight hundred years, I’m choosing to stay.

It might be the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.

It might be worth it.