Page 140 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 23

The Waiting

Chapter 644: In which our heroine learns that happiness is its own kind of terror.

The palace has too many corridors.

I’ve been here two weeks and I still get turned around between the Moon Garden and my quarters, which is embarrassing for someone who’s infiltrated seventeen different royal compounds over the centuries. But those were jobs. In and out. Kill someone or steal something or both, then disappear before anyone learned my face.

This is different. This is staying. Two weeks of staying in one place and my body’s already protesting—queasy mornings, weird fatigue, like eight hundred years of running have left me allergic to standing still.

My feet know the way to Ren’s chambers before my brain catches up. That’s becoming a problem.

I stop in the corridor outside his door. The guards pretend not to see me, which means they absolutely see me and have been briefed on exactly who I am and why I’m allowed to wander the imperial wing at night. Wonderful. By morning the whole palace will know the emperor’s assassin-turned-something is lurking outside his rooms like a stray cat deciding whether to come in from the cold.

Dumpling, currently draped over my shoulder like an orange scarf, mrrows impatiently.

“I’m thinking,” I tell him.

He meows again. Judgmental.

“It’s different here. On the road we were just—it didn’t mean anything. Anyone could share a bed at an inn. No one was watching. No one was counting.”

Dumpling’s tail flicks against my collarbone. He doesn’t care about my catastrophizing. He wants the warm spot on Ren’s desk, the one next to the lamp where the heat pools just right for maximum cat comfort.

The door opens.

Ren stands there in house robes, informal, the kind of soft grey silk that costs more than most people’s annual income but looks like he just threw on whatever was closest. His hair is loose. There’s ink on his fingers. He’s been working.

“You’ve been standing out here for five minutes,” he says.

“I was communing with your guards. Lovely fellows. Very dedicated to their posts.”

“They sent a runner.”

Of course they did. “Snitches.”

His mouth does the almost-thing. Not quite a smile, but close. I’ve learned to read that twitch like a tell in a card game—it means I’ve amused him, which is more satisfying than it should be.

“Come in,” he says. “Unless you prefer the corridor.”

I should make a joke. Something about how corridors have excellent acoustics, or how I’m developing a fondness for standing awkwardly outside doors, or how the guards are clearly betting on whether I’ll actually go inside. I don’t. I walk past him into the room, Dumpling and all, and the door closes behind us with a soft click that sounds louder than it should.

His chambers smell like sandalwood and ink and him. I’ve gotten used to that smell over six weeks of shared beds in anonymous inns, that one disastrous night in a barn when the rain wouldn’t stop and we slept in the hayloft with the horses snoring below us. I know what he smells like when he’s sleeping, when he’s just woken up, when he’s been working for hours and the ink has soaked into his skin.

But this is different.

This is here. The palace. The Dragon Emperor’s private chambers, where the sheets most definitely cost more than my entire wardrobe and some of the jade carvings on the desk are older than me. Where the servants who made the bed know whose bed it is, and where staying the night means something it didn’t mean on the road.

On the road we were just two people. Here he’s the emperor. And I’m… what? The assassin who failed to kill him? The immortal disaster who somehow ended up in his orbit? The woman who’s been sharing his bed for six weeks and still doesn’t have a name for what we are?

“You’re thinking too loud,” Ren says.

“I’m always thinking too loud. Character flaw. One of many.”

He crosses to the desk, moves a stack of papers so Dumpling can claim his spot. The cat flows off my shoulder like orange water, settles into the warm pool of lamplight, and begins grooming himself with the air of someone who’s exactly where he belongs.

Must be nice.