Page 143 of The Immortal’s Mark

“But I’m going to be careful anyway.”

“I know that too.”

He kisses me.

Not desperate, not urgent. This is slower. This is here, in his chambers, where it means something, where I’ve just agreed to let it mean something.

I kiss him back. I let myself want it. I stop waiting for the other shoe to drop, just for a minute, just for this.

His hands slide into my hair. I arch into him, closer, and he makes a sound against my mouth that I’ve learned means I’m doing something right. We’ve had six weeks to figure out what works. We’re good at this part. The physical part. Bodies are easy.

It’s everything else that’s hard.

He walks me backward. My shoulders hit the edge of his desk—the other edge, not the Dumpling edge—and he lifts me onto it without breaking the kiss, and I wrap my legs around him because I can, because I want to, because I’m done pretending I don’t want every part of this I can get.

“Wait,” I manage, between kisses. “The cat is watching.”

Dumpling stares at us from his warm spot by the lamp. Unblinking. The expression of a creature who has seen many things and judges all of them.

“I’m not doing this with an audience.”

Ren doesn’t argue. He just crosses to the desk, scoops up the ball of offended orange fur, and deposits him in the corridor with the efficiency of a man who commands armies. The door clicks shut. A muffled yowl of betrayal filters through.

“He’s going to make you pay for that.”

“Probably.”

“I’m just warning you. Cats hold grudges.”

“So do emperors.” He’s already crossing back to me, and the look in his eyes makes my train of thought derail entirely. “Where were we?”

“You were—” His mouth finds my throat. “That. We were there.“

We make it to the bed eventually. His robes come off somewhere between the desk and the mattress, mine shortly after, and then it’s just skin and warmth and the particular pleasure of knowing someone’s body well enough to make them fall apart.

I know how to make him breathe harder. He knows the scar on my hip, the one from Death #412, and he traces it with his thumb before he kisses it like he’s memorizing the shape of old pain. I know the tension he carries in his shoulders and how to work it loose. He knows I talk too much when I’m nervous and that the talking stops when he does something right.

He does a lot of things right.

Slow. We go slow, because we can, because there’s no guard rotation to beat or mission to maintain or pretense that this is anything other than what it is. His hands on my skin. My nails down his back. The way he says my name like it means something, like I’m someone worth naming.

And when he finally moves inside me, I stop thinking entirely.

There’s just this. Us. The bed that costs more than villages. The lamplight making gold shadows on the ceiling. His weight, his warmth, the rhythm we’ve learned together. I hold on and let myself have it—all of it, without the jokes, without the armor, without the part of me that’s always calculating the exit.

I stay.

My head rises and falls with his breathing, my ear pressed to his chest where his heartbeat thuds slow and steady against my cheek. The lamp has burned down to embers, casting the room in pools of gold and shadow, and somewhere beyond the silk curtains the palace has gone quiet in the way that means it’s either very late or very early.

His arm is warm and heavy across my back. His breathing has gone deep and even. There’s a looseness in him I’ve only seen a handful of times—after moments where survival stopped being a question and something else took its place.

“I didn’t think I could have this,” I say.

Quiet. Almost hoping he won’t hear.

He hears anyway. “Have what?”

I don’t answer right away. I don’t know if I have the words.