Page 177 of The Immortal’s Mark

Then the void dissolves.

Air.

Lungs.

Weight.

The world rushes back like a wave I didn’t ask for, and I’m gasping, choking, my body remembering how to breathe in great heaving gulps that hurt my chest and burn my throat and feel like the most beautiful pain I’ve ever experienced.

I’m alive.

I’m alive.

And Ren is above me.

His face fills my vision. His hands are on my shoulders, my arms, my face—everywhere at once, like he’s trying to make sure I’m real. Like he’s been holding me while I was dead and he can’t stop even now that I’m back.

“You came back.” His voice is wrecked. Stripped raw. Nothing measured about it, nothing controlled. Just relief and terror and something underneath that sounds a lot like love.

“I wasn’t supposed to.”

The words come out without permission. Honest. Too honest. I’m shaking—not from the resurrection, not from the cold—from something else. From the confusion still rattling through me.

“What do you mean?” His hands cup my face. Careful. Like I matter. Like I might break.

I don’t tell him I won’t break. I like this too much.

“I chose to stay dead.” My voice sounds wrong to my own ears. Small. Scared. Not like me at all. “I meant it. I didn’t have a plan, Ren. I didn’t have some loophole. I didn’t have one of my clever tricks or my backup escapes or any survival-instincts telling me how to get out of it.”

I take a breath. It shudders.

“I just—I chose you. And I thought that was the end.”

He pulls me close.

No words. No measured response. No emperor’s composure.

He just pulls me into his arms and holds me like I’m the only real thing in the world. Like he’s been holding me while I was dead and he can’t stop now that I’m alive. Like if he lets go I might disappear again.

His heart beats against my chest. Fast. Desperate.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I don’t understand what happened.” I’m talking into his shoulder, my voice muffled by silk and warmth and the smell of him—sandalwood and ink and something underneath that’s just him. “The ritual was working. He had me. I could feel it. And then something just—stopped it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” I pull back enough to see his face. Still wet. Still wrecked. Still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and isn’t that just the cruelest joke of all. “He saw something. The Hungering King. He looked at me and he saw something I couldn’t see and his face just—”

I shake my head. Try to find words for the way an eleven-century-old monster had crumbled.

“He couldn’t say it. Whatever it was, he couldn’t make himself say it. Something about the blessing—her mother’s blessing—the parts he couldn’t bear to read—”

Ren’s hands tighten on me. “He was there? In—”

“The void. The space between. He was waiting.” I laugh, and it sounds wrong. Too sharp. Too close to crying. “All his waiting and I ruined it by not dying correctly. Can you imagine? Eight hundred years of practice and I still can’t stick the landing.”

He doesn’t laugh.