Page 192 of The Immortal’s Mark

“I don’t know how to be someone’s father.”

I look up. His eyes are bright. Wet at the edges. The Emperor of the Jade Throne, crying in the morning light, and somehow that makes it easier to let the tears track down my own face.

“My family destroyed itself.” His voice is quiet. Careful, like he’s handling something fragile. “My brothers killed each other. I was twelve years old and everyone I loved was dead or had done the killing. What if that’s what family means for me? What if I don’t know how to build something that doesn’t—”

“Wait.”

His lips make an ‘O’, a word caught in his mouth.

“You said family.”

He blinks. “What?”

“You said family.” My voice catches on it, cracks on it. “You called this— us— a family.”

“That’s what it is.”

“I know, I just—”

Eight hundred years. Eight hundred years of burying everyone I ever loved. Eight hundred years of leaving before I had to watch them leave first. Eight hundred years of telling myself that alone was safer, that alone was better, that alone was the only thing I could survive.

“I haven’t had one of those in a very long time.”

He pulls me into him. I let myself be pulled. My face against his chest, his heartbeat under my ear, his arms around me like he’s trying to hold all my broken pieces together.

“You have one now.”

I laugh. It comes out wet, broken, nothing like a laugh at all.

“I’m crying because you used a noun correctly. This is humiliating.”

“It’s human.”

“Same thing.”

We stay like that. I don’t know how long. The light shifts across the floor, warm to warmer, morning bleeding toward midday. My tears dry on his shirt. His hand moves in slow circles on my back. At some point Dumpling jumps onto the bed and tries to wedge himself between us, offended at being left out of whatever’s happening.

I don’t pull away.

The running instinct doesn’t come. I keep waiting for it—the familiar itch under my skin, the desperate need to go, to put distance between myself and anything that matters. It’s kept me alive for eight centuries. It’s the only response I know.

It doesn’t come.

“What if he has your mouth?”

His voice is soft against my hair. I don’t lift my head.

“She.”

“We don’t know—”

“I know.”

He pauses. Accepts it the way he accepts everything about me—without pushing.

“The bloodline?”

“All daughters. All the way back to Mei-Ling.” I shrug against his chest. “Don’t ask me how. I just know.”