Page 3 of The Immortal’s Mark

Careful. Controlled. The kind of man who’s learned that everything he does is watched, weighed, recorded, remembered. The kind of man who can’t even eat dinner without considering the political implications.

The kind of man who’s very, very tired of being observed.

We have that in common, I think, and then push the thought away because that’s not useful.

I should look away. I’ve seen what I need for the job.

Shame, really. All that discipline, all that careful kindness he thinks nobody notices, and he’s still going to die tonight. He’ll never know why. Never know who paid for it. Never know that the woman who killed him spent a few extra minutes watching him be decent to a frightened servant girl.

Not my problem. Not my business.

The servant I bribed—Wen, her name is, third daughter of a merchant family with gambling debts that would make a dockside sailor blush—moves toward the high table with a fresh decanter of wine.

White Lotus extract. Tasteless. Colorless. Takes about three minutes to stop a heart, four to finish the job.

Lotus. That’s what Lián means—the name I gave myself after I forgot my real one. Lotuses grow in mud. Seemed fitting.

Painless, if that matters.

It doesn’t, but I like to think I’m professional about these things.

I’ve used it a hundred times. Never failed me once.

I settle deeper into my shadow and wait.

He lifts the cup.

Drinks.

I count. One minute. Wen retreats to the servants’ corridor, her part done, her debts about to be cleared. Two minutes. The minister on his left drones about grain shipments, or taxes, or some other tedium that will stop mattering in about sixty seconds.

The tremor starts in his hand.

Subtle. Just a flutter in the fingers wrapped around the cup’s stem. Most people wouldn’t notice. Most people don’t spend eight centuries learning to read bodies like texts, to see the tiny tells that separate the living from the dying.

The cup slips. He reaches for the table’s edge, misses. The color drains from his face—first pale, then grey, then the particular waxy shade that means a heart is stuttering, failing, forgetting how to beat.

He falls.

The court erupts.

Screaming. Scrambling. Ministers shouting for physicians they know won’t arrive in time. Guards rushing toward the throne like their swords can fight poison. The particular chaos of important people who’ve never seen death happen to someone who matters, who’ve spent their whole lives pretending that power makes you immortal.

A woman wails—theatrical, performative, already calculating how this grief can be leveraged. Cups shatter. Someone knocks over a brazier and suddenly there’s smoke mixing with the incense, ash drifting through the candlelight.

I’m already turning toward the servants’ corridor.

Job done. Payment waiting. Nothing left here but cleanup and accusations and the kind of political maneuvering that makes my teeth ache.

Time to disappear.

Three steps toward the corridor—

Heat.

On my back. Like standing too close to a bonfire. Like walking into a forge in summer, or holding your palm over a flame until the skin starts to tighten.

Impossible heat. The kind that shouldn’t exist in a room full of silk and frightened nobles and a dead man on a throne.