Page 4 of The Immortal’s Mark

My feet stop.

Every instinct I’ve honed in eight hundred years—every survival trick, every danger sense, every screaming voice of experience—tells me to keep moving. Nothing that feels like this is ever good news. Nothing—

I turn anyway.

The emperor is rising.

Golden fire flickers beneath his skin. Crawling up his throat like veins of molten metal, tracing the line of his jaw, burning behind his eyes where the light was dying thirty seconds ago.

He should be dead. White Lotus doesn’t fail. I’ve used it on men twice his size, men who fought wars and survived plagues and built up tolerances to every poison in every apothecary’s nightmare. I’ve watched them all convulse and foam and go still.

He stands.

Not convulsing. Not foaming. Standing, like a man who’s decided death isn’t something that applies to him. The fire settles beneath his skin—banked, not extinguished. A beast curling back into sleep, satisfied that its point has been made.

The grey pallor fades. Color returns to his face—warm, alive, impossible.

He’s alive.

He’s alive, and my entire understanding of how poisons work, how people die, how the world is supposed to function, is crumbling three steps from the servants’ corridor.

The court has gone silent. Five hundred people frozen mid-scream, mid-scramble, staring at their emperor who just died and didn’t.

My heart does something wrong. Skips, stutters, forgets the rhythm it’s kept for eight hundred years. My hand is frozen halfway to the knife at my belt, fingers forgetting how to close.

I’ve seen a lot of impossible things. I’ve been an impossible thing since before most of these people’s grandparents were born.

I have no category for this.

And then—

His eyes find mine.

Across the hall. Through the silent crowd, the guards who’ve forgotten how to move, the ministers frozen with their mouths hanging open.

His gaze cuts through all of it—through the smoke and the shock and the five hundred bodies between us—and lands on me.

Me. In the shadows. Where no one has looked directly at me in three centuries.

I’m good at being invisible. Not magic—just practice. Eight hundred years of practice. The art of being unremarkable, of sliding out of memory the moment someone looks away. I’ve made a career of it. A very long, very successful career of standing in rooms full of people and being nothing but furniture, background, a face no one remembers five seconds after they’ve seen it.

He sees me anyway.

Like he knew where I was the whole time. Like he’s been waiting for me to look back.

Something in my chest goes tight. My weight shifts toward him without my permission, and that’s—that’s wrong, that’s not how this works, I don’t lean toward people, I lean toward exits—

“Assassin.”

His voice carries. Not loud—quiet, actually, the kind of quiet that makes a room listen. Weighted. Certain. The tone measured and chosen, not a syllable wasted.

The voice of a man who’s spent his whole life being obeyed.

“Stay.”

One word. A command. The kind of word that stops armies, ends rebellions, reshapes the fate of nations.

My legs have better sense than my brain.