Page 42 of The Immortal’s Mark

“Now he’s apparently not a myth anymore.” I turn to face him. “He was a story for most of my centuries. A warning mothers told children about wanting too much.” I gesture at the walls. “Myths don’t pay in silver. Myths don’t fund assassinations.”

He’s listening. Really listening, the way he does—taking in everything, sorting it, filing it away.

“You know things,” he says. Not a question.

“I’m eight hundred years old. I know a lot of things.” Most of them useless. This might not be.

We search the rest of the warehouse. More symbols. More evidence of worship. A list of names—coded, but I recognize the cipher. Hunger Cult membership, probably. I take it.

When we leave, the streets are too quiet.

I know something’s wrong before my mind catches up.

The absence hits first—market noise that should be there and isn’t. The street was busy when we entered. Now it’s empty, vendors vanished, doors shut. Now there are shadows in doorways that weren’t there before, and my instincts are screaming at me to move.

Too quiet. Hate that.

“Back,” I say, but it’s too late.

They come from three directions at once. Robes. Void symbols stitched into the fabric. Eyes that have looked at something too long and forgotten how to look away.

True believers. Worse than professionals. Professionals have self-preservation instincts.

The first one reaches me and I’m already moving—low strike to the knee, blade finding his throat before he finishes drawing his weapon. Professional. Efficient. My kind of ugly.

Second one. Bigger. He believes. Belief makes people stupid and dangerous, and this one’s swinging at me with the certainty that his god will guide his hand.

His god doesn’t. I do.

I twist inside his guard. Messy. Close. The kind of fighting that keeps you alive when pretty swordsmanship gets you dead. My knife finds his liver. He goes down.

Two more behind them. My blade in one, twist, pull, he screams. The other catches my arm—a line of fire across my bicep—and I repay him with steel through his eye.

Blood on my hands. Blood on my shirt, the one I actually liked. The familiar arithmetic of violence, and I’m moving through it without thinking because thinking is for people who haven’t been doing this for eight hundred years.

First wave down. I’m breathing hard. Arm’s bleeding. Could be worse.

I look for Ren.

He’s fighting.

Not hiding. Not cowering behind me like I expected, like emperors are supposed to do, like every instinct told me he would because that’s what rulers do—they let other people bleed for them.

He’s fighting. Efficient. Brutal. Pure soldier’s training, nothing ceremonial about it. Two against one and he’s winning, blade work precise and merciless. He moves like someone who’s done this before. Someone who knows exactly how much force it takes to put a man down.

He can fight.

Good.

More of them come. The second wave is here. We’re back to back now—I don’t remember moving toward him, don’t remember choosing it, but here we are. Unspoken coordination. He covers my blind spot. I cover his.

This shouldn’t feel natural.

I kill someone on his left. He kills someone on my right. We don’t need to talk. We don’t need to plan.

“You’re full of surprises,” I manage, between knife-work.

“Later,” he says, and there’s something in his voice—not fear, not anger, something closer to exhilaration—and then we’re both too busy staying alive to talk.