Page 43 of The Immortal’s Mark

We’re running out of cultists. That’s good. My arm is bleeding more than I’d like, and he’s favoring his left side where someone got lucky. But we’re winning. The odds are shifting.

Then I see the rooftop.

Crossbow. Trained on his back.

He doesn’t see it. He’s finishing the last two in front of him, blade singing through the air, and the archer on the roof is drawing back and there’s no time to shout, no time to warn him, no time to think.

My body moves.

No.

The bolt takes me in the chest.

Center mass. Good shot. I’d be impressed if I weren’t busy dying.

I’m falling. Ground coming up fast. I’ve done this six hundred and forty-three times—forty-four now, I suppose—and you’d think I’d be used to it. The impact. The spreading warmth. The way the world goes grey at the edges and sounds come from very far away.

I’m not used to this part. The seeing. The knowing.

His face above me.

He caught me. I didn’t feel it happen, but I’m not on the ground—I’m in his arms, and he’s kneeling in the street, and there’s something in his face I’ve never seen before. Horror, yes. But something else. Something that looks like—

He’s saying something. I can’t hear it. The world is narrowing to a point of warmth spreading across my chest, familiar and awful, and his face, and his hands on me—careful, desperate, like I’m something that matters—and one clear thought:

I didn’t have to do that.

Eight hundred years. Six hundred and forty-three deaths before this one. I’ve died for money. For causes. For nothing at all. I’ve died stupid and I’ve died smart and I’ve died screaming and I’ve died silent.

But, I’ve never died for someone.

Never thrown myself between a bolt and a back. Never chosen someone else’s life over my own comfort. Never made my body move before my brain could catch up and explain that this was a bad idea, that emperors can find other assassins, that I don’t do this.

I did it anyway.

His face.

His hands.

He’s still talking. I want to tell him it’s fine. I want to make a joke—something about my professional reputation, something about how this is really going to complicate the investigation, something to make that look leave his eyes because it’s doing things to my chest that have nothing to do with the crossbow bolt.

I can’t make my mouth work. I can’t make anything work.

Just his face. Just the way he’s looking at me like I’ve broken something he didn’t know he had.

I didn’t have to do that.

I did it anyway.

Darkness.