Page 49 of The Immortal’s Mark

“Watching me be dead.”

“Yes.”

She processes this. I watch her try to fit it into the categories she uses to understand the world—threat, asset, ally, enemy. I watch it fail to fit.

“Why?”

I do not have an answer. Or I have too many answers, and none of them are things I can say. How do I explain that watching her die felt like watching a part of myself die? How do I explain that the three hours of waiting were the longest of my life, longer than the civil war, longer than the night I bonded with Tianlong, longer than any of the endless moments of duty I have survived?

How do I explain that I would have waited three hundred hours if that was what it took?

Tell her, Tianlong suggests, and for once there is no mockery in his voice. Tell her why.

I cannot. The words do not exist. Or they exist but I do not know how to make my mouth form them, how to take the thing in my chest and translate it into sound.

“I do not know,” I say instead. “But I could not leave.”

She nods. Something in her expression shifts—a softening I have never seen, a crack she usually guards with violence and humor. She lies back against the pillows. My pillows. In my bed. The impropriety of it does not occur to me, or occurs and is dismissed as irrelevant.

“Stay,” she says. “Until I sleep. Just—stay.”

I should not.

“Yes.”

She sleeps eventually.

I watch it happen—the tension releasing from her shoulders, her breathing evening into something slow and steady, her face losing the sharp edges she wears like armor. In sleep, she looks almost peaceful. Almost young. The blood in her hair catches the dawn light, turning rust to something closer to copper, and I think about how I should have someone bring water and cloth and clean her properly.

I do not summon anyone.

Eight hundred years. Six hundred and forty-four deaths. And she chose to add one more for me.

I should leave.

The hour is beyond improper now. True dawn has arrived, spilling gold through the window screens, illuminating the room in stripes of light and shadow. There will be audiences to attend, petitions to hear, the endless machinery of empire that does not pause for emperors who spend the night beside assassins.

I do not leave.

I stay. I will examine this decision tomorrow. I will analyze the implications. I will restore the observation-analysis-control pattern that has governed my life for twenty-two years and determine what this means for the investigation, the conspiracy, the future of the alliance.

Tomorrow.

Today—this morning—I stay.

Tianlong is silent. He knows when to give us privacy. The fact that he considers this moment worthy of privacy says more than I am ready to hear.

She stirs in her sleep. Shifts. Her hand moves across the silk until it rests near mine on the edge of the bed—not touching, but close. Close enough that I could reach out and close the distance.

I do not reach.

But I do not move away either.

I watch her breathe.

That is enough.