Page 5 of The Immortal’s Mark

They’re already running.

Corridors blur.

My feet know the way—I mapped this route three times, paid a servant to chart the patrol gaps, memorized every turn between here and the outer wall. Eastern corridor to the inner garden, then over the wall, down the drainage channel, gone before anyone thinks to look up.

Guards at the eastern junction.

Shouldn’t be there.

I pivot. West corridor. Silk hangings whipping past.

More guards.

They know. Someone talked. Someone betrayed the route before I even started climbing, sold me out to whoever—

Doesn’t matter. Think later. Run now.

My lungs burn. Haven’t run like this in decades. Forgot how much bodies complain when you push them past the breaking point, how much it costs to ask more from muscles that thought they were done being asked.

A crossbow bolt buries itself in the wall by my head. Splinters sting my cheek. Close. Too close.

The kind of close that means someone’s actually trying to kill me, which is almost flattering. Most guards shoot to wound, keep you alive for questioning. This one’s aiming for the throat.

“So much for the easy exit,” I mutter.

The joke falls flat. Even to me.

Another bolt. I drop, roll, come up running. The corridor opens into a courtyard—moonlight and cold air and absolutely nowhere to hide.

I have two seconds to decide: wall or doorway, east or west, live or—

I go for the wall.

I don’t see the third bolt.

Just—impact.

Something hot punching through my throat.

Oh.

My knees give out. Stone rushes up to meet me—cold, hard, exactly as uncomfortable as dying always is.

Funny. You’d think after six hundred and forty-three times, I’d be used to this part.

The taste of copper floods my mouth. The moon blurs above me. Sounds fade first—always sounds first, the shouts becoming murmurs becoming nothing, the world retreating like a tide going out. Then colors start to go. The grey-white moonlight bleeding into grey-grey, then just grey, then—

Somewhere far away, boots pound closer. Voices shout. None of it matters.

Six hundred and forty-three times, I’ve done this.

You’d think it would get easier.

It doesn’t.

The edges go soft. The weight goes away. That strange floating feeling that means the body’s giving up on the whole enterprise, shutting down systems, letting go. I know this feeling like I know my own hands. Know the drift, the fade, the darkness crowding in from the edges.

The last thing I see isn’t something poetic like the moon or stars.

It’s his face.

His eyes across the hall. Finding me in the shadows. Seeing me, when no one’s really looked at me in longer than most people live. The fire beneath his skin. The impossible fact of him standing when he should have been dead.

Why could he—

Black takes the rest of the thought.

Well. That’s inconvenient.