Page 68 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 12

Thin Walls and Fat Cats

Emperor Ren

I cannot sleep.

This is not unusual. Twenty-two years on a throne built from the bones of my family has made sleep a negotiation rather than a surrender. But tonight is different. Tonight, her words keep returning, circling like carrion birds that refuse to land.

I held his hand while he died.

I have heard confessions before. Ministers confessing treason. Generals confessing failure. Prisoners confessing crimes they did not commit because the alternative was worse. None of them sounded like that. None of them cost the speaker anything.

She gave me something last night. Something she had not given anyone in three hundred years.

I do not know what to do with it.

The comb is in my hands again—mother’s jade, cool and smooth against my palms. I do not remember taking it from the bedside table. My fingers find it the way a man dying of thirst finds water: without thought, without choice.

Remember who you were, she said. Before the fire. Before the crown.

I set the comb down. Close my eyes. Will myself toward sleep.

Through the wall, I hear her voice.

The walls in the eastern wing are old. Wooden panels and silk screens, built for beauty rather than privacy. I learned this the first night I placed her in the adjacent chamber—a security decision, keeping the emperor’s shadow close. A practical arrangement.

This is what I tell myself.

I should not know that she paces when she cannot sleep. I should not know that she hums sometimes, tunelessly, or that she talks to herself when she thinks no one can hear.

I should not be lying here, listening.

“Dumpling, I swear to every ancestor who has ever ignored me, if you knock that inkpot over one more time, I will end you.”

Silence.

“Don’t give me that look. You know what you did. There is a paw print on the Minister of Revenue’s taxation proposal. A paw print, Dumpling. On official documentation.”

More silence. She is talking to a cat. A cat named Dumpling.

I should roll over. Pull the pillow over my head. Pretend the panel between our chambers does not carry every word.

“Fine. You’re right. It was boring anyway.” A pause. “Ren would’ve—” She stops. When she continues, her voice is different. Harder. “The emperor would have found it tedious. That’s what I meant.”

Oh. Tianlong’s voice curls through my mind like smoke. Oh, this is magnificent. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe too loudly. I haven’t been this entertained since the Crown Prince of Liu sneezed during his own coronation and launched the sacred hat into the brazier.

I should stop listening.

You should. You absolutely should.

I do not stop listening.

“He’s ridiculous, you know.” Her voice again, and I recognize this—the deflection, the sharpness that means she is circling something she does not want to name. “Sits there with that face. All carved cheekbones and noble suffering. It’s insufferable.”

The cat offers no opinion.

“And he listens. That’s the worst part. Doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t do that thing people do where they’re already calculating how broken you are before you finish talking.” A sound—frustration, maybe, or something rawer. “Who does that? Who just… sits there like what you’re saying actually matters?”