Page 82 of The Immortal’s Mark

That’s worse. Enjoyment means investment. Investment means caring. Caring means trouble.

Three days of knowing that when we leave, there will be no palace walls between us.

No protocols. No courtiers. No carefully maintained distance dressed up as professional necessity.

Just two people. Pretending to be married. For three weeks.

I catch my reflection in the bronze mirror. Common clothes—rough cotton, undyed, practical. My hair bound simply instead of in the elaborate styles court women favor. No cosmetics, no jade pins, no silk. The scar above my eyebrow—the one from Death #412 that never quite fades—is visible instead of hidden.

I look ordinary. Forgettable. Exactly what a merchant’s wife should look like.

The woman staring back at me looks terrified.

“You’re not terrified,” I tell her. “You’ve done this before. Dozens of times. Different names, different covers, different—”

Lives.

The word snags in my throat.

I’ve had dozens of lives. Different names, different places, different versions of myself. But only one husband. Only one time I stayed long enough to let someone in.

I’ve been running ever since Chen died. Eight hundred years of leaving before anyone gets close enough to lose.

And now I’m about to spend three weeks pretending to be married to someone who already knows what that cost me.

I shut that door. Slam it. Lock it.

This is different.

This is pretend.

This is three weeks of playing a role with someone who makes my chest tight and my thoughts scattered and my carefully constructed armor feel like tissue paper in a storm.

Ren doesn’t wear armor. He doesn’t need to. He is armor—layers of control and duty wrapped so tight around whatever lives underneath that most people never see the cracks..

But I’ve seen them. The cracks. The moments when the mask slips and something human looks out. The way he laughed—actually laughed—when Tianlong complained about the saddlebag for the fifth time. The way he looks at the Moon Garden jasmine like it might have answers to questions he hasn’t figured out how to ask.

The way he looks at me.

I am in so much trouble.

The terrified reflection doesn’t argue.