Page 91 of The Immortal’s Mark

The door remains closed. She remains inside, breathing, dreaming, unaware of how close she came to waking in darkness.

He remains wrapped around her. The emperor. The boy who reminds me so much of who I was that looking at him feels like looking into a mirror that shows the past instead of the present.

I need them to fall deeper. Love so profound that it answers without asking, that gives without counting, that would choose death over a world without the other.

Which means I must watch.

Which means I must wait.

Which means I must let them have what I cannot have—every touch, every laugh, every morning of waking beside someone who is still breathing.

Mei-Ling would laugh if she could see me now. She always said my plans were too clever by half. She said I thought so many moves ahead that I forgot to account for the moves that mattered—the ones the heart makes without consulting the mind.

She was usually right. She was usually right about everything.

Which is why I have spent eight centuries trying to prove her wrong about dying.

She would not recognize me now. That is the mercy I tell myself. She would not have to see what her death made of me—this hollow thing that wears her husband’s face, this hunger that speaks with her husband’s voice, this monster that loves her still with whatever is left of her husband’s heart.

I move through the inn like a ghost. Like a memory. Like the thing I have become, which is something between the two—not dead enough to rest, not alive enough to feel, just present, just waiting, just hungry.

Always hungry.

Outside, the night air is cold. I do not feel it. I have not felt cold or warmth or anything but hunger since the day she died. But I remember what feeling felt like. And sometimes, that is worse.

I settle into the shadows outside the inn. As I have done for centuries, for generations, for longer than anyone alive can remember.

But tonight the waiting has teeth.

Inside, she shivers. Just once. Just briefly. Some part of her knows, perhaps—some ancient instinct that remembers what it means when darkness gathers outside the door. She does not wake. She does not need to. The shiver is enough.

The emperor pulls the blanket over her shoulders. Still asleep. Automatic. The gesture of a man who has begun to love without meaning to, whose body knows things his mind has not yet admitted. He murmurs something against her hair. I cannot hear the words. I do not need to hear them. I know what they are.

I said the same words to Mei-Ling, once. A lifetime ago. A world ago.

I need their love to grow. I need it to become the kind of love that answers without asking, that gives without counting. And then I will be there. Waiting. Ready. Offering her the choice every woman in her bloodline has faced.

Die for love.

But first, I must watch. I must let them have the thing I cannot have. I must tend their love like a garden I will eventually salt, nurture a flame I will eventually extinguish, build a beautiful thing for the sole purpose of tearing it down.

The hunger gnaws. The emptiness stretches. The night stretches endless around me, cold and dark and empty.

She curls closer to him in her sleep. He tightens his arm around her. Two people falling in love, unaware of what watches them from the shadows, unaware of the trap closing slowly around them.

I loved someone enough to unmake the world.

You will too, little echo. That is your inheritance. That is your curse.

And when you do—when you are ready to die for him the way Mei-Ling died for our people, the way every woman in your bloodline has died for something they believed was worth the price—I will be there.

I will be waiting.

I am always waiting.