The ice that had surrounded her, protecting her, was slowly melting, carrying him away with it. He’d never been so happy before—he had never known such an abrupt ending to his misery, not since he’d been a child. This was paradise—he was dead. Once, she’d denied his affections, reinforcing how the outside world meant them to be. But that façade was slipping. She touched him—his face, his body—and his tongue moved to brush her arm just as any adoring lapdog’s might. His bones shifted and popped, dragging him from the four-limbed, natural form that he’d been born into to become the thin, ragged abomination that stood tall on hind legs when he was not crouched so passively before the silver-furred she-yote.
“I found Eterne,” he said once his body had stilled, regaining composure after wrenching limbs into bizarre, unnatural shapes. His hand moved to touch the ends of her hair, transfixed by their close proximity. “They treated me like a prince.” He was, after all, of royal blood. Anything less was blasphemy. “I came back though.” Anywhere without Kaena may as well have been hell. “For you.”