"It's time," he said, his voice soft. He turned to me with fear in his eyes, making his face tight, and took my hands in his. "Promise to stay with me," Dain said, his wolf eyes searching my face. "Please promise to stay."

I stepped forward and lifted my hands up to his face. Dain let his hands slip down to hold my wrists as I drew his face down and kissed him gently, then leaned my forehead against his. "I promise, Dain," I said, not begrudging him the words. "I chose you, and I choose you. I will stay with you forever. You're my soulmated truelove, and I love you exactly the same amount when you're on four feet as I do when you're on two."

"Thank you," he said, as if he was holding onto that promise like a lifeline. "I will strive to believe you." He closed his eyes and nodded, a sharp jerk of his head, then let me go and stepped back. Dain dropped the glamor of clothing he'd been wearing and shuddered, then stepped forward into his natural form.

It wasn't like a movie transformation—there was no morph effect, or glowing lights, or even air displacement. My eyes couldn't even track what, exactly, had happened. Smooth and too fast for me to process, Dain's body went from being mostly fae to mostly divine, and in front of me was the man who had come through the wall of the throne room for me. In the battle, he'd been filthy, injured, and furious. It had been impossible not to see him as a creature of implacable destruction, who could lay the dead down to sleep with a roar and break anything in his way. But now?

Dain was beautiful. His strong body shifted with the fluid motion of a predator, the long, dense wolf fur catching the evening sunlight. All of his fur had the same quality as his hair did, gleaming like silk, and the deep black of his scales looked like lacquered armor. Power and elegance radiated from every line of his body, from the dark tip of his nose down to the black plumes of his tails. He looked like an ancient god, the sort of creature someone on a quest in an epic story might seek out for wisdom or aid. If I'd caught a glimpse of him in the woods, one momentary glance of those wolf eyes in the face of something otherworldly, I would never have been able to stop trying to find him again.

He took my breath away.

I turned my head to look into his face, and the awe and adoration must have shown in my expression, because his ears relaxed away from being pinned against his skull, and the tension fell out of him like water. Dain turned a step and lowered his head, pressing his muzzle against my chest.