The pain came later, as pain often does when the body has been too overwhelmed to register it in the moment. Selena felt it begin as a whisper between her shoulder blades—a sensation like ice cracking under pressure, spreading outward in jagged lines that traced the paths where her wings had once emerged. Then the whisper became a scream.
She collapsed, and only Dante's arms kept her from falling completely into the colorless void. His grip was solid, or as solid as anything could be in this place where physics were more suggestion than law. But even as he held her, she could feel that he was different too, that the transformation they'd undergone had marked him just as deeply as it had marked her.
"I've got you," he said, his voice threading through the agony like a lifeline. "Breathe. Just breathe through it."
