““He leans forward, resting his forehead against mine. I feel his breath on my skin as he exhales a deep breath. "I'm sorry." His voice is slurred and rough. "But you see, I should have been dead for nearly two hundred years. Instead, by chance, I was found by a curse and was turned into this. Not human, not immortals, but some cruel melding of the two. I endured two centuries of horrors, and maybe it was all so I could be here with you. If my unnatural existence means nothing else, it means this. I get to be here, now, with you.””
