Page 194 of The Sin Binder's Chains

“You think I want you in a confined, wet space with me?” Silas gasps. “I have standards, Elias. I only flirt with you because it’s easier than unpacking your emotional repression.”

Elias crosses his arms. “I flirt with you because I think you're secretly a feral spirit possessing a twink’s body.”

“Again,” I say, rubbing my temples, “get out of the hallway and shower before I set you both on fire.”

They scatter like roaches.

Finally.

Orin appears beside me without sound, hands folded behind his back like the destruction around us is a perfectly acceptable backdrop.

“I don’t know how you’ve managed not to curse one of them into a coma yet,” he murmurs.

“I’m playing the long game,” I say. “Waiting until they least expect it.”

“You’ll be a legend.”

“I already am.”

His mouth twitches. “Come with me. We need to talk.”

The words settle under my skin. Because when Orin says that, we’re not just talking. We’re unraveling.

He doesn’t say where we’re going.

Just walks.

And I follow.

It’s not far, but every step pulls a little harder. Like my body remembers where we’re heading before my mind does.

The wall.

That wall.

The one at the edge of the academy courtyard, half-crumbling and always too high to be meant for sitting, except he made it a throne once. A quiet one. A place where magic bloomed from nothing, and his hands pulled roses from the cracked stone just to give me color when the world was too gray.

It feels like walking into a dream I was ripped out of.

The roses are gone now. Their skeletal vines hang blackened and brittle, clinging to the wall like ghosts too stubborn to moveon. The courtyard beneath us is cratered, scorched, nothing left but rubble and ash.

A battle was fought here.

I was part of it.

And yet… this moment is still the quietest kind of grief.

Orin doesn’t sit right away. He runs his palm across the stone, brushing away flakes of ruined memory, before lowering himself slowly. Like he’s listening for what the wall remembers.

I join him.

We sit in silence for a moment. A real one.

Then he speaks, low and steady. “We don’t know how she took them.”

“I do,” I whisper. “She wanted to hurt me.”

“She wanted to prove something,” he says. “To you. To us. To herself.”

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