Page 33 of The Sin Binder's Chains

Luna

A warm body is pressed up against me. Too warm. Too close. And I know exactly who the fuck it is before I even open my eyes.

Elias. His scent is all over me, smoky, slow, like something decadent and lazy, laced with the undeniable weight of Sloth. His arm is draped across my waist, his face buried in my hair, practically on top of me like I’m some kind of human body pillow.

And hell no. I did not sign up to be accosted in my sleep.

I inhale sharply, my mind catching up to where I am, where we are, the Void, that cursed, endless wasteland, a place that does not belong to the living. It stretches out around us, an impossible expanse of twisted, jagged earth, of shadows that move when they shouldn’t, of something watching from the edges of the dark.

We’re here to find Silas and Riven.

Not to cuddle.

Elias shifts against me, groaning softly, his grip tightening like his subconscious is clinging to me, like I’m some kind of comfort in this fucking nightmare realm.

I glare at his sleeping form.

And then I elbow him in the ribs.

Hard.

Elias grunts, inhaling sharply as his entire body jerks awake.

There’s a long moment where his brain short-circuits, where he registers that his arm is around me, that he’s practically sprawled over me, latched on like a goddamn barnacle, and his body goes rigid.

“Oh.” His voice is wrecked, low and rough with sleep. “Oh, wow. Um. Hi.”

I shove at his chest. “Get the fuck off me.”

Elias scrambles back like he’s been electrocuted, sitting up so fast he nearly falls off the makeshift bedroll.

"Okay, okay, first of all, wow, I am so sorry, this is not what it looks like.” He holds up both hands in surrender, his hair a disheveled mess, his shirt rumpled, eyes wide with something between panic and secondhand embarrassment.

I glare. “Oh? Then what does it look like?”

Elias swallows. “Uh. It looks like I may have accidentally, in my very deep sleep, subconsciously gravitated toward your obvious body heat and…possibly…maybe…used you for warmth?”

A pause.

“…Like a very sexy furnace?”

I stare at him.

Lucien, who has been sitting on the far side of the dying fire, watching this with unimpressed amusement, exhales slowly. “Elias.”

Elias turns to him, wild-eyed. “Listen, I didn’t mean to.”

I snort. “Didn’t mean to what? Throw yourself on top of me in the middle of the night?”

Elias makes a miserable noise, dragging a hand through his already-ruined hair. “Okay, but technically, I was asleep. So that makes this an innocent mistake, and I feel like we should all move on and pretend this never happened before my very fragile self-respect crumbles into actual dust.”

Lucien hums. “It was definitely not innocent.”

Elias whips around. “Okay, Satan, no one asked you.”

Lucien leans back against a jagged rock, looking thoroughly entertained. “You may as well accept it,” he says smoothly. “It’s not like this is the first time you’ve made a fool of yourself in front of her.”

Elias groans, dropping his face into his hands. “Kill me. Just kill me right now.”

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