Page 15 of The Sin Binder's Vow

My jaw tics. I shake my head.

“God only knows,” I murmur. “He was always the most…open. The easiest to read. She could twist that. Turn him into what she needed. And she’ll keep twisting. Keep taking. Until there’s nothing left but the version of him that serves her.”

Silas makes a low sound behind me. “Sounds like my last relationship.”

“Shut up,” I growl.

Luna doesn’t smile. Doesn’t move.

She just stares at the ruins stretching behind us—the cracked stone arches, the overgrown stairwells, the cathedral looming like it remembers too much.

“Then we don’t wait,” she says.

Her voice is steel now.

“We find them. And we burn her out.”

Luna

The clearing stretches between us like a wound.

Orin, Riven, Lucien—all shadowed by the cathedral’s fractured arches, the kind of lightless corner that drinks noise instead of echoing it. They’re far enough that I can’t hear their voices, can’t read their lips. Just the curve of Lucien’s spine as he paces, the raw aggression in Riven’s stance, the eerie stillness of Orin, hands folded like he’s waiting for the world to end.

I’m on the opposite side with Silas and Elias.

We’re close to the edge of the old marble fountain, its bowl cracked and half-devoured by creeping vine. A statue once stood here—gods know of what—but it’s crumbled now, the torso twisted backward like it couldn’t stand to see what became of this place. Even the roots here don’t grow straight. They coil wrong. Like something underground is pulling them toward it.

And yet, all I can think about ishim.

Lucien. Pale. Bleeding. Avoiding me like I was the thing that unmade him.

I wrap my arms tighter around myself, trying to ignore the ache spreading through my chest like something foreign. I’m not unfamiliar with rejection, but this wasn’t rejection. This was recoil. Like my presence hurt him. Like my voice triggered something that would’ve pulled him to pieces if he didn’t shut me out first.

I’m gutted.

Like something vital has been stolen from me.

Something I didn’t even know I’d already claimed.

Lucien may hate me. He might see me as a threat. A liability. A flaw in the plan he’s always holding so tightly he forgets to breathe. But when I reached for him—when I tried to touch him—he looked… terrified. Not of me. Of what touching me would do.

And gods help me, I keep wondering if he wishes it was me he’d been bound to first.

Not Branwen.

That thought carves through me with the precision of a blade dipped in poison. Because it shouldn’t matter. Because I didn’taskfor any of this.

But the idea that he might want it now? That maybe in the cracked ruin of whatever is left of him, there’s a version of Lucien thatwantsto be tethered to me instead of haunted by her?

It’s ruinous.

“I know that look,” Elias says beside me, tone falsely casual, like he’s trying to dance around the sharp edge of the moment. “It’s the same one Silas gets when he accidentally walks past a mirror.”

“Hey,” Silas says without looking up, flipping a dagger through his fingers. “First of all, my reflection owes me money. Second, rude.”

I don’t smile.

Elias shifts closer, scratching at the back of his neck. He always does that when he’s uncomfortable—when he’s trying to make light of something too heavy for him to hold.

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