Page 18 of The Sin Binder's Vow

Elias ignores him entirely. His eyes are on me now—silver bright, too sharp—and I know that look. He’s about to say something inappropriate. Crude. Awful. And he’s doing it for me.

“Luna,” he says with mock solemnity. “Do you want to hear the worst pick-up line ever uttered in the bowels of Daemon?”

“No,” I say, deadpan.

He grins. I don’t stop him.

“Are you a cursed relic,” he begins, “because I can’t stop touching you even though Iknowit’ll destroy me from the inside out.”

Silas wheezes. “Ten out of ten. Horny and doomed. Very on-brand.”

“You’re disgusting,” I say.

But my lips are twitching.

Elias steps closer, dropping his voice, but not the tone. “Wanna hear what I told a possessed mirror once?”

“Please don’t—”

“I said,‘if you’re gonna reflect my inner demons, at least give me a show worth stroking to.’”

Silas snorts. “Thatexplains why the Mirrorwing tried to drown you in piss vapor for three days.”

“It wassexypiss vapor.”

“Elias,” I choke out, covering my mouth, trying not to laugh. “Stop.”

“I’m on a roll,” he says, undeterred. “Next up, the time I got banned from an orgy in the undercatacombs for asking if the ghost watching us could join—”

“No,” I gasp.

“—because he looked lonely! And I’m agiver.”

Silas collapses backwards onto a pile of old stone, cackling. “Hewaslonely. I saw him crying after.”

My sides hurt. My eyes sting. The ache doesn’t vanish—but it shifts. Loosens.

Because Elias is standing there with that maddening, cocky tilt to his mouth, hiding something deeper behind every filthy word. He’s the kind of idiot you hate needing. The kind you know would burn down the world just to make you laugh while it turns to ash.

“Thanks,” I say finally, wiping the corner of my eye.

He shrugs, like it’s nothing. “We’re all fucked, Luna. Might as well fuck around on the way down.”

Silas raises a hand. “Poetic.”

And for the first time since this nightmare started, I let myself breathe.

Even if it’s just for a minute.

I hate this place.

Even though I’ve never been here before—not really—it coils around me with the intimacy of memory, the kind that isn’t yours but lives in your blood anyway. Like a dream half-remembered, or a story whispered to you in the womb before your first breath. The longer I stand here, the more the ruins begin to breathe.

The wind moves through the archways in patterns too deliberate to be weather.

The stones feel warm where they should be cold.

And beneath my boots, the earth hums with something old. Older than the Academy. Older than the Sins. Something that doesn't belong to time at all.

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