Page 108 of The Sin Binders Ascent

I shake my head, fury and grief knotting behind my ribs, twisting up through my throat. “So that’s it? You pulled the plug on my life because you were scared of what I could be?”

“No,” he says. “I pulled the plug because what you could be might rewrite everything the gods built. We made the Sins as a punishment. You turned them into ahome.”

Behind me, Theo’s breath catches. Just slightly. Enough for me to feel it tug at the chain between us. He knows. He sees it too now. This wasn’t about me being dangerous to the world.

It was about me being dangerous to the gods.

I stare at Brashir, at this towering relic pretending to kneel, and the weight of it hits me all at once.

They never meant for me towin.Not them. Not any of them.

But I did.

And that’s the one thing they couldn’t allow.

Theo

Brashir doesn’t move immediately. He looms, a ruin wearing skin, his monstrous form bent low over the wreckage he calls mercy. The air hasn’t changed temperature, and yet everything feels scorched. The beast he resurrected lingers at his side, massive and glassy-eyed, a hound shaped by ancient punishment, not birth. It waits without breath. Without hunger. Only obedience. Brashir does not need monsters with an appetite. He commands obedience by design.

His voice, when it comes, coils low, not whispered, not thundered, but felt. As though the words dig directly into the marrow and wait to be acknowledged.

“She may keep you.”

The sentence drops like a guillotine between us. Not a gift. Not a pardon. A calculation. As though I am an allowance. As though he’s measuring how much rope he can give a dying animal before calling it kindness.

“You,” he continues, shifting his attention fully to me now, those pale, mineral eyes catching on my face like I’m something lodged in the teeth of history, “were not intended. I would not have permitted it, had I been given a choice.”

Brashir’s gaze narrows, not with anger, but with an almost clerical detachment, as though I’m an accounting error on a prophecy he otherwise perfected.

“But you arrived. You tethered. Severance, at this point, would be more dangerous than indulgence. One sin is tolerable. A single tether can be observed. Studied. Managed. She cannot return to the Seven. That remains absolute.”

He says it like scripture, and I see her shift beside me, barely perceptible, but it moves through the cuff like a voltage spike. Her silence says more than speech would. She’s listening. Absorbing. Drowning.

“She returns,” Brashir says, “and the other gods will not hesitate. Her annihilation will not be personal. It will be clean. Swift. Necessary. What she built was never sanctioned. The sins were not made tolove. They were made tobalance. Topunish. Seven bonded as one is not harmony. It is corruption. Her survival has already torn holes through what was meant to remain sealed.”

He begins to straighten, unfolding from the earth like a cathedral rising from a blood-soaked foundation. The sky behind him parts, not from force, but from gravity, the space bending to accommodate the weight of what he is.

“The others are lost to her. They have to be.”

There’s no cruelty in the statement. No satisfaction. Only inevitability. This is how it ends, he says with his posture. This is how mercy survives.

I don’t look at her. Not directly. But I feel her unraveling beside me, not with desperation, but with the slow, choking realization that no one’s coming. Not now. Not in time. Whatever world she thought she might return to has already begun to rot in her absence.

She won’t beg. That’s not who she is. But what’s happening to her right now,thisis worse than begging. It’s the quiet, swallowing kind of grief. The kind that digs in behind the ribs and waits. No fire. No tears. Just the sharp edge of somethingthat was once love being called sin by a god who names ruin salvation.

Brashir watches her, not in pity, but in study. Her reaction is data. Her silence, a final test.

“There were deliberations,” he says, as though it matters, as though bureaucracy is a balm for decimation. “Other options considered. Stripping the Seven from existence. Reforging them without her. Erasing the memories of all who remembered what they became. It was not the first time we remade a myth.”

The beast shifts beside him. A slow stretch of bone and sinew, more sculpture than life. Brashir places a single, massive hand on its spine and keeps speaking.

“She was meant to host. Nothing more. A vessel. A necessary temporary bridge. But she becamechosen. She becameworshipped. The Sins allowed it. Desired it. That is not desire. That is trespass.”

The irony doesn’t escape me. The embodiment of divine structure decrying my existence while granting me as a consolation prize. Not because he believes in my purpose. But because I am tolerable. Contained.

His gaze lifts to me again, steady and detached. “You are unstable. Your nature makes you susceptible to decay. But as long as she remains tethered to you, she remains observable. Bound desire is easier to extinguish than love.”

I could laugh if the rage in my chest didn’t taste like salt and ash. He doesn’t understand what I am. What I’ve become in her shadow. Or maybe he does, and that’s what makes his offer so precise.

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