Page 129 of The Sin Binders Ascent

Me?

I gave up on getting out of anywhere a long time ago. I know what it is to be forgotten. I’ve lived lifetimes in places meant to erase. This one’s no different, just louder, more creative in its cruelty. But watching her, watching her fight it anyway, reminds me what desire looks like when it isn’t twisted into hunger. Its purpose. It’s momentum. It’s everything I thought I didn’t need anymore.

She doesn’t look at me when she speaks.

“I’m not stopping,” she says, like she’s warning me.

“I know.”

“You’re not going to talk me out of it.”

I let a slow grin pull at the edge of my mouth. “I wouldn’t dare.”

She glances at me then, quick and sharp, trying to catch whatever it is I’m hiding. But I’ve had eons to learn how to bury my truths behind something smoother.

“You think I should give up?” she asks, voice dry.

“No,” I say, quieter now. “I think the fact that you haven’t is why you’re still you.”

Her mouth twitches like she’s going to scoff. But she doesn’t.

She just closes her eyes for a second. And when they open, there’s something behind them that’s frayed and heavy.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I get out and they’re gone.”

“You’ll keep going,” I say, and this time it’s not soft. “You’ll burn the world down if you have to. That’s who you are.”

“I don’t want to burn it down,” she says. “I just want to go home.”

I swallow something bitter.

“I know.”

The rain taps a slow rhythm across the stone above us. Steam rises in coils from the earth, making the trees blur at the edges like they’re part of some dream neither of us agreed to enter. The ground here is rich red clay, slick with water and pocked with holes that something too large probably crawled through. But for now, we’re untouched. We’restill.

I watch the way her lashes stick together in clumps from the rain. The curve of her throat as she swallows. There’s a bruise blooming high on her cheekbone from yesterday’s fight. The kind of fight that would’ve killed someone without her fire.

She’s waiting for me to make a move.

I can feel it in the way she keeps glancing over, pretending not to. The little flicks of her eyes when she thinks I’m focused on something else, as if I can’t taste the shift in her, how her desire’s gone from heat and resistance to something smoother, slower. A sweetness is building beneath the edge she wears like armor. She’s not biting anymore. Not snapping her teeth the second I open my mouth. She’s teasing instead. Laughing, even. And not the kind of laugh that cuts, but the kind thatlingers, the kind that lands on my skin and sits there long after she turns away.

She’s stopped flinching when I’m close.

She leans in now, just enough that her scent coils around my senses, wet moss, ash, something I haven’t named but crave every time I catch it on her skin. She doesn’t pull away when our fingers brush, reaching for food, or when I hand her one of the woven cloths we scavenged for rain. She lets the touch stay. And her stare, when she forgets to hide it, is something else entirely.It’s heavy. Focused. It doesn’t screamtake me, it whispersI’m thinking about you when I shouldn’t be.

It’s tasteful. Elegant in its hunger. And it’sdriving me mad.

I could take it, if I wanted. She’s not subtle, not anymore. The way her mouth parts slightly when I talk too close, the way her thighs shift when I laugh under my breath, the way her pupils drag across my neck like they’re already tasting. It’s all there.

But I don’t move.

I won’t.

Because if I give in, if I let myself take even a mouthful of the craving between us, she’ll throw it in my face the first time she remembers the life she’s trying to get back to. She’ll look at me with regret. She’ll say I used this place, this moment, thisisolationto wedge myself into something sacred. And she’ll be right, maybe.

Because I’m not one of them.

I’m not Lucien with his brutal quiet. I’m not Ambrose with his riddles and books. I’m not Elias with his lazy smirk and chaos-wrapped loyalty. I’m not Riven. Gods, I’ll never be Riven. She loves them already. Fully. Eternally. They’re her foundation.

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