Page 13 of The Sin Binders Ascent

I stay planted.

“No.” One word. But it burns the air between us.

Blackwell raises an eyebrow, slowly. “You’d defy me?”

“I’m not bringing him into our home,” I snap. “Not near them. Not nearher.You want him released, you house him yourself.”

Theo leans back in the chair like this is all going according to some script he wrote centuries ago, and we’re just stumbling through the beats.

“Wow,” he drawls. “You make it sound like I’m not a delight at dinner parties.”

Luna cuts him a look that would flatten lesser men. “You’re a plague in a button-down.”

Theo presses a hand to his chest like she’s just proposed.

Blackwell rises. The shift is quiet, but everything in the room bends slightly around it. The air thickens, not with magic, but with gravity. With age. With the weight of a god who’s uncoiling something old behind his spine.

“Youwillbring him,” he says, each syllable cold as granite. “Because if he’s left unchecked, we both know what he becomes. He cannot remain unsupervised. And there is only one place strong enough to anchor him.”

My fists curl at my sides. “And you think that place isher.”

“She’s the only one who can hold him,” he says simply. “Whether either of you wants it or not.”

“No.”

“She’s already bonded to the rest. This is just the last piece.”

“She is not acontainer.”

Blackwell’s stare is final. “She’s the reason you’re all stillsane.She holds you because she was built to.”

Theo’s voice cuts through the thick silence, low and amused.

“Not suresaneis the word I’d use.”

I round on him. “You say another word and I will end you before we leave this room.”

He smiles again. That lazy, infuriating smile like he’s already inside the house, inside our walls, insideher.

“Oh, Lucien,” he murmurs. “You and I both know I’ve already started.”

Luna doesn’t move. I see her jaw set. I see the way her hand drifts close to her hip, where Riven once told her to keep a blade. She doesn’t know who Theo is. But she already hates him on instinct. And yet, gods help me, Blackwell is right about one thing.

Theo is coming. Whether we want him to or not.

Luna’s glare slices across Blackwell’s desk like a drawn blade. Her hands are clenched at her sides, the way they always are when she’s one word away from ending something ancient.

“I said no.”

The word lands hard. Pure, unyielding, final. But she’s not done.

“You can go to hell,” she spits, voice steady but trembling at the edges, not with weakness, never that. Withfury. The kind that was earned. “All of you. I’m not your key, your cage, or your fucking redemption arc.”

She spins before Blackwell can answer. Before I can stop her. And then she’sgone. Boots striking stone, the echo of her fury ricocheting down the hallway like thunder.

I follow. Instinct. Reflex. Obsession. Whatever name we want to give it, it owns me now.

My stride eats the ground between us. “Luna,”

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