Page 141 of The Sin Binders Ascent

She glances at me, eyes narrowed. “We’re different.”

It lands between us like a stone dropped in a still pool. We are. After last night, after what we did, there’s no pretending we’re just survival partners. No pretending we’re strangers with matching trauma.

She shifts her weight and looks back toward the castle. “Maybe it’s a lure. Maybe he’s bored watching us fuck on rocks and dodge mouth-beasts.”

“Charming visual. Thanks.”

She cuts me a glare, but it’s half-charged. “You know what I mean. Maybe this is part of it. The test. The end of the maze.”

My jaw clenches. I want to tell her no. That it’s not real. That the castle’s a trick, a projection, a way to fuck with her hope again. But I know better. Brashir doesn’t deal in illusion. He deals in inevitability.

And this? This was always coming.

“Then we go,” she says, already moving, already calculating. Her eyes are hard again. That same determination that’s carried her through all of this. “We find him. We talk. I get out of here.”

She doesn’t look at me when she says it.

I watch her take the first few steps down the ridge, and my stomach knots. Because I should want that. I should want her to get free. To get back to her men, her family, her real life. To let this fucked-up interlude die in the woods where it belongs.

But I don’t.

Gods help me, I don’t.

I want her to get what she needs. I want her safe, whole. But the thought of her leaving me in this place, leaving meafterI’ve felt her body shake under mine, after I’ve tasted what she sounds like when she falls apart in my arms, it guts me.

How selfish is that?

How twisted is it that the worst thing I can imagine right now isn’t Brashir killing us, but Brashir letting her go?

Letting hergo back.

I follow anyway.

The ground changes color, less of that spongey black moss and more cracked red clay, dry even though it rained just hours ago. The air gets hotter, denser, like it’s not meant to be breathed. The trees thin, but they don’t stop watching. Their branches tangle together overhead, woven with bone charms and torn fabric, the remnants of something older than us.

There are no sounds but our footsteps.

When we reach a cliffside path, the castle’s closer than it should be. It sits heavy on the landscape, like it’s pressing down into the world instead of rising out of it. I can feel it in my ribs.

Power. Age. Hunger.

She slows.

“You think he’ll let me leave?” she asks, without looking at me.

My mouth opens, but I don’t answer.

She finally turns, and I see it in her face. The conflict. Theache.

Not just to go home. But to leaveme. And I realize I’m not the only selfish one. She’s terrified it won’t be that simple. That going back might mean leaving a part of herself in this place. With me. We stand there for a long beat, just breathing in the same hot, scorched air. Watching the castle. Feeling the world shift around us.

The path to the castle isn't really a path. It's a wound carved into the land, split open by time and something older thantools. The earth cracks beneath our feet, scorched red and black, brittle like old blood dried under the sun. Whatever once grew here is dead now, roots fossilized into claws reaching up through the soil. Each step kicks up a haze of ash that clings to our skin, our mouths, the insides of our lungs.

The castle gets bigger with every step. What looked like a mirage on the ridge reveals itself now in terrifying detail. Not a ruin. Not something left behind. It's alive, in the way a thunderstorm is alive. In the way rot spreads with purpose.

The outer walls rise hundreds of feet into the air, not built of stone but something darker, glossier, like volcanic glass layered with veins of molten light. The material pulses in places, throbs in others, as though it remembers how to bleed.

Massive towers spear into the sky, uneven, asymmetrical. Some lean forward like they’re listening. Others spiral up and disappear into the sickly clouds. They aren’t smooth. Each one is covered in jagged carvings, runes, glyphs, symbols that shift if you look at them too long. They flicker with faint silver light, then vanish again. I try not to stare.

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