Page 145 of The Sin Binders Ascent

“Can I go home now?” I ask.

My voice doesn’t waver. I wish it did. I wish I sounded as broken as I feel, but there’s only exhaustion in it now. A cracked hope that maybe, maybe this was the end of the trial.

Brashir mouth tightens, just a fraction. That smile doesn’t return. He leans forward slightly, elbows on his massive knees. The throne groans beneath the weight of his shifting body.

He studies me like I’m something delicate. Or doomed.

And then, in a voice too quiet for his size, he says, “How long do you think you’ve been here, Luna?”

The question splinters something inside me.

I blink. Swallow.

“A few weeks.”

Brashir’s expression folds into something heavier. Not pity. Never pity. Just… inevitability.

“Time works differently here,” he says, slowly. “This realm doesn’t obey the structure your mind remembers.”

I take a step closer, my fingers curling in on themselves. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” he says, voice now like thunder wrapped in silk, “that every hour you’ve spent here has equaled a year on Earth.”

The room tilts.

“What?” I whisper. My knees nearly give, but I don’t fall.

He meets my gaze, unwavering. “You and Theodric have been here for five weeks.”

The math cracks through me like lightning. Five weeks. Forty-two days. One thousand eight hours.

Eight hundred and forty years.

“No,” I say, but there’s no strength behind it. Just breath.

Theo curses softly behind me. The kind of sound that breaks, not from disbelief, but because it makessense.

Brashir watches me come undone, regal and cold. “The world you knew is not the world waiting for you now.”

I want to scream. I want to claw the floor, tear my own skin open and drag out the time he stole from me. But I don’t. I stand there, heart slowing, gaze fixed on the thing on the throne that speaks of truths no god should be allowed to say.

My men…They’re immortal.

But they’ve been without me.

All this time.

I stare up at him, heart pounding from the numbers. Eight hundred and forty years. Eight centuries without them. Withoutme. The thought alone feels like acid behind my ribs, but it’s therestof what he says that drags me to the edge.

“And your Sins,” he continues, “have made quite a mess of it.”

My hands clench before I realize it. “That’s becauseyoulocked me up here.”

He dips his chin, not a nod. Not quite. “It might be.”

I want to demand why. Why now. Why any of this. But then he shifts again on that monstrous throne, and something in his facechanges. Subtle. Calculated. There’s something new behind his gaze. Not detachment. Not judgment.

Regret.

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