Page 47 of The Sin Binders Ascent

“I swear to the gods, if you smirk one more time,” I shove him again.

“You’ll what?” Theo drawls, like this is flirtation, not a fucking reckoning. “Bite me?”

“Iwill drown you,” I snap, voice pitching higher, the words shrill from cold and fury.

“You offering?” His grin stretches wicked, too pleased with himself. “Because I’ve got a few kinks I wouldn’t mind introducing,”

I slam my palm into his chest to push him back, but I’m not braced for the mud. It slicks like oil beneath my boot, and in one graceless second, I slip. My arms flail, my body pitching sideways, but Theo moves fast, catching me at the elbow,

Only the bastard loses his footing, too. And then we're both falling. We crash into the waterlogged ditch in a tangle oflimbs, his arm under my back, my knee catching his ribs, wet clothes sliding over slick skin and tangled fabric, water and mud soaking every crevice of us. My hair sticks to my cheeks, my chest heaves, and I'm half sprawled across him.

He groans, not in pain, but inexaggeration.“Well. This got intimate.”

I slap his chest again. “You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re on top of me,” he breathes, smirking through the raindrops catching on his lashes.

“Because you fell!”

“You fellwithme.”

“I waspushingyou!”

“You wereflirting.”

My fist tightens in the fabric of his shirt. I’m shaking with rage, soaked to the skin, my heart pounding like I’ve been sprinting, and his hand slides, slow, deliberate, to my hip like it belongs there.

I freeze.

He looks up at me with eyes like electric sin and says, too softly, “You hate me, right?”

“Yes.”

His fingers curl into my waist. “Then why do you feel like lightning in my hands?”

I shove at his chest, hard, bracing my weight against him, but the mud gives, and I just slide over him again, grinding my knee into his stomach. He groans,like I’ve just kissed him instead of tried to break a rib,and it only ignites the fury burning in my throat.

“You smug, cocky, manipulative,asshole!” I scream it, loud enough to scare a bird out of the trees overhead. “I don’t want anything from you! I don’t want your power, your charm, your endless string of double entendres. I don’t want yourhandsonme, I don’t want your words in myhead, and I sure as hell don’t want your voice in mybones!”

His smile is gone. Gone, but his eyes are steady,like I’m the chaos, and he’s the one weathering me. Like heknowssomething I don’t. I reach back to shove him again, but I don’t get the chance.

Hands seize my arms, rip me backward and up out of the mud in one powerful yank.

“Luna.”

Riven’s voice.

The rage behind it is lethal. I hit solid chest, not Theo’s,Riven’s,and the second my back meets him I feel the tremble in his muscles. He’s seething. Gray eyes storm-black, locked on Theo where he’s sprawled in the muck like sin incarnate and not remotely apologetic.

“What thefuckdo you think you’re doing?” Riven’s voice cuts across the clearing, brutal and low, and it’s not just him now,Lucien steps out from the trees, eyes like carved obsidian, and Orin’s there too, mouth tight with something worse than anger,disappointment.

Ambrose. Elias. Caspian. They fan out behind him like a fucking firing squad. All of them drenched, all of them armed with the kind of rage that doesn’t just strike,itburns slow.

Theo lounges back in the mud like it’s velvet, arms spread, palms up. “Little misunderstanding,” he says casually. “She fell for me.”

Riven lunges.

Lucien stops him with one word: “No.”

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