Page 53 of The Sin Binders Ascent

Luna, still half-pressed to my side, mutters, “I’m right here, you know.”

I glance down at her. She’s soaked to the bone, mud streaking up her thighs, curls plastered to her cheeks, and still she stands straighter than any of us. Furious. Beautiful.Mine.

But the cuff gleams in the dying light,gold catching the skyfire of an oncoming dusk storm,and Theo’s is still glowing too.

This thing, whatever the hell it is,wantsthem close. And I want it off. Now. Before something worse happens. Before it’s not just proximity it starts messing with. Before Luna stops pulling away. And starts pullingtoward.

Lucien

Blackwell’s office hasn’t changed in thirty years. The same brutalist stone walls that drink sound instead of echoing it. Shelves lined with artifacts that shouldn’t exist,shards of the old world that even time was wise enough to forget. The long obsidian desk carved from the spine of something long dead, its surface always bare save for a single parchment scroll that’s never unrolled.

He sits behind it now, fingers tapping a deliberate rhythm, eyes unmoving as we fill the room like an approaching storm,shouting over each other, arguing, demanding. The conversation fractured, snarled, chaotic. Riven pacing like a caged wolf. Silas and Elias talking at once. Ambrose’s mouth twisted into a cruel smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

And Luna,gods. Luna with her cuffed wrist and the quiet blaze of fury that’s more dangerous than all our shouting combined.

Blackwell watches us the way a spider watches a fly spin itself in its web.

“I told you,” he says finally, voice silken, almost bored. “To let them work it out on their own.”

I don’t move. I keep my voice level, because someone in this room has to sound like they haven’t lost their mind. “You didn't mention the cuffs.”

“I didn’t need to.”

My Dominion coils at the edges of the room. I feel the pull of obedience tug against every body here,subtle, simmering. I tighten it. Just enough to still them, not enough to bend them. I’ve never used it against them. Not my brothers. Not Luna. Not unless necessary.

This is close.

“You’re saying this was the plan?” I ask, tone razor-thin. “That thing on her wrist,onhis, you arranged that?”

Blackwell’s expression doesn’t shift. “I arranged nothing. I allowed possibility.”

Riven curses under his breath. Ambrose scoffs. Silas mutters something about fate being a bitch and Elias, ever the subtle arsonist, starts looking for things to throw. Luna stands rigid beside me, her wrist wrapped in the gold that’s already bruising her skin.

“And what exactly is this ‘possibility’ meant to prove?” I demand.

Blackwell’s gaze slides to Luna, and I feel a spike of possessiveness so deep it nearly scorches through the floor.

“That not everything,” he murmurs, “revolves around the seven of you.”

The silence that follows isn’t silent at all. It howls.

“You’re wrong,” Riven snaps. “It’s always been about the seven.”

“No,” Blackwell corrects, and his voice is suddenly a blade. “It’s always been about her. And none of you ever asked why.”

Luna shifts beside me. I don’t look at her. I can’t.

“You want to keep her safe,” Blackwell continues, his fingers drumming again. “Admirable. But safe from what? From desire? From choice? From the consequences of letting someone else in? You think you’re protecting her, but you’re protecting yourselves,from losing ground you think you own.”

Elias rolls his eyes. “You’re so fucking philosophical when you’re the one pulling the strings.”

Blackwell ignores him. “She is bound to all of you because she chose to be. And she can un-choose. You don’t get to decide if she opens that door again. You don’t get to decide if it stays closed.”

“And the cuff?” I ask, cold, calm, deadly. “It stays?”

Blackwell smiles faintly. “Until she makes a decision uninfluenced by any of you.”

Ambrose steps forward then, voice deceptively smooth. “That’s not possible. We’re in her. She’s in us. There is no uninfluenced.”

---