Page 62 of The Sin Binders Ascent

She hurls a pillow in my direction without turning over. It smacks me square in the face.

I grin wider.

This is what they never understood. Lucien with his authoritarian ice. Riven with his perpetual scowl and fists. Even sweet Ambrose, who thought if he buried me deep enough, time might forget I existed. None of them ever learned how toplaywith her.

But I’ve watched her. Watched the way she sharpens when challenged. How she flares like wildfire when pushed, cornered. She doesn’t want safe. She wants blood. She wants to bare her teeth and know the person across from her won’t flinch. They’ll bite back.

And gods, do I plan to.

“Do you know what your greatest weakness is, Luna?” I ask the ceiling, as if I’m bored. As if this whole thing,being chained to her, trapped in this house with seven raging, possessive men who want to rip my spine out,isn't the most fun I’ve had in centuries.

She doesn’t answer. I don’t care. I answer for her.

“Compassion. Youfeeltoo much. You carry other people’s grief like it belongs to you. You try to save everyone.”

I glance at her again. “Even me.”

She flips around now, furious and wide-eyed, the cuff yanking slightly as she moves. “I am not trying to save you.”

My grin turns knife-sharp. “No? Then why are you so afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then why do I make you so angry?”

Her mouth opens, then snaps shut. She’s bristling, every muscle tight with the need to scream, to strike. Not just at me,but at everything. At the gods, at fate, at whoever decided she needed to bear the weight of this twisted story.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, at herself.

Because I’ve seen it,that flicker of desire she doesn’t know how to name yet. Not lust.Need. Raw, irrational, soul-twisting need. It's tangled up in her bond-scars, those broken echoes in her aura. Everyone else walks around like they know who she is. But I see the pieces.

And gods, I want every single one of them.

I toss the pillow behind me and lay back again, hands behind my head, leg kicked out like I’m the one in my bed. “If you ever want to talk about it,your feelings, your deep hatred of me, or the way your gaze lingers a little too long on my mouth,you know where I’ll be.”

She glares.

I smile.

I stare up at the ceiling, watching moonlight trace a ghost line across cracked plaster. The room’s too warm. The air too full of her. Everything smells like her skin,like soft heat and lightning before it strikes. And I’ve been gone too long to know how to stop wanting things that don’t belong to me.

Not that I ever did.

Eons. That’s how long they left me there. Buried alive in a realm that didn’t exist on any map. Not Heaven. Not Hell. Something deeper. A vault beneath the bones of the world. Cold, dark, empty except for the echo of my power feeding back into me like a scream I couldn’t escape.

No sound. No sense of time. Just the clawing ache of denial.

Because I’m not like them. I don’t need attention. I needcraving. I need to bewanted.And they took that from me.Sealed me off from the world’s hunger. Cut me off fromherbefore she was even born.

They thought I’d rot there. Thought I’d decay into something pitiful. That Desire could starve.

Idiots.

I didn’t rot. Iburned. Every year,century?,millennia?,I boiled hotter. Sharpened myself against the weight of their betrayal. Carved meaning out of isolation. Until Blackwell cracked open my prison and smiled like he was doing me a favor.

“You’ll behave this time, won’t you?” he said, like I was a dog they’d finally decided to unchain.

But it wasn’t his voice I listened for when the door opened. It was hers.Luna.

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