Page 78 of The Sin Binders Ascent

They're gone.

Not dead. Not severed. Not hidden behind wards or buried beneath shielding spells. Just… erased. Like my boys,my sins, were never written into my story at all.

I stagger, knees buckling as my lungs revolt. Air won’t catch. My body knows something’s wrong before my mind can catch up. A dry sob claws out of my throat, ugly and choking, as I fold over at the waist and clutch my stomach. The world tilts. Nothing holds. Not the ground under my feet or the magic in my blood. Not the ancient song that hums between us. Notthem.

I try again. Reach inward. Search the bond that’s been with me since Orin first touched my skin with his honey-warm hands. Since Ambrose looked at me like I was both answer and threat. Since Elias made a joke and didn’t mean it, and Silas laughed at the worst possible moment, and Caspian kissed me like sin was a holy thing. Since Riven bled for me, again and again, until his rage felt like home.

Nothing.

It’s not even quiet. Quiet implies presence, like someone holding their breath in a room with you. This is worse. This isabsence. A void so vast and clean and complete it doesn’t leave echoes behind. There’s no space for grief to take root becausethere’s nothing to grieve. Like I’m the last girl in a world that never had them to begin with.

My knees hit moss so thick it swallows the impact with a hush. I heave, not from pain but from the sheerwrongnessof it. Dry, rasping gasps that make my ribs stab like cracked glass. My vision swims. My stomach churns. I taste copper and bile and loss.

This place, whatever the hell it is, feels stitched together from ruin and memory.

The ground pulses, faintly, like there’s something buried beneath it that’s still alive and breathing. Fungal blooms shimmer in the corners of my vision, their glow the same sick green as dying embers. And the fog, it’s alive. It curls and coils and watches.

But all I care about is theholein me where they should be.

Thirty years of bondlines. Hot, beautiful, maddening, each one its own current, its own voice. Each Sin stitched into me by magic older than time and deeper than language. And now… gone. No warmth from Orin's calm tide. No fire in my blood from Riven’s temper. No laughter bubbling up from Silas’ chaos, no smug pressure from Caspian’s hunger brushing under my skin.

I claw at my chest like I can dig them out.

“You alright?” Theo’s voice slinks in from somewhere behind me, casual, curious.Unbothered. And it cuts like a blade.

I don’t answer. Can’t. He has no idea what it means to losethem. To be cleaved open and find nothing inside but empty echoes of love you know happened, but suddenly feels like maybe it didn’t. Maybe I made them up.

MaybeI’mthe echo.

I try to stand, my legs trembling like a newborn deer’s. The cuff between us glows faintly, gold and warm, mocking me. He’s still tethered.Hemade it through. But not the ones I chose. Notthe ones I built a life with. Not the seven men I would’ve burned the world down to protect.

I feel rage rise, thin and sharp. But it can’t land. It has nowhere to go. Because what am I supposed to fight when I don’t even knowwhereI am?

This world isn’t Earth. It’s something older. Hungrier. Something with teeth. And now it has me.

Worse, it has me alone.

The trees stretch so high they disappear into the clouds like ancient gods forgot to finish carving the sky. Their trunks are wide as temple columns, bark blackened and fissured, weeping thick, syrup-colored sap that smells like rust and rot and crushed violet petals left too long in a tomb. Above, the canopy sways with groans and creaks low, seismic noises like something massive exhaling just beyond the visible treeline. Wind shouldn’t sound like that. It shouldn’tfeellike breath.

This world is wrong.

Everything is the size of myth. Ferns as tall as buildings unfurl with serrated edges sharp enough to slice skin, slick with dew that shimmers like blood. Mushrooms the size of wagons huddle in fungal groves, their undersides pulsing with bioluminescent veins, breathing in and out in slow, wet rhythms. Ivy as thick as ship’s rope coils between roots like snakes waiting to strike.

And thesmell, gods, the smell. Damp earth and something metallic underneath, like old coins and fresh wounds. It coats the back of my throat, sour and sweet, clinging to my lungs. Everything reeks of decay dressed up in perfume.

A shriek cuts the air to our left, shrill, inhuman, too high to be anything with a mouth and lungs. It soundswet. Like something splitting open. Theo stiffens beside me but doesn’t reach for me. He doesn't get to. I still haven’t forgiven him for breathing the same air as me.

Something crashes in the distance, somethinghuge. Trees crack. The ground shivers beneath us like the bones of the world are protesting whatever walks across it. Not a beast. Acolossus. Bigger than anything that belongs in any realm I’ve ever known. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know.

But I will. Because that’s the kind of girl I am. The one who doesn’t run. Not even when every bone in her body whisperswrong.

The sky here is bruised jade smeared with ash, shot through with violet lightning that never strikes, just hovers and flickers like an open wound in the clouds. No sun. No stars. Just light with no source, like the air itself is lit from within.

The ground slopes steeply and the trees give way to twisted fields of spindled grass that reaches my waist, each blade shimmering with oil-slick rainbows when the breeze hits.

Theo whistles low beside me, a sound that should be casual, flippant, but feels carved out of something darker.

“Well,” he drawls. “Either we just stumbled into the prettiest afterlife ever, or we’re in deep shit.”

---