Page 93 of The Sin Binders Ascent

Her voice is quiet again now. But not soft. Just steady. Thoughtful in a way that feels older than either of us.

I’ve spent so long inside the skin of what people desire, I’ve forgotten what it looks like on the outside. Forgotten that not every hunger ends in sex or power or ruin. Some are smaller. Quieter. A plate of warm food. A place to sit. A laugh that doesn’t end in regret.

She exhales, the sound almost like a yawn, but sharper. Tired. She props herself up on one elbow again and looks toward the pool. “Still not dead?”

“Not yet.”

“Shame. Would’ve saved me some time.”

“I’m wounded.”

“Not yet.”

I look down at the water again. The reflections are still wrong. They don’t show us, not really. Just echoes of what we might be. My face is too still, too symmetrical, like someone remembering me rather than seeing me. Luna’s image doesn’t appear at all.

She doesn’t notice. Or maybe she does and chooses not to say anything.

Outside, somewhere far above, a distant shriek spirals through the air. Not human. Not an animal. Just loud enough to remind us we’re not alone here.

Luna shifts again. Her hand brushes mine without looking for it this time. Just enough contact to say,I’m still here.

So I don't let go.

Lucien

She’s gone. Not in the way people mean when they say someone is lost or missing. Not like misplaced keys or a lover who storms out of a room and slams the door so loud the walls remember. No. This is worse. This is emptiness so sharp it scalds. This is theabsence.Pure, surgical, and fucking wrong.

Luna has been wound into the hollow of my chest for thirty years. She’s existed like breath, unnoticed until it falters, until it’s ripped from your lungs, and suddenly everything inside you is clawing to get it back. The bond that tied us all together didn’t just fade. It didn’t dim. It wassevered.

I feel it like a blade still buried in the meat of my ribs.

Her presence isn’t quiet. It’s not sleeping. It’s not hidden somewhere beneath the surface, waiting for us to reach deeper. It’s just… gone. Like someone took a knife to the root of who we are and left the edges raw.

The house is too still. No one speaks, not really. They’re scattered throughout the hallways like pieces of something once living, all of us trying to understand how the unthinkable has happened. I stand in the sunken den, facing the windows that no longer mean anything, staring out at the dark slope of the hill that leads into the woods. Useless. Everything is useless without her.

My powers have dulled. Not absent, but unresponsive, as if Dominion itself is disgusted with me. Like it knows its source of gravity has been removed and is now reluctant to obey. I try to reach for it, just beneath the surface of my skin, where I’ve always kept it, sharp and obedient, but ready. And it’s there. Murky. Heavy. But out of reach. Like trying to move through water and finding it turned to smoke.

Footsteps drag behind me, slow and unhurried, like someone who resents the need to exist right now.

Elias.

He slumps onto the arm of the couch like a cat with a head injury, elbow digging into the cushion, legs stretched across the coffee table in a way that has probably pissed Ambrose off in a hundred previous lives.

“She’s not dead,” Elias says, voice flat, tone thick with that lazy slouch he wears like perfume. “She’s just... not here.”

I turn slowly, jaw tight. “Youfeltthat break and you’re sitting there like it’s a fucking mild inconvenience?”

“I’m sitting because the only other option is burning the house down and doing interpretive dance in the ashes.” He scrubs a hand through his dark curls, then lets it flop across his chest again. “And I’m saving that for tomorrow.”

Ambrose enters without ceremony, carrying a glass of something far too expensive to drink during a crisis and sipping it like the room isn’t vibrating with restrained chaos. He wears detachment like it’s part of his skin. Except for the fact that he hasn’t tightened his tie in the last hour. That’s how I know he’s unraveling.

“She’s not dead,” Ambrose says, as if it’s a statement of fact and not the only thing keeping me from ripping the walls apart. “If she were, the bindings would’ve imploded. You felt the severing. Not the end.”

“And that distinction meanswhatto you exactly?” I ask, walking toward him with slow precision. “Because the difference between a severed bond and a corpse is narrowing by the second.”

He holds my gaze. No flinch. No humor, which is rare for him. Just that calculating stillness he uses to win negotiations and manipulate monsters. “It means she’s been cut off. Intentionally. Not by death. Not by distance. Somethingtookher, Lucien. And if we waste our energy turning on each other, we won’t have any left when we find the thing that did it.”

I want to believe him. Ineedto believe him.

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