Page 95 of The Sin Binders Ascent

He crouches down by a jagged rock, fingers brushing over moss that clings to it like old lace. “Still warm.”

“She was taken,” Riven says, not asking. Declaring. His voice is a low grind of sound, like it’s been dragged over too many sharp things in too little time. He’s not wearing a shirt again, and there’s blood dried under one of his eyes, not his own. “She didn’t leave. Someone ripped her out.”

“Or something,” Silas adds from where he’s hanging upside down from a low branch, one leg hooked over the wood like he’s doing acrobatics at a funeral. He’s chewing on a sprig of something green and mildly toxic. “I mean, not to be dramatic, but this hasinterdimensional interferencewritten all over it. Just saying.”

“Then say less,” Lucien snaps. “We’re not here to speculate. We’re here to findher.”

Orin moves slowly along the edge of the clearing, fingertips grazing the bark of a tree that looks half-dead but hums faintly beneath the surface. His eyes are narrowed, and every movement is precise, deliberate. Sage in a boy’s frame, barefoot in the dirt like he belongs to the forest more than the house. “This tree remembers her,” he says quietly. “She leaned against it. Breathed here. But then the energy folds. It’s like a tear.”

Ambrose turns his head, eyes tracking every word with surgical focus. “A rift.”

“A pull,” Orin corrects. “But not like a portal. Not spatial. Temporal, maybe. Layered. Like somethingthreaded throughthe moment.”

Elias exhales a stream of smoke upward and mutters, “God, I hate when he gets poetic. It means something wants to eat us.”

Silas grins. “Is it me?”

“No,” Ambrose answers, deadpan. “It’s never you. You’re the thing wesendin to get eaten.”

“Aw,” Silas pouts. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

I ignore them. The clearing stinks of the absence she left behind. It’s not just emotional. There’s something chemical about it. The trees here have turned slightly inward, the branches leaning in as if recoiling from whatever touched this space last. Leaves have yellowed in unnatural patterns. The air is off, too cold in bursts, too hot in patches, like something slashed through the balance of the elements and left a glitch in the fabric.

She was here. I can still feel the shape of her in the wrongness of the moment. The memory of her body pressed into mine. The way she used to hum when she thought I wasn’t listening. The scent of her skin after rain. That perfect, shattering pull of the bond when she was content.

None of it is here now. None of it lingers.

“She didn’t walk away,” I say quietly. “Someone took her. And they didn’t leave through any doorway I’ve ever known.”

Ambrose kneels beside me, voice low. “If we’re dealing with temporal slippage or layered memory realms, we’ll need more than brute strength. You’ll need to anchor.”

“Iamthe anchor,” I grind out.

“No,” Orin says from behind us. “Sheis.”

That stills me.

I look up. They’re all watching now. Even Silas. Even Elias, who’s finally snuffed out his cigarette and is staring at the edge of the trees like he’s waiting for something to come out of them.

Nothing makes sense. Roots loop in patterns that don’t match the trees they belong to. The shadows are cast in the wrong direction. The sound of birds doesn’t echo. It just falls flat, like it was recorded and played back from too far away.

“Then we go deeper,” I say, rising. “We find whatever slit open this place, and we tear it wider.”

Elias groans again, flinging his arms wide like a martyr. “Oh, good. A fun suicide mission. Let me just grab my emotional support flask and some backup pants.”

Caspian turns to him. “You’ve been wearing the same pants for four days.”

“They’ve grown attached to me.”

“Just like your emotional damage.”

“Exactly. They’re besties.”

Ambrose cuts through the exchange with a flick of his hand. “We need to prepare for instability. If we enter through a layered point, we’ll encounter displacement. Time distortion. Maybe even possession.”

Silas brightens. “Possession?Finally.I’ve got some demons in me that are just begging to swap jobs.”

Riven steps forward, eyes like a storm about to choose a coastline. “Let’s go. The longer we wait, the colder her trail gets.”

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