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The Sinner’s Bond hummed beneath their skin—less like a chain now, and more like a second heartbeat. Not demanding. Just… present. Permanent.

“Will it always be like this?” she asked. “Every time?”

Reuban didn’t answer. But his hand slid to her stomach, fingers resting there like instinct. Like territory. “If it is,” he said finally, “then you’ll always have to be ready to pay for what you took.”

She considered that and smiled. “Maybe I hope to never stop owing.”

“You surely won’t stop,” he murmured, his lips sliding along her forehead. “Because you took every bit of me.”

Sword of Severance

The stone walls drank the lantern’s dim light as the ocean growled through stone cracks.

Reuban stood near the table, fingers grazing its grain, breath steady but threaded with something… off. Like pressure humming behind the bones, a low pulse in the back of his jaw. And it couldn’t be the Sinner’s Bond, not after it just got finished obliterating his balls.

He adjusted the row of tin cups again for no reason other than to do something with the strange tension. Midnight hung close. The air, thick and real.

A soft creak slipped from the back—Josie stirring, likely. Kaos’s healing sleep was fading.

Reuban flicked his gaze to the door’s latch, wondering again over the manner of Raviel’s arrival. Would it be the sound of boots? Wings? Chariots of fire?

Maybe that's what was bothering him. Having an Archangel over for a midnight chat invoked his psychotic obsession with detail to divine protocol.

Kildare warned about being careful with words. They were beings of few syllables and were known to cast judgments on any who uttered the wrong ones.

Kross’s footsteps behind him journeyed along his frayed nerves. They felt like a hallucination of drunk rhythms that hid a secret map or code he was supposed to hear or see or taste.

“You do realize he’s not coming for dinner,” Krave informed, brick-walled in his chair as Reuban placed a pitcher of tap on the center of the table.

“It’s water,” he informed back, going around his Sire’s hunger for their Queen. And not just her blood. It was strong enough to stir Reuban’s appetite, even while he had no need or desire for his queen or her blood.

Kildare sat with hands clasped behind his head, body stretched out with his eyes closed. The attire Reuban had purchased him was ditched for his celestial blood skirt and wing-webbing embedded into the rest of his skin. In the light, it appeared like rubies crushed down to powder and gave him a celestial beauty that felt unlawful.

Reuban wanted to ask him about the Archangel’s visitation habits again. But no matter how he arranged the words, it felt like a childishare we there yet?query.

He blew out a steady, measured breath, only to run into Kaos’s dark aura. He seemed the least interested in whatever hid in the shadows of the ticking time, but Reuban knew better. He stood before the wall-sized window, locked down tight. Not tight enough that Reuban didn’t pick up what seeped from the cracks. And he surely wasn’t going to try and learn what it was. Not because he feared Kaos but because he sensed whatever he hid was tied to the gnawing unease in his own spirit.

Reuban opened a chair and forced himself to sit and not arrange or touch another fucking thing. He felt Larena enter the room and then jolted from the heat of her hand on his shoulder.

Fuck, he was ready to get this over with.

She opened the chair next to him and sat. He let her take his hand under the table while eyeing her serene face and the hint of joy at the edge of her mouth. He remembered her mercy matrix right as it oozed from her palm into his, coatinghis nerves with something close to a numbing agent and yet not. Like he knew what he felt but wasn’t forced to drown in it.

The air suddenly cracked with Raviel’s appearance and Reuban’s hand slammed into a tin cup with his barked, “Fuck!” The dish clattered across the table into the others like a bowling ball and he shot up to fix the mess only to send shit spinning out of reach.

The archangel pulled the chair open at the head of the table and sat, entirely oblivious to the embarrassing welcome wagon.

“Everyone needs to be here,” he announced as Reuban abandoned rescuing his pride, taking quick note of the angel’s eerily familiar human form as he sat. As if feeling his scrutiny, silvery eyes landed on him and jostled his memory. The maintenance manager at their apartment. The one who’d graduated from federal prison for cutting off his father-in-law’s head with dull scissors. Mistook him as an intruder at his hunting cabin. “He wore a ski mask,” he’d paused to say, a detail as important as a speck of dust. "Took me over an hour,” he informed with pride, gaze twinkling. “But I championed through it.”

Raviel could’ve been his older identical twin by fifteen years. He lacked the glint of insanity in his gaze, but had the same do as I say or die vibe. And rocked it.

Reuban realized Kaos was no longer at the table the second he returned with a wide-eyed, wary Josie clinging to his arm.

He felt her fear. The kind you had when you broke a million divine rules and Heaven was paying you a visit to chat about it.

Kaos sat her in the chair that put her between her four Kings. Himself then Kross on her left, and Krave then Kildare onher right. That put Reuban and Larena directly across and Raviel by the large window with the ocean view behind him.

Where was the Pontis? No longer needed? He was a being that wouldn’t be missed. Except by their Queen maybe.