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“If she comes for me and Lucien,” Orin murmurs, “you stay with Riven. Elias. Silas.”
“No,” I say, immediately. Instinct. Spite. Desperation. “That’s not going to happen.”
He exhales, quiet but not tired. Just… sad.
“You don’t understand what the bond means,” he says.
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
I twist toward him, jaw tight. “Then tell me.”
He turns to face me fully. “You think it’s a connection. Something shared. Equal. But the bond, a real bond, wasn’t meant to be fair. It’s a chain dressed as devotion. Power disguised as intimacy. And when it’s unleashed, Luna…”
His voice softens.
“It becomes absolute.”
I stare at him.
And he doesn’t look away.
“You could make them do things they don’t want to,” he says, voice steady. “If you pushed. If you wanted. Riven. Silas. You could pull them inside out and they’d let you, because the bond doesn’t care what they want. It only cares what you will.”
The words land like a bruise I didn’t know I had.
I try to speak. I can’t.
Orin keeps going. “That’s why none of us wanted to be bound. Why we fought it. Because once we’re yours, really yours, we stop belonging to ourselves.”
“But I don’t, ” My voice catches. “I don’t take.”
“No,” he says gently. “You don’t.”
And that, somehow, is worse.
Because the bond is older than my morals. Older than my mercy. And if the first Binder reaches for him, for Lucien.
Orin’s voice cuts through again, quiet and deliberate. “As of right now… if she calls to us, and we’re not anchored… we go.”
I shake my head. “No. I won’t let that happen.”
“You may not have a choice.”
“You think I won’t fight for you?” I snap.
His gaze darkens, not cruel, but ancient.
“I think if she reaches deep enough,” he says, “you’ll finally see what the bond does when it’s no longer love, Luna. When it’s need.”
I go still.
He turns back toward the ruined courtyard, fingers trailing the edge of the stone like he’s asking it to remember the version of us that sat here, once.
“You think the others are safe because they joke. Because they kiss you. Because they sleep beside you and haven’t run. But if she takes me and Lucien, if we’re pulled back to what we once were…”
I stare at him.