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And now, looking at Ambrose, something sharp and sick settles behind my ribs. It’s not death by blade or curse or fate.

It’s this.

The binding.

It’s everything Ambrose fought to avoid, everything he swore he’d never give away, laid bare tonight without ceremony or mercy. He didn’t die on the floor of that ritual chamber, but something fundamental inside him cracked when he bled for her. When he marked her. When he gave in.

And it was never about him losing.

It was about what she became because of it.

The pieces slide together, brittle and brutal. Silas was too busy performing to spell it out, but the old stories—the ones tucked into the Hollow’s bones, the ones Orin warned us not to read too closely—all said the same thing in fragments and half-truths.

The fifth binding isn’t just another notch on her skin.

It’s a shift in power.

The crests don’t just shield her. They don’t just mark us. They root something deeper, something older, into her bones—pull from us and reshape her, thread our power into her pulse until she’s something other, something more.

And with the fifth seal, she’s no longer just a Binder. The old Binders never survived the fifth not because the Sins killed them, but because they weren’t built to carry this kind of weight. They couldn’t survive the shift.

But Luna… Luna’s already past the line.

I glance back at her, the air between us humming sharp, and the truth clicks hard and vicious.

The reason she’s still standing isn’t because she’s lucky.

It’s because she’s something else now.

And the worst part—the part settling like a blade between my ribs—is that I think she’s stronger than any of us. Maybe stronger than Orin, who’s still up at the Pillar holding the portal closed like it’s peeling him apart from the inside. And maybe that’s what the prophecy meant all along. Ambrose didn’t haveto die. He just had to give up the one thing he never would—his power, his freedom, himself.

He had to bind.

And in doing that, he made her unstoppable.

I drag in a breath, slow and ragged, my bottle forgotten in my grip. The garage still smells like sweat and beer and smoke, the others too drunk, too high to realize what’s really happening in front of them. But I feel it now, alive in the marrow of my bones.

The balance has shifted.

The thought claws sharp at the inside of my skull, ugly and unwelcome, but it won’t let go. It sits there, gnawing at the edges of everything I am, louder than the laughter that’s already faded, louder than Silas’ theatrics, louder even than Luna’s burning stare across the room.

Ambrose has to die.

I can’t shake it now—not after everything that’s happened tonight, not after watching him unravel in slow motion without saying a word. It feels too real, too heavy, too much like inevitability pressing down on my ribs.

But then another thought—softer, sloppier, stitched together by the alcohol humming in my bloodstream and the haze clinging to my throat—edges its way in.

Or maybe I’m just drunk.

High. Tired. Fraying at the seams like the rest of them.

Because the idea of losing one of us… it doesn’t make sense. It never has.

We are the Seven.

Not six. Not almost seven. Not almost enough.

We’re the thing the Hollow was built around, the thing the Council still whispers about behind closed doors like we’re a curse they can’t kill. We’re not just a number. We are balance, order, entropy, desire, wrath, wisdom, sin incarnate.