Page 155

As if Luna is just a placeholder. As if the girl fate chose is some interchangeable limb of destiny, a name that can be swapped out when it no longer fits the story Maeve’s trying to claw back into.

I don’t react. I let her keep talking.

“Kill her,” Maeve continues, her voice low and even, “and the bond resets. It always has. I was the last true Binder. I died with the bond intact. Technically, I never released them. Lucien. Riven. Caspian.” She glances at each of them in turn, like her name might still ring inside their bones. “It would revert to me. Or to someone else in my bloodline. You’re playing with chaos here, pretending she’s permanent. But if Luna dies, I take her place.”

I tilt my head slightly, letting that sink into the others before I speak. Because Maeve’s not wrong. We don’t know what happens if Luna dies.

The bond was never meant to form like this, stretch like this,holdlike this. And yet, here we are—anchored to Luna in ways none of us have language for. She changed the design of this entire existence by simply surviving it. No one’s tested what happens when a living Sin Binder, bonded to more than one Sin, is killed. Maybe the magic finds its way home. Maybe it fractures the world. Maybe it ends us all.

I study Maeve like she’s something already dead—something clawing its way back into relevance by weaponizing doubt. Her eyes flick to Luna again, but Luna doesn’t flinch. She just stands behind me, close enough that I feel the rhythm of her breath at my back. I know without turning that she’s angry. I canfeelit—how her magic hums like a fault line beneath her skin. Not wild, not out of control. Just steady. Sharp.

And waiting.

I smile slowly. "You don’t sound confident, Maeve. You sound desperate."

She flinches. Just slightly.

I step forward once, not enough to provoke, just enough to place my body fully between her and Luna. If she tries anything, I’ll be the first she’ll have to get through. And Maeve knows better. She always did.

“You’ve told yourself that if Luna dies, the bond reverts. That the magic will recognize you. But even you don’tbelievethat, do you? Because if you did, you wouldn’t be wasting time talking. You’d already have loosed every weapon you have.”

I let the silence expand between us like a blade.

“You’re not here because you believe fate owes you something,” I finish, voice low. “You’re here because fate already answered, and you can’t stand the answer.”

Maeve’s mouth twists, and something bitter flashes behind her eyes—grief, maybe. Or whatever shadow is left of it after ahundred years of being dead. She opens her mouth to speak, but this time, I don’t give her the space.

“Go back to your hundred ghosts,” I tell her, my voice silk wrapped around steel. “Tell them the Binder they want is still standing. And if they come for her…”

I look past her to the trees.

“…they’ll find out why none of us were ever meant to be tamed.”

Behind me, Luna steps closer. Her hand slides against mine—not needing permission, not asking for protection. Justbeingwith me. And it roots me.

I squeeze her fingers once, then let go. Not because I’m letting her face this alone. But because I’m about to show Maeve what the Sin of Gluttony really is—And I’ve always preferred to use my hands.

There’s something foul in the way she bleeds. I don’t mean physically—her body doesn’t bleed like mortals. Not anymore. She’s not alive. None of them are. They’re the echo of the women we once knew, their magic curdled by the bitterness of not being chosen, not surviving, not mattering anymore.

But there’s still a tether between the realms—between what they were and what we are. And I’ve walked between those states enough times to feel it when I tap into them.

My hand is on Maeve’s throat, and her magic pulses against my palm like a dying heartbeat, and I drink from it—not with my mouth, not in the crude way of lesser creatures—but with the gluttony woven into my existence. Idrainher through the bond that no longer belongs to her. I feed on the residue of what she thinks she still deserves.

And it tastes like rot.

Magic, when pure, is symphonic. Luna’s magic tastes like starlight cracked over ancient bone—haunting and full of promise, like a spell half-whispered in a lover’s mouth. EvenRiven’s rage, Elias’s sharpness, Silas’s chaos—they have flavor. They hold weight. But Maeve?

Maeve tastes like ash and failure.

“Still hungry, Maeve?” I ask her, my voice low and almost gentle. “Because I am.”

She screams—not in pain. In rage. It shatters through the clearing, and it is not her voice alone. It's achorus—a hundred other voices answering her call from the tree line. The dead do not rest here. And neither does ambition.

They come like shadows pulled loose from the roots, a swarm of tattered white dresses and hollow eyes. Women we knew. Women who once touched us. Slept with us. Loved us. Lied to us.

They move fast, but they don’t move smart.

Lucien is moving, blood trailing down his arm from the arrow embedded in his shoulder. He rips the arrow free and crushes it in his fist like kindling, his eyes glowing with Dominion, voice rumbling low and absolute: “No one touches her.”