Page 2 of The Sin Binder’s Chains (The Seven Sins Academy #2)

Lucien doesn’t dignify him with a response, and Elias winks at me instead. “He’s excited. This is his excited face.”

I glance at Lucien. His expression is pure stone, glacial and unreadable.

“Right,” I say dryly. “He’s practically beaming.”

Elias laughs, a low, husky sound. “He’ll warm up to it.”

The road stretches before us in uneven cobblestones, the edges blurred by mist that seeps from the cracks, coiling over the ground like something alive.

The further we go, the more unnatural the landscape becomes, shadows pooling in places they shouldn’t, shapes shifting just at the edge of my vision. The Rift isn’t far now. I can feel it.

Or maybe it feels like us.

Lucien stops first. We follow, standing at the threshold where the earth itself seems to distort, the fabric of reality rippling like a heat mirage. The Rift is not a door. Not a gateway. It’s something else entirely.

A wound.

A hollow place in the world, cut open by forces that don’t belong here.

And we have to step through it.

Elias exhales, his smirk dimming as he looks at it, something contemplative darkening his silver gaze. “I hate these things.”

Lucien, finally, speaks. “You’ve been through one before.”

Elias tips his head back, his lashes low. “Haven’t we all?”

Lucien doesn’t correct him. He just steps forward, closer to the Rift’s edge, and the very air around him bends in response, drawn to him like ink bleeding into water. His presence makes the space hum with something unspoken, something waiting.

Something watching.

I exhale, adjusting my grip on my satchel. “So. How bad is this going to be?”

Elias lets out a short, amused breath. “Scale of one to catastrophic?”

I arch a brow at him. “Let’s start with one.”

He grins. “Then we have nowhere to go but up.”

Lucien lifts his hand, pressing his palm toward the Rift’s edge, his fingers barely grazing the swirling, shifting space where reality ends and something else begins.

It flickers, the color shifting between black and indigo, pulsing like a heartbeat. A ripple spreads outward, distorting the world around it, and I swear I hear something whispering just beyond the threshold.

Not words.

Not even voices.

Just sound.

A beckoning.

Lucien’s voice is quiet but firm. “Stay close.”

Then, without hesitation, he steps through, and the Rift swallows him whole.

Elias grins at me. “Well. No turning back now, little star.”

And then he follows, disappearing into the void. I hesitate only for a second, inhaling, steadying my pulse. Then I step forward.

The moment I step through the Rift, the world ceases to exist. Not in a violent, cataclysmic way. Not in a rush of wind or a sharp pull through space. No, it’s worse than that. It’s absence.

I don’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I don’t hear the sound of my breath. My body isn’t mine, it’s nothing, and yet, I am aware.

It’s like stepping into a space that was never meant to be touched by something as fragile as flesh. The void doesn’t pull me in, it releases me, the way a body expels a foreign object. I feel the moment I stop existing in the place I was before, and start existing here.

Wherever here is.

Shapes flicker in the darkness, things that aren’t fully formed, caught between being seen and being imagined. Shadows without a source. Glimpses of landscapes that vanish the moment I try to focus on them.

The Rift isn’t a place. It’s between places. A wound where reality fails to hold itself together. A passage through something that should never be traveled.

And inside it, I am nothing.

I don’t have lungs, but I feel the ache of breathlessness.

I don’t have skin, but there’s a sensation of touch, a thousand needlepoints dragging over me, whisper-thin claws tracing down my spine.

My body flickers at the edges, dissolving and reforming with each step, my limbs no longer moving in the way they should.

I walk forward, or at least, I think I do, but there is no direction, no time, no sensation beyond the slow, creeping wrongness that wraps around my bones like smoke.

And then, the bond snaps back into place. Not violently. Not the way it was before. But I feel it. A thread pulled taut, frayed at the edges, distant but unmistakable.

Silas.

Riven.

They are there. Alive. Somewhere on the other side of this.

The connection is weak, stretched thin, a whisper in the back of my skull instead of a presence, but it’s real. It’s waiting. And the realization hits so hard I gasp.

And suddenly, I exist again. I stumble as the ground reappears beneath me, my boots scuffing against something uneven, my legs nearly buckling under the sudden weight of being. The air is sharp, too thick, filling my lungs in a rush that makes my vision swim.

I hear Elias curse beside me, a low, raspy sound. Lucien is ahead, already regaining his composure, his shoulders stiff as he scans the space before us.

I lift my head and finally see. The sky overhead is wrong.

Not a sky at all, but a vast expanse of shifting darkness, broken by slivers of dim, unfamiliar light.

The land is jagged, fractured, as if something tore through it long ago and never bothered to put it back together properly.

Towering black spires stretch toward the void above, twisted structures that look like they were carved from shadows and bone.

This place doesn’t want us here.

Lucien speaks first, his voice even but edged with something cold. “Move.”

No hesitation. No time wasted. He starts forward, his steps deliberate, his posture unyielding.

Elias lingers, rubbing the back of his neck, his usual smirk absent. “Well, that was unpleasant.” He exhales, glancing at me. “You good, little star?”

I nod, but it’s not quite a lie. “It’s weaker than it should be. But they’re here.”

Elias hums, stretching out his arms. “Makes sense. The Rift doesn’t like bonds. Likes to sever things.”

That thought makes my stomach knot. The connection between us was already fragile, if we don’t reach them soon…I shake the thought away and keep moving. Because no matter what it takes, I’m getting them back.

The landscape unfolds before us in jagged stretches of blackened stone, veins of something too dark to be shadow pulsing faintly beneath the cracked surface.

It’s not lifeless, not dead, but it doesn’t belong to anything living either.

There’s a wrongness to it, like a painting smeared with something poisonous, a distortion at the edges of reality that my mind keeps trying, and failing, to reconcile.

I scan the horizon, noting the way the structures ahead twist upward like broken spines, curling into the empty sky.

Or what should be a sky. Instead, the expanse above is a roiling, endless dark, not quite clouds, not quite void, just a shifting nothingness, fractured by streaks of faint, unnatural light.

I force a slow breath into my lungs. “What is this place?”

Lucien doesn’t hesitate. “The Hollow.” His voice is clipped, his gaze sweeping the distance. “It exists between realms. A scar between the living world and everything that should have been left behind.”

Elias exhales, tipping his head back, studying the flickering half-light above us. “A lovely fucking scar,” he mutters. “Charming vacation spot.”

Lucien ignores him, his attention fixed ahead. “It was never meant to be traveled. Not by creatures like us.”

That catches my attention. I glance at him, his profile sharp in the dim glow. “Creatures like us?”

Lucien’s mouth presses into a thin line. “The Hollow doesn’t favor intruders. It was carved out of the void itself, stabilized only by the things strong enough to hold it together. Everything else? It either swallows or spits back out.” His gaze flickers toward me. “We should hope for the latter.”

Something cold curls at the base of my spine. “And the things that hold it together?” I ask, slower now.

Elias grins, but it’s not his usual smirk. It’s something sharper. “Oh, you’ll meet them soon enough.”

I don’t like the way he says that.

Lucien exhales, his patience thinning. “We’re wasting time. If the Rift stretched the bond this much, they’re farther than we thought. We need to move.”

His eyes settle on me, expectant. Waiting.

I blink. “What?”

Lucien tilts his head slightly. “You’re the one who felt them. You tell us which way.”

Right. Because that’s my role in this. The Sin-Binder. The one who can track them, even across the places between.

I push out another slow breath, willing the bond to surface, willing my mind to stretch toward that fragile thread still connecting me to them.

It’s faint. A whisper against my ribs. Silas is sharpest. His presence flickers in and out like a radio caught between stations, static layered with something distant, something raw. The kind of pain that isn’t fresh, but sustained.

Riven is quieter. Not absent, not gone, but muted. Not himself.

I steady my breathing and reach deeper, letting the pull guide me.

Then, finally, I turn.

“There.” I lift a hand, pointing toward the farthest stretch of broken land, where the horizon buckles into jagged cliffs, the light dimming into something deeper than black. “That way.”

Lucien watches me for half a second, assessing, then nods once.

“Then we don’t stop until we get there.”

He moves first. And behind me, Elias lets out a low chuckle, the kind that sounds more amused than it should.

“Well,” he murmurs, stretching his arms overhead as he falls into step beside me. “This is going to be fun.”