Page 36 of The Sin Binder’s Chains (The Seven Sins Academy #2)

Riven shakes beneath me, his body thrumming with an anger too vast to be contained.

The ground beneath us shudders in response, cracks spiderwebbing outward from where he stands, as if even the Hollow itself is struggling beneath the weight of his wrath.

His body is a live wire of rage and ruin, his breathing uneven, raw, the sound of it scraping against my nerves like something broken.

I press closer, my arms tightening around him, my fingers digging into the slick heat of his bare skin.

He’s burning up, his body fever-hot from the aftermath of his Wrath, from the power still clinging to him like a second skin.

But I don’t let go. I don’t flinch, don’t pull away. If anything, I hold him tighter.

"You’re okay," I whisper, voice steady despite the storm still raging inside him. "I’ve got you. I’m here."

His breath catches, a sharp hitch in his throat, and something shifts.

The Wrath doesn’t break, not completely. It clings to him, resisting, refusing to let go, but my words carve through it, cracking something deep inside him. His fingers twitch against my waist, a hesitation, a fracture in the overwhelming need to fight, to destroy.

Then, he stills.

For the first time since he lost himself to the Wrath, his body stops trembling. His grip loosens, his shoulders drop, and his head tilts forward, pressing against the side of my neck. A slow exhale. A surrender.

I slide my fingers into his hair, gently, carefully, waiting for him to come back fully, waiting for the moment he remembers where he is, who I am. His breath is warm against my throat, heavy, uneven, and for a long moment, neither of us moves.

Then, finally, he speaks, low, hoarse, barely a whisper.

"Luna."

My name. No bite. No resistance. Just a raw, quiet thing, said like a confession, like a prayer.

My fingers tighten in his hair, my other hand pressed against the curve of his spine. "Yeah," I breathe. "I’ve got you."

I don’t know how long we can stand like that. It feels like forever. Or maybe no time at all. The others are still watching, waiting, but for now, none of that matters.

Because he’s here. And he's not lost.

He is drenched in blood. It coats his arms, splattered across his chest, streaked along the sharp cut of his jaw where the creature’s death left its final mark.

The thing beneath him is nothing but ruin now, its body torn apart, no longer shifting, no longer breathing.

But still, he holds his blade like he’s expecting another fight, fingers clenched too tightly around the hilt, his body still too rigid, too coiled.

He’s here. But not all the way. I know that because he hasn’t let go yet.

"Riven," I whisper, my voice steady despite the way his energy crackles against me, wild and untethered. I don’t pull away. I don’t force him to move. I just press my palm flat against his chest, against the fever heat of him, and wait. "It’s over."

His body tenses, his jaw ticking like he wants to argue. Like the Wrath inside him is whispering no, not yet, not enough.

I watch as something shifts in his expression, something raw and fractured, and then, he exhales. The blade vanishes in a whisper of magic. Not thrown. Not dropped. Just gone.

And before I can react, before I can take another breath, before I can process the fact that he’s finally let go,

He wraps his arms around me.

I freeze. Not because I don’t want it. Not because I don’t need it. But because I wasn’t expecting it.

Riven Kain doesn’t give. He doesn’t take comfort, doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t know what to do with it. He lashes out, he destroys, he seethes. He lets the rage consume him so he doesn’t have to feel anything else.

But right now, his arms tighten, his body collapsing against mine, his breath hot against the curve of my throat. His skin smolders beneath my touch, the aftershock of Wrath still burning through him, but he holds me like he needs this more than he needs air, more than he needs to fight.

And maybe he does. Maybe I do, too.

So I don’t speak. I don’t let go.

I just hold him back.

"As much as I hate to break up this touching little moment," Elias drawls from somewhere behind me, his voice too amused for the absolute disaster happening around us, "we’ve got a problem."

I don’t let go of Riven immediately. His breathing is still uneven, his muscles still coiled tight, his Wrath simmering beneath his skin like an ember refusing to go out.

But Elias rarely sounds serious unless he means it, and something in his tone makes me pull back just enough to glance over my shoulder.

And then I see it.

The ground is moving.

Not in the way it did before, when Riven’s power cracked the earth open in his rage, but deeper, more deliberate. A sick, slow ripple of motion, like something beneath the surface is stirring, waiting, waking.

“Severin is such a dick,” Silas mutters, flipping a dagger between his fingers. "Can’t let it go, can he?"

“Well,” Elias says, stretching like we’re not standing in the middle of something horrifying and eldritch, "we did take his Sin Binder from him. That kind of thing tends to bruise a man’s ego."

Layla.

Shit.

I forgot about her, about how she’s still standing there, staring at the corpse of whatever nightmare we just killed, at the blood that’s still dripping from my hands, at the way Riven is barely holding himself together.

And she’s standing too close to the shifting ground.

I swear, my heart stops for half a second.

"Silas," I snap, already moving, and he doesn’t hesitate. He meets my gaze and nods like he understands immediately.

Then, in a whisper of magic, he splits. Mimics of himself spill into the space around Layla, surrounding her in a flickering blur of motion.

The real Silas stays by my side, but his copies fan out in a loose circle, shifting unpredictably, a disorienting tangle of identical grins and flickering steel.

Layla flinches. Her fingers twitch at her sides, something uncertain in her eyes as she looks around, her lips parting like she’s about to say something. But she doesn’t move, doesn’t run, just watches.

"You’re safe," I say, low and sure, trying to make my voice sound steadier than I feel.

Layla doesn’t respond. She just keeps looking at the thing we killed. At me.

And beneath us, the ground keeps moving.

It crashes into me like a tidal wave, warmth, devotion, something fierce and unguarded, too raw to be contained. It isn’t mine. It isn’t a feeling I called for or even expected. It’s his.

It floods the bond between us, unbidden and overwhelming, a sudden pulse of adoration so intense it makes my breath catch, makes my body go still. It’s not just attraction, not just want, it’s reverence, a feeling so deep it feels ancient, like it has always existed, waiting to be known.

For a moment, I am inside it, drowning in it, feeling exactly what it means to be wanted by Silas Veyd.

I flick my gaze to him, searching, and our eyes meet.

Just for a second.

But it’s long enough.

Long enough to see what he never meant for me to know.

Because it is all there, laid bare before me. No teasing, no masks, no clever words to hide behind. Just the weight of it, the depth of it, the truth of him, stripped of all his usual armor.

And then, it’s gone.

The bond slams shut so fast it nearly knocks the breath from my lungs. The warmth vanishes like it was never there, leaving only a phantom of what I just felt, a hollow space where something breathtaking had been.

Silas rips his gaze away from mine, his expression shuttering, his jaw tightening like he’s forcing himself to forget it even happened. His fingers flex at his sides, his whole body going rigid, as if he just holds himself still enough, he can pretend I didn’t just feel everything he’s never said.

But I did.

I know now.

And I don’t forget things easily.

My heart thunders in my chest, my body still tingling from the remnants of his emotions bleeding into mine. I could let it go, pretend along with him, ignore the way it changed something between us.

But I won’t.

Not forever.

Because for one perfect second, I felt exactly what it meant to be loved by Silas Veyd. And I’m not letting him take that away from me.

They move as one.

Lucien, Orin, Riven, Elias, and Silas, a wall of defiance, a shield of sharp edges and lethal intent. They step forward in near-perfect synchrony, bodies tensed, power thrumming beneath their skin, ready to meet whatever is about to crawl out of the shifting, rippling earth.

But it’s Lucien who moves first.

Lucien, who calculates, who never acts without reason, without knowing every possible outcome first. Lucien, who stands at my back but never at my mercy, who plays his games with the board only he can see. He is always three steps ahead, always deciding what I need before I know it myself.

And yet, he was the first.

The realization crashes into me, cold and sharp as a blade pressed to my throat. Lucien doesn’t move first unless there’s no other option. Unless he believes, even for a second, that I can’t handle what’s coming.

And that? That means something.

I take a breath, steady, even, but my pulse hammers against my ribs as the ground splits open in earnest.

From the dark maw of the Hollow, they spill out.

A tide of writhing, shifting bodies, monsters with too many limbs, too many mouths, too many eyes that gleam in unnatural hues. They move with jerky, inhuman speed, the sound of their limbs scraping against stone and dirt setting my teeth on edge. Severin’s creatures. His nightmares made flesh.

Lucien draws first. A whisper of steel and power.

Then Orin, silent, but unshakable.

Riven cracks his knuckles, a growl low and dangerous curling from his throat. A man already half a beast, already ready to sink into it.