Page 22 of The Sin Binder's (The Seven Sins Academy #4)

We’re all a little drunk. Okay, maybe more than a little. Maybe the kind of drunk where everything feels sharp and loose at the same time, and the world has that soft edge like you’re falling sideways but it’s funny instead of terrifying.

The garage reeks of smoke and sweat and magic—the kind that coils under your skin like a promise you can’t unmake.

Silas is in the middle of the room, performing.

That’s the only word for it.

One hand pressed dramatically to his chest, the other raised like he’s reciting poetry, except it’s the worst fucking poetry anyone’s ever heard. Some bastardized mess of Old Tongue and modern slang, weaving in nonsense about Luna’s “heavenly hips”

and how “the Sins fell, but Silas Veyd fell hardest.”

Elias is doubled over, wheezing laughter so loud it’s almost painful. Riven’s leaning back against the workbench, beer bottle dangling from his fingers, a rare smirk pulling at his mouth.

Even Ambrose isn’t immune—his mouth twitching at the corners like he wants to be above this but can’t quite manage it.

And me?

I’m sprawled in the chair, one boot kicked up on the crate in front of me, head tipped back, throat rough with laughter and smoke and something heavier simmering underneath.

It’s good.

For a moment, it’s easy.

Then the tornado hits.

The garage door slams open hard enough to rattle the hinges, and she’s there—our Sin Binder. Our girl.

Luna. Furious and fucking breathtaking.

Her eyes cut through the room like a blade, sharp enough to gut. She’s barefoot, tattoos still fresh and raw on her skin, and she looks like she could end worlds with nothing but a glance.

Every single one of us freezes like she’s a goddamn predator who just caught us mid-heist.

Silas’ hand drops mid-performance. Elias straightens, wide-eyed. Riven tucks his smirk away like it never existed.

Even I blink, forcing my brain to catch up to my body because the room tilts dangerously when I try to stand.

She marches in, all lethal grace and pissed-off energy, and before any of us can scramble for words—

She flashes us.

Lifts the hem of her shirt, casual and deadly, showing off the black ink sprawled across her stomach, up her ribs, crawling toward her sternum like vines and claws and ruin.

Our marks.

Our names written into her skin.

My breath catches sharp in my throat.

Her gaze sweeps across us, cutting, furious. “Which one of you brilliant assholes is going to explain this to me?”

Before any of us can stammer a word, there’s a faint click.

I glance over and—fucking—Riven’s holding up his phone, camera raised, thumb tapping the screen like he’s cataloging an execution.

Luna’s eyes narrow to slits, but she doesn’t move.

Silas, predictably, stumbles forward like he’s been yanked by an invisible chain.

“Holy shit,”

he breathes, voice too loud, too wrecked, too reverent. His eyes are wide, grin stretched stupid and sweet across his face.

He stops in front of her, gaze glued to the ink curling beneath her breast—the chaotic, swirling glyphs marked in my own handwriting, tangled recklessly alongside his.

“That one’s mine,”

he says, voice dipping lower, softer, like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.

His fingers lift, almost hesitant, then trace the curve of his crest on her skin.

The contact makes her shiver.

And me?

It’s stupid how badly I want to touch her too. How badly I want her looking at me the way she looks at him—like she could drag me to hell and I’d fucking thank her for it.

Elias whistles low from behind me. “Well, this just got interesting.”

Luna’s glare could melt the bones out of our bodies.

And still—still—Silas stands there with his fingers hovering over the ink curling under her ribs like he’s touching scripture, reverent and reckless all at once.

Until she slaps his hand away.

Hard.

The crack of skin on skin echoes in the garage, and Silas stumbles back, blinking at her like she’s just murdered his puppy.

Elias, because he’s the worst kind of idiot, doesn’t even react to the slap—his phone’s out at his hip, tilted subtly like he’s trying to pretend he’s not taking photos of her inked-up stomach while also very clearly taking photos.

“Elias,”

I drawl, voice rough from smoke and too much beer, “are you serious right now?”

He doesn’t even look up. “For posterity.”

“Put your shirt down, sweetheart,”

Silas mutters, voice slurring around the edges now, still not moving. “I can’t think when your tits are out.”

It’s fair.

None of us can.

Riven’s got his arms crossed, but I don’t miss the way his eyes flicked down too, once, fast, like he was memorizing every inch of her skin.

Ambrose hasn’t looked away once.

Luna makes a low, murderous sound in her throat and tugs the fabric back into place, arms folded tight across her chest like she’s debating who to set on fire first.

That’s when Silas claps his hands together, sways on his feet like he’s about to fall over, and then does the most Silas thing possible.

“I think,”

he announces, voice way too loud, “we need a history lesson.”

Before anyone can stop him, he snaps his fingers.

Three clones of himself ripple into existence around him—identical smirking disasters, all wobbling slightly like the spell’s drunk too. One leans against the wall dramatically, one drops onto the workbench, the last one flourishes a nonexistent cape and gives Luna an extravagant bow.

“Behold,”

the clone says, voice dripping with theatrical flair. “The Crests of the Sins.”

“Oh fuck me,”

Elias mutters, dragging a hand down his face but not stopping his phone from recording now.

Silas stumbles forward, grinning so wide it looks like it hurts. “See, darling,”

he slurs, gesturing wildly between himself and the others, “a Sin’s crest isn’t just a symbol. It’s a spell. It’s a binding. It’s history burned into flesh.”

The clone perched on the workbench holds up an imaginary scroll. “Only a handful of Sin Binders in recorded history ever got to five marks.”

The clone at the wall adds, “None of them survived long after.”

Silas spins on his heel, nearly toppling over. “Until you.”

His eyes lock on Luna, sloppy and soft and reverent under all that drunken chaos.

Silas claps his hands once, the sharp crack echoing off the stone walls like he’s summoning a crowd. His grin is reckless, stretched wide across his flushed face, curls falling into his eyes, and the drunk glint there is dangerous.

He spins, finger pointing dramatically at her, then at each of us in turn. “You’re in luck, darlings. Because tonight, you’re about to get the best damn history lesson you never wanted.”

Silas begins to pace, weaving between his clones like a ringmaster too drunk to stand still, voice dropping into something low, conspiratorial, full of slurred theatrics and danger.

“See,”

he starts, tossing a glance over his shoulder at Luna like she’s the only audience that matters, “back when the Binders crawled out of whatever pit birthed them, the Sins didn’t need to leave marks. It wasn’t a thing. You bound one or two, if you were lucky—or stupid. Maybe three, if you were cursed.”

The clone draped over the floor lifts a hand dramatically, miming being struck by fate, while the one at the workbench rolls his eyes.

“But five,”

Silas continues, voice curling sharper now, like smoke catching flame. “Five was the threshold. Five was the line you didn’t cross.”

He stumbles slightly but recovers with flair, pointing at his clone near the workbench, who now mimes opening a dusty book and flipping pages.

“No one knew why. Some said it was a curse. Some said it was the Binders themselves—that their bodies couldn’t handle the weight. That their magic would turn on them, burn them alive from the inside out the second the fifth mark appeared.”

The clone on the floor flails dramatically, pretending to choke, limbs splayed like a tragedy painted in oil.

Silas pauses, gaze dragging back to Luna, voice dropping softer but no less sharp. “And when the fifth crest appeared… it wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t ink and consent and pretty little promises. It burned itself onto their skin—carved in like a death sentence.”

He steps closer to her now, slower, more deliberate, like every word is stitching something between them.

“Not because we gave it,”

he says, voice rough. “Because the magic demanded it.”

His clones flicker, glitching briefly like static.

Silas sweeps an arm wide, spinning on his heel, voice rising again into something breathless, messy, half-sung. “And no Binder ever made it past five. They all died, darling. Some within days. Some within hours. Doesn’t matter. The fifth was the line. The end.”

The clone at the workbench mimes closing the book and dropping it to the floor.

Silas stumbles one last step forward, stopping right in front of Luna, voice slurred but soft, something real crawling under all that glittering, messy showmanship.

“But here’s the thing,”

he murmurs, lifting one hand like he might touch the edge of her shirt again, the line of her ribs. He doesn’t. “You’re already past the story. You’re rewriting it.”

The clones all collapse at once, vanishing in a shimmer of light like a curtain falling. The garage is too quiet now, the smoke still hanging heavy, the weight of his words sitting sharp on all of us.

And Luna—Luna is standing there, bare-legged, barefoot, branded, and glaring at us like she’s two seconds from setting the world on fire.

And for the first time in centuries, none of us know how the story ends.

My gaze drags sideways, cuts past Silas still buzzing on the high of his own theatrics, past Elias slouched in his chair like he’s seconds from saying something that’ll get him punched, past Riven who hasn’t moved but who’s reading every single one of us like a puzzle. I look at Ambrose.

He hasn’t looked up.

The others probably think it’s because he’s pissed—because he’s angry he lost, that he’s tied now to the one person he swore he never would be. And maybe that’s part of it. But I know Ambrose Dalmar better than most. That posture, the stillness he’s holding around him like a weapon—that’s not anger. That’s grief. He looks like a man mourning his own death.

And that’s when it hits me—not in a sharp, clean burst like most of my magic, but slow and suffocating, curling inside my chest like smoke caught too deep in my lungs.

That prophecy.

The one that’s been circling us like a blade since Luna’s clone whispered it in that chamber—those three truths laid bare like a loaded gun. Ambrose has to die to get Orin and Lucien back.

We’ve been trying to unravel it, clawing at the meaning like animals starving in the dark. I thought maybe it was literal. Maybe we'd have to put him in the ground to save the others. Elias, in one of his rare sober moments, said maybe it wasn’t that simple—that maybe death wasn’t death the way we understood it.

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 have to 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.

You can’t erase one of us. You can’t cut a thread from the weave and expect the fabric to hold.

We were here before kingdoms rose and fell. Before gods bled out their own people to build empires. Before Binders walked this earth and made us kneel. We were the story before anyone dared to write it down.

So how the fuck could we become six?

The thought stabs something sharp and aching beneath my ribs, and I drag in a breath, grounding myself against the weight of it. Maybe I’m reaching. Maybe I want to believe it because the alternative tastes too much like loss, like grief I can’t afford.

But gods, if there’s even a sliver of hope…

If this—the bond, the fifth crest, the shift in her power—isn’t death, but something else…

Something like change.

Then maybe that prophecy wasn’t a curse. Maybe it was a door. One none of us wanted to walk through, but one Ambrose cracked open anyway.

Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the end of us.

It can’t be.

We are the Seven. And you don’t rewrite creation without all of us.