Page 3 of The Sin Binder's (The Seven Sins Academy #4)

Lucien looks pissed. Not in the usual way—where his irritation is measured, folded neatly behind a polished glare and a sharp comment that cuts deeper than a blade ever could. This is different. He’s flat on his back, dirt streaking his jaw, blood drying under one nostril, and the fury burning in his eyes isn’t about pain.

It’s about position.

He’s furious that he’s beneath me.

That I put him there.

His pride—more brittle than bone, more volatile than my rage—can’t handle being pinned. But the bastard isn’t trying to get up either. Which means something else is going on beneath all that pristine arrogance. Something that has nothing to do with Branwen’s leash.

His breathing slows.

That tells me more than anything.

If she were in his head right now—if her hand was still wrapped around his spine like a leash—he wouldn’t be stilling. He wouldn’t be thinking. He’d be snarling. Lashing out. Throwing magic like words he’d regret later.

But he’s not doing any of that.

And that nosebleed? It’s stopped. Branwen’s magic always bleeds them when she’s pulling strings too tight. It stops when she’s distracted. Redirected. So I know she’s focused on someone else now. Probably Caspian, considering the roar of corrupted lust still vibrating through the Hollow.

So for now—Lucien is lucid.

Which means we’ve got seconds.

“You done?”

I mutter, voice low and rough, holding my arm braced across his chest, not pinning him fully—just reminding him I could.

Lucien exhales through gritted teeth. His eyes flick to mine, burning with something smarter than anger. Calculation. Familiar. Friendship, even. Beneath all the titles, all the power—Lucien has always been the one who sees. The one who keeps count while the rest of us burn.

“You know this isn’t how I wanted this to go,”

he says, voice quiet, almost careful.

“No one gives a shit what you wanted,”

I snap. “You didn’t stop it. None of us did.”

“I wasn’t given a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Easy to say when yours isn’t being dragged through you like barbed wire.”

I know. Branwen’s grip isn’t soft. It’s invasive. It twists. But hearing him say it, hearing that edge of pain slip through his perfect mask—it fucking grates. Because I’m the one who gets to be angry. That’s my role. He’s supposed to be above it. Cool. Collected. Superior.

Not human.

But right now, flat beneath me, chest heaving with the effort of not clawing his own power back, Lucien Virelius looks human as hell.

I don’t ease up. I don’t trust the space between us.

He shifts once under me, not to fight—just to feel it. My weight. The reminder that even he can be brought down. And it kills him. That’s what’s fucking with him more than anything. Not the dirt. Not the wound. Not even Branwen’s magic. It’s me.

He doesn’t like being beneath anyone.

Especially not me.

“Get off,”

he mutters finally, voice low, embarrassed.

“Say please.”

He growls under his breath. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Tempting,”

I reply, pushing off him with a grunt, standing slow, not offering a hand. “But I’ve got better things to do. Like making sure Luna doesn’t get gutted while you have your existential breakdown.”

“All you need to do is tire us out,”

he says, spitting blood like punctuation, like the taste of iron might buy him enough seconds to get clever again. Lucien’s tone is razor-flat, but behind it—beneath that veneer of calm that only cracks when he's bleeding—he’s almost impressed. That pisses me off more than it should.

I roll my shoulder, feeling the dull throb from where his knee had caught me earlier. I didn’t notice it in the heat. I only feel it now that the adrenaline's thinning and the Hollow’s quieted enough to breathe again. There’s always a moment after combat where you can hear your own body screaming at you, accusing you of ignoring it.

“I’m working on that,”

I grunt, letting my gaze sweep the fractured battlefield.

It’s chaos—coiled and beautiful in the way ruin always is. The Hollow bears our weight, but it’s changing beneath our feet. Magic scars the ground in etched sigils and broken stone. Blood paints the grit in streaks of memory, and the air smells like the aftermath of something we should’ve never started.

Lucien shifts behind me, slow and careful like he knows I’m still too keyed up to trust.

I don’t turn back to him. I drag a breath down into my lungs. It catches at the edges, sharp with smoke and frustration.

“Where’s Caspian?”

“Ambrose has him,”

Lucien says.

“Great,”

I mutter. “That’s definitely not going to get complicated.”

Lucien’s laugh is low, bitter, more exhale than sound. “Everything’s complicated now.”

He’s not wrong. But it still grates. I don’t like hearing it from him. Not while he’s still pulling himself upright, brushing dirt off his coat like we didn’t just try to kill each other.

Lucien doesn’t say it like he expects resistance. He says it like he’s already three moves ahead, like he knows my decision before I’ve made it. There’s no edge to his voice, no urgency. Just the kind of precision that always makes me want to punch him. He doesn’t command. He places pieces.

“Go,”

he says. “She’s focused on Orin. You’ve got one shot.”

I don’t waste time with questions. I nod—once—and I take off before I can second-guess it.

The Hollow warps beneath my feet as I move. It’s alive with residue—echoes of spells, power still humming in the bones of the earth, fractured sigils bleeding magic across the ground like veins. Every stride forward draws more heat to the runes scrawled over my arms, my chest. My breath comes ragged, not from exhaustion but anticipation. My rage isn’t just awake—it’s starving.

And there she is.

Branwen stands like she’s rooted to the very heart of the Hollow, her hands folded calmly in front of her, her power swirling in quiet arcs of gold and rot around her frame. There’s nothing frantic in her posture. No urgency in her gaze. Just... satisfaction.

She’s not watching the chaos anymore.

She’s watching Orin.

His body is braced, his shoulders drawn taut, his magic trembling under the weight of her hold. Whatever she’s done to him, it’s pulling him apart from the inside. And yet he stands. Silent. Unmoving. Sage-like in his pain. If it were anyone else, they’d be on their knees.

But she’s too focused on him to notice me—exactly like Lucien said.

It’s my opening.

I dig in and run, every pulse of power coiling into my fists. I don't plan to knock her down. I plan to rip her apart. Take her apart with rage—with the fury she’s bred in all of us and fed like it belongs to her. My wrath is not Lucien’s clever blade. It’s not Orin’s quiet storm. It’s wildfire, and I mean to burn her in it.

Ten feet away, her head tilts.

Her lips curl into a smile like a secret she never told me.

And everything goes wrong.

It hits me first like a cold snap in my brain—a voice, not spoken aloud, but pressed into my bones. Lucien. I know that weight. That command. He doesn’t need words to make a body betray itself. His will slides in like silk and drags.

“Down.”

My knees lock. My steps stutter.

It’s not enough to stop me. Not completely.

But I feel it. That hesitation—foreign, forced—gripping my spine like a leash.

Before I can shake it off, another force collides with me. Not blunt. Not visible. Just a hand—Orin’s. Ghost-light fingers brushing against my arm as he steps out of Branwen’s shadow.

And the second he touches me, it’s like something inside me gets hollowed out. The burn of my magic evaporates in slow, dragging waves. Not stolen. Not consumed.

Devoured.

Orin’s eyes meet mine, and there’s sorrow in them.

Real sorrow.

But his mouth doesn’t open.

He doesn’t explain.

He doesn’t apologize.

He just takes.

My rage—the thing that’s defined me, driven me, saved me—seeps out of me through his grip like blood through a cracked vessel.

I snarl and swing for him out of instinct.

But it’s weak.

Sloppy.

The kind of hit I’d never throw if I were myself.

And it misses.

Of course it misses.

Because I’m not myself anymore.

Between Lucien’s voice and Orin’s touch, I’ve been undone.

And Branwen doesn’t lift a finger.

She just turns her back.

Dismisses me.

Like I was never a threat.

Like I was never worth the effort.

The smile she leaves behind is worse than a blade.

Because it tells me she planned for this.

Lucien and Orin have me boxed in.

Not with brute force—though they could.

Not with words—though Lucien’s are always blades waiting for the right vein.

It’s their presence that suffocates, sharp and unrelenting, pulling at my magic until I can barely remember what it feels like to rage without something leeching it from my bones.

Lucien stands a few paces off, spine straight, hands loose at his sides, but every inch of him wired with purpose.

He doesn’t look at me like a brother.

He looks at me like a problem.

And Orin, fucking Orin, is the quiet executioner—shoulders calm, expression unreadable, but his power already threading through the seams of mine, feeding on it slow and patient like he's done this a thousand times before.

They think they’ve neutralized me.

And maybe they have.

But that’s not the point anymore.

Because their eyes are on me, and that means they’re not on them.

Out in the swirling ruin of the Hollow, I can feel Silas’s magic shift like a change in pressure.

It flits around the edges of this war like a drunk shadow, untethered and erratic, but underneath the chaos is precision—targeted interference, unpredictable enough that even Branwen’s cursed foresight can’t trace him.

And Elias, gods help him, is right there too.

Not subtle.

Not graceful.

But he’s moving, and that’s what matters.

They’re working in tandem, even if they’d both swear they’re not. Silas, the storm. Elias, the spark.

Maybe this is what Lucien wanted from the beginning.

To make Branwen think the real threat is the one snarling in the center of the battlefield, ready to tear her throat out.

And while she watches me, while she’s focused on containing my fire, the others slip through the cracks.

They can get close enough to matter.

Close enough to end her.

We just have to keep pressing.

Keep distracting her.

Long enough for her to trip.

Long enough for her leash on Caspian to snap.

Long enough to matter.

But I don’t know how much longer we can hold.

Branwen didn’t bind children.

She didn’t craft her weapons out of soft souls.

She bound us.

We weren’t meant to clash like this—against each other, against the very gods we once were.

We were forged from the same ash, born from the same cursed dust.

Brothers without blood.

Mirrors sharpened into opposites. Each one of us a counter to the next.

Rage and pride.

Sloth and gluttony.

Envy and greed.

We were never meant to win against one another.

We were meant to burn.

And that’s what this is now. Not a battle. Not even a rebellion.

It’s a slow, inevitable burn.

And I just hope, when it’s over, there's something left of us worth saving.

Time doesn’t shatter. It stretches—elongated and strained like a heartbeat held too long in the chest. The battlefield stutters into slow motion, every particle of ash and fractured magic hanging mid-air like it's been caught in glass. The Hollow breathes around us, and in that breathless space, I feel the shift.

Elias has done something I haven’t seen him do in years.

He’s trying. Not deflecting. Not wisecracking. Not sliding through the chaos like it can’t touch him.

He’s running.

And gods, I can't look away. Because for a second—just a second—I’m not sure it’s really him. The image of Elias Dain, in motion, full-speed, is so foreign it almost breaks my brain. I didn’t think he had it in him. Not really. I always figured the sloth thing was more than a Sin—it was structural. Something wired into his bones. Something even the bond with Luna couldn’t pry out.

But he’s moving now. Hard. Fast. Intentional.

And the world bends around him.

Orin notices. I see the way his back stiffens, like a man watching prophecy unfold in front of him. His hand closes loosely at his side, and for a moment, he’s not the ancient observer. He’s a damn anchor. His power spreads into the ground in slow, measured pulses—bracing. Absorbing. As if even he doesn’t know how far this ripple will go, but he knows it will break something when it does.

Elias keeps going.

Unstoppable. Unapologetic. His face pulled tight with effort I’ve never seen there. It costs him to do this. That’s the thing. People forget the price. His power isn’t flashy, but it drains. Slowing time? It drains him of more than magic. It takes memory. Movement. Sometimes even sense. He doesn't use it unless it's necessary.

Which means this is.

And then—

Silas.

Time doesn't touch him. Of course it fucking doesn’t.

Silas storms through the frozen second like he’s been waiting on Elias to get with the program. His body flickers in and out of focus, clone after clone shedding from his shoulders like shadows trying to outrun him. But at the center of it, there’s one Silas. Real. Reckless. Grinning like a lunatic high on chaos. His boots hammer the ground, tearing toward Elias with wild purpose.

And I brace—because they’re going to collide. Silas doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t dodge. He leans in, like he wants to crash.

But Elias?

He doesn’t blink.

He catches him. Fucking—plant-feet, grip-wrists, full-body momentum—catches him mid-run like this is something they’ve practiced in secret, like they’ve been waiting for the moment time would finally give them the stage.

The ground cracks under Elias’s feet, a split vein of power ripping through the Hollow as he absorbs the impact. But he doesn’t stumble. Doesn’t even grunt. Just sets his stance and spins, dragging Silas with him in one clean, impossible motion.

“Go get her, pretty boy,”

Elias mutters, voice so low it nearly disappears into the frozen air.

And then—he throws him.

He throws Silas like a weapon forged in madness and spit and spite.

Time snaps.

And Silas erupts.

Blades drawn. Power stealing through his veins like borrowed lightning. His body twists mid-air, and I can feel the war song of it, every step of that move built not in theory but in trust. The wild kind. The kind only idiots and brothers are stupid enough to pull off. And for once, for the briefest damn moment, I don’t want to strangle either of them.

Branwen sees it too late.

She turns.

And Silas hits her like the embodiment of every mistake she ever made.