Page 32 of The Sin Binder's (The Seven Sins Academy #4)

The dirt beneath me is damp, clinging to my palms like it’s got something to say about my life choices. My chest’s pressed flat to the earth, knees scraping rocks as I belly-crawl the last few feet to the edge of the ridge. I’m fully committed now—smudged, bruised, probably a little blood somewhere on me, because I can’t do anything halfway.

Below, the cathedral sprawls like a black gash against the hollow gray horizon. It’s a beast of stone and shadows, its doors sealed, its spires crooked like claws. No sign of Orin. No Lucien. No Branwen. No monsters waiting to swallow us whole.

And because I’m a dramatic little shit, I sigh, draping myself theatrically over the ledge like I’ve just conquered the entire continent.

Luna, I slide my voice through the bond, pitching it low, conspiratorial, because I know she’s probably still distracted, still chewing on all that doubt from earlier.

This is your brave soldier reporting in. I have scaled the unscalable, risked life and limb—and my very expensive hair—to reach the precipice of our doom.

A beat, and when she doesn’t immediately reply, I double down.

No enemies in sight, but clearly, they fear me. I’d fear me too if I were them. I’ve ascended Mount Doom, Mount Everest, and the very peaks of your standards, darling. All for you.

Another pause.

Then, just to be an ass, I add: Tell the plebs at the bottom of the hill that the hero requests snacks upon his triumphant descent.

Her response hits my head sharp, dry, You’re ridiculous.

But underneath it, there’s that thread of warmth I was looking for. That little spark of her amusement, stitched tight around her worry, and I want to unravel every knot of it.

I tap the bond again lazily, dragging the words across her mind like a promise. For you, baby, I’d climb every mountain, crawl through every pit, die in every tragic backstory. All so I can make you roll your eyes at me later.

I drop to my stomach again, slowly, like the ground is lava and I’m the world’s sexiest sacrifice. Dirt cakes into the seams of my hoodie—my hoodie, the one that’s absolutely still cursed and now whispering things about Elias’s thighs. Not helping.

But I press on.

Luna, I whisper through the bond, this is your hero reporting live from the warfront. The target—cathedral of doom, spire of nightmares, probably haunted—is approximately forty slithers away. Terrain is rocky. Danger: extremely high. Risk to ego: minimal.

I wait for her snark, the inevitable gods, , but all I get is a flicker of warmth—like she’s trying not to laugh. Encouragement. Fuel.

So I keep going, crawling, ducking behind a log like there are snipers in the trees. There aren’t. Unless Ambrose sent them, which wouldn’t shock me. Man’s playing a long game of who’s-the-most-impressive, and I am not losing to a guy who barrel rolls without irony.

I inch closer to the cathedral's shadow, and the closer I get, the colder the ground feels. Not temperature-wise. Soul-wise. Like the earth here remembers blood. Screams. Things no one wrote down. The grass dies under my fingers, each blade curling in on itself like it doesn’t want to touch me.

Good. I don’t want to be touched.

Except by Luna. She can touch me. Any time. Preferably when I survive this and demand celebratory snuggles.

Update, I tell her, voice hushed and serious now. I’m five feet from the gate. Still no movement. This place is… weird. I don’t like it. And that’s saying something, because I like haunted stuff. I once made out with a banshee for the aesthetic, but this? This isn’t just dead. It’s waiting.

There’s a shadow in the stained glass. Could be a trick of the light. Could be Branwen. Could be worse.

And because I’m me—because I have to—I throw a glance over my shoulder toward the hill where the others are dots in the distance, and I mutter, Suck it, Ambrose. Your broody ass wouldn’t even crawl, would you? No. You’d just teleport inside and call it efficiency. This is drama. This is style.

A breeze snakes past me, and I freeze. Something old whispers through it—not a voice, not a word, just… permission. A door in the cathedral shudders. Opens a crack. My heart lodges in my throat.

Luna… I think it just opened for me.

I flatten myself against the cold, dead grass like I’m part of the scenery, like I can somehow blend into the earth if I just breathe shallow enough. My hoodie scrapes over the stone, and I ignore the bite of rock cutting into my ribs because this is strategy—this is war—and I’m halfway through mentally drafting the chapter I’m going to write about myself later when the figure steps out.

Lucien.

He looks the same and nothing like himself, all in one breath—a shadow of the man who once shoved me into a fountain because I swapped his tea with holy water. His hair’s longer, tangled like he stopped caring. His expression is wrong, hollowed out and carved sharp at the edges like something’s eaten through him. And still, even from here, I see how his shoulders sag when he spots me.

Because he’s spotted me. Of course he has. His sigh is long. Drawn out. Exhausted in a way I haven’t heard in weeks.

And that’s when it happens.

My hoodie—my cursed, treacherous hoodie—murmurs like a drunken oracle, the sound crackling against the bone-dry air. Loud enough that even the dead probably heard it.

"I once got drunk and tried to make out with a gargoyle because it looked lonely."

I freeze, mouth open, crawling half off the hillside like the dumbest predator alive. Lucien’s sigh shifts—less exhausted now, more resigned—and I swear on every shred of chaos in me, I hear the faintest, smallest huff of a laugh from him.

I inch forward, craning my neck like maybe if I lower my body enough to the dirt, I can somehow rewind time. No dice.

He’s still staring at me.

And I hear his voice—dry, soft, razor-edged in a way it always used to be when he was trying to save me from myself.

“,”

he calls quietly, without looking back toward the cathedral door behind him. “Is there a reason you’re impersonating a worm?”

I press my forehead to the ground. This is it. My legacy.

Luna, I whisper through the bond. Abort mission. The cargo’s alive but he’s seen me. I repeat: he’s seen me. Also, my hoodie is a traitor. If I die here, tell Elias he still owes me a drink and tell Riven I love him but he can’t have my stash.

There’s no answer from her except the ripple of her laughter, soft and warm inside me, and I close my eyes for half a second, breathing it in.

Lucien shifts on his feet, waiting.

I push up to my elbows, dirt sticking to my hands. “You look like shit,”

I tell him, because if I don’t say something, if I don’t fill the cracks with noise, the hollowness will settle between us like it always does.

The scrape of boots on stone shatters the brittle quiet, and I glance back just in time to see the rest of them spilling over the ridge like chaos incarnate—Elias waving a hand like he’s trying to flag down death itself, Caspian already pulling something sharp from his belt, Ambrose looking far too collected despite the drunken brawl last night, and Riven stalking forward like this entire world has personally offended him.

Luna’s at the front, of course. Her mouth set in that determined line, power pulsing beneath her skin like a storm she’s holding back just barely. It rattles the threads of our bond, like she’s trying to smother the urge to tear this place apart brick by brick.

Lucien's eyes flick past me, toward them, toward her, and then over his shoulder to the cathedral doors.

“She’s coming,”

he says flatly. No inflection, no heat. His voice sounds like it belongs to someone else entirely. Controlled. Claimed.

Something sharp coils in my gut.

I wipe dirt off my palms, straightening like I hadn’t just spent the last ten minutes crawling through gravel and shame. "Yeah, we figured," I say, and when his gaze cuts back to me, I grin because someone has to. “Could’ve sent a messenger pigeon, Lucien. Save me the cardio.”

But his stare is hollow. Tight at the edges. And he isn’t looking at me—not really. He’s looking past me, toward the inevitable.

Branwen.

It hits me, sudden and sharp, like a punch behind my ribs, how wrong this is. How Lucien stands like a soldier waiting for the axe, not like the brother we’ve spent years bleeding beside. His bond to her isn’t a thread—it’s a leash.

The others reach us, fanning out behind me. Elias shoves me with a scowl, muttering something about how I never wait for backup. Caspian barely glances at me before his eyes lock on Lucien, sharp and worried. And Riven’s looking at Luna like she’s the only thing keeping him breathing.

“Lucien,”

Ambrose says evenly, voice cool as frost. “Where is Orin?”

Lucien’s jaw flexes. A muscle jumps at the corner of his mouth. “Inside. She has him.”

Luna’s voice cuts through the space between us. Soft, lethal. “And you?”

He doesn’t answer. I know that look—the hollow of it, the way it gnaws at the corners of his expression. Branwen’s fingers are sunk deep into his soul, pulling strings. He’s a weapon pointed at us whether he wants to be or not.

I step forward, slow, deliberate. “You gonna let us in, or are we gonna have to fight you first?”

Lucien’s mouth twitches. Almost a smile.

“She said you’d come,”

he murmurs. “That you’d throw yourselves at her altar.”

Rage hums under my skin. Not because he’s wrong—but because she’s in his head enough to say it. Luna shifts beside me, and I feel her fury, her grief, her goddamned resolve, thrumming down the bond like static.

“We didn’t come here to die,”

I tell him quietly. “We came here to drag you and Orin back home.”

And to kill the bitch who won’t let us.

Lucien’s throat bobs. His eyes flick to Luna one last time before he steps back—just a single step—and the doors behind him begin to creak open.

The invitation is clear.

And the trap is already set.

The cathedral swallows us whole. It’s not built like a place of worship—nothing holy about it. The walls breathe power, bones stitched beneath the marble, cracked mosaics of Sins threaded through the floor like a graveyard dressed up pretty. High above, the vaulted ceiling disappears into shadows, ribs of stone arcing over us like a beast’s cage. Every inch of the place feels older than the Academy, older than anything, humming beneath my skin like a secret I almost remember.

Lucien moves ahead of us, stiff and mechanical, like a marionette wound too tight. He doesn’t look back, doesn’t slow. His mouth is sealed—not literally, but it may as well be. Branwen’s fingerprints are all over him, slick and suffocating, like she’s puppeteering the words he won’t say.

The doors grind shut behind us. A sound that makes the hair on my arms lift.

I shove my hands deep in my pockets, try to act like I’m not memorizing every corner, every trap stitched into the architecture. There are glyphs carved into the walls—ancient ones, the kind that predate us, that predate the Academy. They’re not here to ward. They’re here to bind, to bleed, to twist.

Every step echoes like a heartbeat.

The corridor opens into a nave, but it’s nothing like the ones at the Academy. Here, the pews are slabs of polished stone, cold and cracked, arranged not to invite worship but to direct attention. Toward the altar at the far end, where I know she’ll be waiting.

And gods, she’s theatrical. Branwen always did like her stages.

Above us, the stained glass isn’t of saints or martyrs—it’s of us Sins. Twisted, desperate, beautiful and ruined. The light that filters through their faces fractures the room, casting slashes of crimson, gold, violet across the floor like fresh wounds.

I glance at Luna. She’s walking straight, chin up, like the shadows can’t touch her. But I can feel her through the bond, vibrating beneath her skin like a blade ready to snap.

Ahead of us, Lucien doesn’t even twitch.

The closer we get to the altar, the worse it feels. Like the walls are leaning in, the air thinning, every breath heavier than the last. I can almost taste her power here, sweet and poisonous, like honeyed venom.

I murmur under my breath, half to Elias who’s at my shoulder, half to myself, “You’d think if you built your little murder cathedral, you’d at least spring for comfier chairs.”

Elias snorts quietly, but it’s hollow. Even he knows we’re walking into something worse than death.

I drag my gaze back to the altar. There are no offerings there—no candles, no prayers. Just a single, empty throne carved from obsidian, split down the middle like it remembers being shattered once.

The Sin Binder’s graveyard. That’s what my fantasy version of Luna told us. And she was right. This place isn’t a sanctuary. It’s a monument to every Sin Binder who’s died and every one who’s been devoured.

And now it’s our stage.

Lucien finally stops at the base of the altar steps. His shoulders lock, like his strings have pulled taut, and I know—without looking—that Branwen is behind that door at the far end. Waiting. Watching.

A smile curls at the edge of my mouth, sharp and ugly.

Good.

I want her to see me when I tear this cathedral down around her.

Lucien’s fingers twitch when he gestures toward the door, the same door he’s been leading us to like some obedient, possessed little soldier—but his eyes, sharp and frantic, slice back to us with a silent, desperate no. He doesn’t speak—he can’t—but he’s screaming in every other way, in the stiffness of his shoulders, the way he sets his feet like he’s bracing for us to walk away.

And I don’t give a single shit about what he wants.

I step forward without ceremony, without asking, without caring what anyone else thinks about it. I’m done waiting. Done playing along. Done with the theatrics and the cat-and-mouse Branwen has been spinning like she’s the weaver and we’re the thread.

The door groans under my hand, older than it looks, like it remembers how many Sins walked through it only to never come back out.

The cathedral’s main chamber swallows me whole.

And there she is. Branwen looks nothing like the venom-laced villainess she likes to play. She’s slumped on the throne, a cracked thing of stone and bone at the top of the dais like she thinks she still rules over us. Her head lolls lazily, skin ashen, hair tangled at her shoulders like she hasn’t slept in weeks. There are dark circles bruised beneath her eyes, and she looks brittle in a way that has nothing to do with her magic.

I let the grin stretch across my face, sharp and brutal.

“You look like shit,”

I say casually, loud enough to snap through the cathedral like a slap. “Didn’t think I worked you over that hard last time. But, hey—age hits us all eventually.”

Branwen lifts her chin, slow and deliberate, like every movement costs her. Her eyes are the same—they’re the only thing that’s still sharp. Still dangerous. Still a knife glinting in the dark.

Her gaze cuts over me, then shifts to the rest of them filtering in behind me, and I see it then—the crack. Not in her body, but in her magic. In the thing she’s built here. The cathedral thrums beneath my feet, like it’s coming apart at the seams, and for the first time, she looks afraid.

Good.

She opens her mouth like she wants to speak, to purr something cruel and calculated, but her voice falters. There’s nothing left of the queen she pretended to be. And I watch her crumble.

I let my footfalls echo as I stroll forward, closer to the steps of her dais. “Let’s get this over with, Branwen. I’m bored of this song.”

The fucking end is coming. And I hope I’m the one who get’s to put this bitch down.