Page 35 of The Sin Binder's (The Seven Sins Academy #4)

"You want her dead, Ambrose," she spits. "You want her out of the way as much as I do."

I smile then, slow and deliberate, leaning in so she feels the weight of me at her throat.

"No," I breathe. "I want you out of the way."

I step back and gesture lazily toward Caspian, who’s coiled behind me like a blade about to strike, his magic humming at the edges of the void she created.

"She's yours," I tell him, voice silk and steel. "Make it count."

And I watch, cool and untouched, as Caspian’s power snaps forward—because I know how this ends.

With her erased.

With us free.

With Luna’s name still burning in my mouth like a curse I’ll never spit out.

The cathedral is chaos—firelight and shards of magic, bodies crashing through the haze like fallen stars. But I’ve never minded chaos. It’s predictable in its own way. Like a negotiation, when the other side starts to panic.

And Branwen is panicking.

Not that she shows it. No, she’s standing like a queen made of ash and rot, her body leaking Lucien’s strength and Orin’s wisdom like it’s hers to wield. But every flick of her wrist is a little too fast, a little too desperate. Every spell cast from someone else’s soul. The threads holding her together are fraying. And I’m watching them come undone.

is a blur—unnaturally fast, unnervingly precise—his power warping the perception of movement around him. Everyone else drags in molasses, but he is sound slicing through skin. Time-diluted violence. His expression is unreadable, but his aim is surgical—dodging Orin’s blasts and Lucien’s ice with the kind of grace that can’t be taught, only weaponized.

And then there’s Silas.

I don't know what spell he used—probably made it up on the spot—but there are versions of him everywhere. Clones bursting across the room in exaggerated theatricality, some screaming war cries, some moonwalking, one performing some kind of backflip off a pew like we’re on a stage instead of in the middle of a war. He’s not even attacking anyone. Just distracting, disorienting, chaos incarnate.

Branwen’s magic stutters.

She can’t target anything. Every time she tries, it’s a version of Silas with a stupid expression or glitter in his hair—and she doesn’t know which one’s real. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter. sweeps behind her, a blur of precision and speed, catapulting one Silas after another through the cloud of smoke and light.

And in the center of that spectacle, I move.

No magic. No flare.

Just purpose.

I glide between the fragments of war like they part for me. My boots don’t make a sound. My hands don’t shake. I see the lines of power crackling off her like veins—Lucien’s cold rage, Orin’s worn wisdom—and I slip through them, carving a path of stillness in the riot.

Her eyes flick toward me.

Good.

I want her to see it coming.

My hand grazes a shattered column as I pass it, and I own it—stone fusing to my will, humming under my skin like it’s waiting for my command. I touch the floor next, and the marble listens. I don't even need to give the order yet. I’m collecting everything I need. Building the strike. Silent, inevitable.

"Stay the fuck back," she rasps, voice low and raw now, and I can hear the cracks behind it, the fear she’s trying to swallow.

I don’t.

"You stole the wrong gods’ toys," I say softly, and I press my palm to the edge of her throne.

Her power jolts, like she feels it—something slipping away from her grasp. She lashes out with a thread of ice, jagged and wild. I sidestep. I don’t blink.

"You never learned how to wield power, Branwen," I murmur. "You just learned how to beg for it."

My magic slides into the throne—into the stone, the veins of the cathedral itself—and seizes. The pillar behind her flares in resistance, but it’s not hers. Not entirely. She’s dying already, just too proud to admit it.

I step closer, letting her focus narrow to me, letting her think I’m the threat.

Because I am.

But I’m also the distraction.

Caspian’s whips lash through the smoke to my right, fast and brutal. He’s been silent, but the heat coming off him is molten. There’s no playfulness now. No tease.

Only vengeance.

And it’s almost time. Almost. Let her try to kill me. Let her burn through Lucien and Orin to do it.

I just need a few more steps.

Just one breath longer.

Then I’ll end this.

The entire cathedral quakes beneath the weight of magic so old, so fucking unholy, it feels like it’s clawing its way up my spine, wrapping its tendrils around every one of my ribs. It’s not Branwen’s—it’s hers.

Luna.

For a heartbeat, I think the world itself hesitates.

And then I see it.

’s hands flash out in that blur he’s mastered, reckless and too fucking smug about it—because of course, the idiot has been practicing this. Like it’s a joke. Like it’s nothing.

And there’s Luna, launched skyward.

Thrown.

The girl who was supposed to kneel for us, who was meant to bend and break and beg. Instead, she’s a streak of fury above us, airborne, her body twisting like she belongs in the sky.

And in her hands—

No. It’s not a weapon.

It’s sin itself.

Forged and snarling, made of every damned thing we are.

Greed. Lust. Envy. Sloth. Wrath.

I can feel it in my marrow. That hammer isn’t just forged from magic. It’s made of us. Our sins woven into metal and rage, an extension of everything we’ve tried to resist, everything we swore we’d never give her. It's jagged, vicious, the head of it carved in brutal, unnatural angles, burning with a venomous light that fractures the cathedral’s shadows.

And she's wielding it like a goddess. No, worse—like a fucking sin-binder queen.

Branwen’s scream fractures the air, high and sharp, almost swallowed by the rush of energy Luna summons mid-flight. The force behind it doesn't just ripple—it devours. My grip slips on everything I’ve possessed in this room, the cathedral itself groaning beneath the weight of her magic.

Even the pillar—the one Branwen clings to like an anchor—cracks at its base, splintering before Luna even lands.

And she doesn’t land softly. No, she crashes down like vengeance incarnate.

The hammer strikes the pillar with a sound that isn’t sound at all—it’s something primal, a tearing, unraveling scream that shreds through magic and marrow alike. The cathedral doesn’t just shake—it fractures. The walls ripple outward like reality itself is bending around her, and for a breathless second, I swear I can see the world behind this one, the void waiting to swallow her whole.

Branwen staggers forward, screaming something desperate, something broken, but the sound is lost. Because Luna’s standing in the wreckage, hair whipping wild around her face, eyes lit with the violence of us, her power leaking off her skin like it wants to burn the entire realm to ash.

And she doesn’t look at Branwen.

She looks at me.

And in that moment, I know—I will never own her.

She will own all of us.

Branwen’s scream splits the cathedral like a blade, ragged and raw, dragging nails down the inside of my skull. She stumbles forward, staggered, her body twisted beneath the weight of Luna’s strike, the splintered pillar crumbling behind her like the bones of a dying god.

And then—Caspian. The man who was always Lust—the tease, the problem, the one who laughed while he unraveled us all—there’s nothing playful left in him now. He’s feral and carved from grief, eyes wild, the shadows of what she did to him still stitched into every line of his face.

He moves like smoke and sin, slipping behind her, his magic crawling across the stone like vines laced with venom. Lust, when wielded properly, doesn’t seduce—it devours.

Branwen doesn’t even see him until he’s already there, until the dagger—no, not a dagger, something ancient, something dark, laced with the same magic she used to bind him—is buried in her chest.

He doesn’t stab her like a man killing a woman.

He drives it in like a god rewriting fate.

The dagger doesn’t slice—it sinks, the hilt pulsing with red-gold light, veins of magic cracking out from the wound, spreading across her skin like molten lightning. Her scream turns to something deeper, something not human, not even Sin Binder anymore—just void, just ruin.

Caspian leans in, voice like silk dipped in poison. “You don’t get to keep me.”

And then he twists.

The magic explodes outward, a shockwave that rattles through the marrow of the cathedral, rattling stone and soul alike. Branwen’s body convulses, her power fracturing into nothing, a thousand shards of what she thought she could control, and Caspian doesn’t flinch.

He watches her fall. There’s no satisfaction in his eyes—no peace. Just the echo of what she took from him and the brutal, irreversible fact that she can’t take anything else.

The pillar behind her collapses with a groan that sounds like the end of the world. And Caspian turns away before her body even hits the floor, like she’s already ash to him. Like she never mattered.

Branwen doesn’t scream again. The sound she makes isn’t even human. It’s the sound of something unraveling—of centuries collapsing in on themselves, a void being sucked dry from the inside out.

The second Caspian’s dagger drives home, the cathedral shifts, the pulse of magic inside its bones fracturing like a cracked mirror. The tether binding her to this realm—this entire grotesque kingdom she’s ruled over like a rotting queen—starts to decay in real time.

I watch her.

Because I want to see. I want to watch her lose every illusion of beauty, every manipulative thread she wove around all of us, pulled apart one by one like string from a corpse.

Her skin peels first. A thousand cracks spidering up her throat, across her cheeks. That too-perfect face crumbling under the weight of what she stole from us—our lives, our power, our choices. Her hair, once silk, frays like brittle straw, color draining until it's gray, then white, then ash.

And the years hit her all at once.

Wrinkles slash across her skin like claw marks, her bones caving beneath the weight of her own greed. It’s not slow. It’s not dignified. It’s grotesque. It’s deserved.

She gasps, wheezing for breath that won’t come, and her eyes—the last thing she has left—flick to me.

Because she knows. She knows I’ve been waiting for this moment since she touched Caspian. Since she dared to bind Lucien. Since she tried to make me hers.

I step forward, slow and deliberate, each footfall echoing through the hollowed-out cathedral like a verdict.

I don’t speak. There’s nothing left to say. I raise my hand, fingers curling lazily, like I’m plucking a coin from the air.

And with the lightest flick of my fingers—I blow.

The ash that used to be Branwen scatters on the breath of my magic, carried into the void like dust on a dying wind. The last thing she’ll ever feel is me destroying her, and she can’t stop it. The cathedral groans beneath us, like it’s breathing for the first time in centuries, and the weight of her hold snaps off the world like a shackle finally broken.

She’s gone.

And I don’t even spare the pile of ash another look.

Orin

The second her ashes scatter, I feel it—that violent, visceral snap like bone fracturing inside my chest. The bond rips loose, not like silk slipping free, but like barbed wire tearing itself from the marrow of me.

Branwen is gone.

And all that's left is the wreckage she’s made of me.

My knees buckle. The ground surges up far too fast to stop it, my body folding beneath the weight of what’s no longer there—her pull, her voice inside my head, the endless gnawing hunger she left in me like a wound that wouldn’t heal.

It’s not peace I feel. It’s emptiness.

I collapse gracelessly, my vision fracturing, breath shallow as the poison I’d been feeding her coils now in my own veins, the venom of centuries seeping into muscle and bone. I let it. I always knew I would pay for what I did to her—what I let her do to me.

But I wasn’t expecting this.

I wasn’t expecting Silas fucking Veyd to drop onto me like a sack of chaos and limbs and bad ideas, followed by a dozen more versions of himself, all talking at once.

"Whoa there, big guy—easy, easy," one clone says, patting my cheek like I’m about to pass out drunk.

"Is it nap time? I love nap time," another one pipes up, upside down, grinning like a lunatic.

"Did you just die a little? Because same," a third says, poking my shoulder repeatedly like I’m a corpse he’s trying to resurrect.

The weight of all of them is ridiculous—too warm, too loud, too much—and I try to shove them off, my hand sluggish, fingers barely curling.

"Silas," I croak, voice like gravel dragged over broken glass.

All of them answer.

"Yes?"

"Present."

"At your service."

"Gods, get off me," I grit out, trying to breathe around the noise and limbs.

One of them—maybe the real one, maybe not—leans in closer, his stupid, chaotic grin softer around the edges. "You’re alive, Orin," he murmurs, quieter now, almost gentle. "You’re free."

The words hit me harder than the poison.

Because they’re true.

For the first time in weeks, there’s no chain around my throat, no voice in my head whispering how I’m not enough unless I destroy myself for her. The bond is gone. And all that's left is me—raw, unsteady, and bleeding from wounds no one can see.

"She’s really dead?" I manage, the question sticking in my throat like ash.

Silas nods, eyes suddenly sharp beneath the chaos. "Caspian gutted her like the rotting bitch she was. Ambrose made sure she didn’t leave a single speck behind."

The clones start to dissolve, one by one, like smoke curling into nothing.

And through the haze of pain, I hear footsteps—real ones—soft, careful, deliberate.

Lucien.

I lift my gaze, finding him at the edge of the wreckage, his mouth parted like he’s forgotten how to breathe, staring at me like he’s seeing me for the first time in centuries.

The chains are gone from him, too. His bond shattered the moment she died. I want to speak, to tell him he’s free—but I can’t. The poison still gnaws at me, eating me alive from the inside out.

Instead, I let my head fall back against the cold cathedral floor, the remnants of battle settling like dust around us.

We won. But I don’t feel victorious.

I stare up at the crumbling ceiling, the cathedral roof like a hollowed-out ribcage above me. Light cuts through it in crooked beams, filtering through ancient, shattered glass. It’s too bright. Too quiet.

I’m too old for this.

Every cell in my body hums wrong, slow and poisoned and full of rot. I can feel it crawling through me—what I swallowed down to keep her weak, what I poured into my veins to feed into hers. Weeks of playing predator and prey. Offering my body as a siphon so hers would starve.

It worked.

But gods, I think it’s killing me too.

I try to pull it out of me—breathe it into the floor, push it through the cracks in my skin, through the fever-wet seams of my bones. I’ve leeched toxins from others for centuries. But not like this. This time it’s mine. It belongs to me. And I don’t know how to let it go.

Footsteps.

Soft. Rushing. Irregular like panic.

Then she’s on me.

Luna. She crashes into me without care or hesitation, all hair and breath and heat, and I grunt from the impact, ribs shrieking, nerves misfiring. But I don’t move. I don’t push her off.

She wraps around me like she thinks I’ll disappear. Like I didn’t spend decades convincing myself I didn’t want this.

Her hands press into my chest, her cheek against my collarbone, and her breath—gods, her breath—shakes as it hits my skin. She says nothing. Not a word. But it doesn’t matter. I can feel her. Her pulse, her magic, her bond to the others humming just beneath the surface of her skin like a current. And for a second, I let it reach me. Let it soak into the places I’m still cracked open.

She doesn’t know what I did.

Not really. Not the cost of it. Not the hours I spent letting Branwen carve out pieces of me so I could bleed them into her.

She doesn't know that her safety was built on my slow undoing. Her fingers tremble. Her lips graze my throat—not a kiss, not even close. Just a moment. A grounding. Like she needs to know I’m still here.

“You’re okay,”

she whispers, and her voice sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.

I don’t answer.

I can’t.

The poison hasn’t left me yet. But her warmth presses into it, softens the burn. Not enough to fix it. Just enough to make me wish I could stay.

Stay here. In this.

In her.

And maybe that’s the most dangerous part of all. Because I’ve been alive too long to believe in softness. But she makes me want to.

I want to hold her longer. Breathe her in until I forget the centuries behind me and the weight still pressing on my chest. But there’s no time left for that. No space carved out in this ruin for softness. Not for me.

Her pulse thrums beneath her skin like a snare drum—alive, vibrant, dangerous. She's light, but she doesn't even know it. And I can’t keep clutching at it, at her, like I’ve earned the right.

So I ease her off me gently, even as my body screams to keep her close. My fingers curl against her back for one more heartbeat, memorizing the curve of her spine, before I let go.

“Orin—”

Her voice cracks like she’s not ready to let go either.

I push a small, rueful smile past the ache in my ribs. “I'm fine.”

It's a lie. She knows it. I know it. But she doesn't call me on it.

My limbs shake when I push up onto my elbows, and gods, everything inside me feels wrong, off-kilter. The poison is still clinging to me, thick and heavy, like oil coating my veins. It's not fatal. I made sure of that—I know the limits of how much my body can hold before it folds in on itself—but it's enough to make me weak. Enough to drag me under if I let it.

I can feel it threading through my system, and I know what I have to do.

I close my eyes, steadying my breath, and start pulling. Siphoning the black rot out of my bloodstream the same way I used to leech sickness from mortals long before any of them learned to fear me. I draw the poison into the hollow of my palm, spinning it tight until it feels like a blade pressed against my skin.

I draw it out slower now—deliberate. Because there’s more at stake than my body buckling beneath this weight. I have to make sure I can stand when this is over. That when we walk out of this cathedral, I’ll be the one steady enough to carry the others if I have to.

The last coil of poison seeps out of my fingers like ink in water, and I let it fade into the stone floor beneath us.

Only then do I glance at her again.

Her eyes are wide, too knowing, too soft.

I can’t let her see me like this.

So I smirk, lazy and hollow, like I haven’t just gutted myself. “Don’t look at me like that, Little Light. You’re going to make me think you care.”

Her brow pulls tight, her mouth parting like she’s going to say something that’ll split me open.

But footsteps echo in the distance.

The others. The aftermath.

“We should go,”

I say, voice quieter now, roughened around the edges. “It’s done.”

But nothing about this feels done. Not when her magic still lingers on my skin like a brand.

Lucien rolls his neck like he’s shaking off a long nap instead of weeks chained under a witch’s leash. His eyes—clearer now, haunted but sharp—flick over all of us like he’s counting pieces on a board. Then he says it. Like it’s simple. Like the weight of it isn’t gouging all of us from the inside out.

“It’s time to go home.”

The words hang there, heavy, hollow, like something cracked in the marrow of this cathedral.

I scrub a hand over my face, swallowing the iron taste still coating the back of my tongue. There’s nothing left of Branwen but ash, and yet somehow the shadows in this place feel heavier without her.

Lucien acts like slipping back into leadership is effortless, like he didn’t just have his will stripped and hollowed out for weeks. But that’s always been his way—wrap grief in authority and call it duty. He looks at us like we’re soldiers who followed him here, not the ones who dragged him back.

And I know why. It’s easier to lead than to feel.

Caspian’s still hovering near the ashes, the hilt of his dagger twitching in his hand like he’s fighting the urge to cut the memory of her out of his skin.

and Silas are bickering over something in the background, their voices sharp and grating, which means they’re shaken but still breathing.

But Lucien’s words settle wrong in my gut.

Because he’s right.

We need to go home.

But there’s nowhere to go.

“The pillar’s gone,”

I say quietly, voice rasped from everything I’ve drained tonight. “Luna shattered it.”

Lucien’s gaze cuts to me, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Then we find another way.”

I huff a bitter laugh, scraping my hands through my hair. “There isn’t another way.”

The cathedral groans around us, stone cracked and bleeding with old magic, echoes of something darker still crawling through the rafters like something unfinished. This place was built on blood and bargain—it doesn’t let people walk out clean.

Luna’s hammer strike was more than destruction; it was severance. The portal wasn’t just a door—it was the anchor that let this place bleed into our world. And she crushed it beneath her feet without looking back.

sidles over, his voice light but frayed at the edges. “Well, that’s a plot twist. Anyone got a map? Or maybe a sacrificial lamb?”

Silas snorts, flopping down on a chunk of broken marble. “I’ll volunteer. I’ve always wanted to be immortalized as the idiot who broke reality.”

Lucien ignores them, his eyes fixed on me like he already knows the thing none of us want to admit.

“You knew,”

he says quietly.

I meet his stare, unflinching. “I suspected.”

“Of course you did,”

he mutters, voice brittle. “Of course you knew.”

Luna’s at the edge of the room now, watching us, her shoulders wound tight, but I don’t look at her.

Because she did what none of us could.

She ended it.

But she also trapped us here with the ghosts.

Lucien exhales sharply, raking a hand through his hair. “We can’t stay.”

“No,”

I agree. “We can’t.”

“There’s still magic in these bones,”

Lucien says after a beat, looking around the cathedral like it’s a puzzle he can force to bend. “This place existed before Branwen. There’s power here. A fracture.”

I shake my head. “Power, yes. But nothing stable. We’d need a tether, something strong enough to bridge what’s left.”

His gaze flicks to Luna without hesitation.

Of course it does.

Because she’s the only one who could do it. But asking her to bleed herself dry to get us out…after everything? I glance at her then, finally, and her eyes meet mine—clear, steady, but so damn tired. She’s already given enough.

Lucien’s jaw sets. “We find another way.”

There is no other way.

But I don’t say it.

Not yet.

Because we’ve all bled too much tonight, and there’s still one more door to pry open. One more sacrifice to make.

The cathedral feels smaller now that she’s gone. Or maybe it’s us—fractured, battered, scattered across the marble like chess pieces mid-war. The echoes of Branwen’s last scream still hum in the bones of this place, stitched into the cracks of the stone, but there’s something else too—a quiet, almost imperceptible emptiness that settles in the absence of her madness.

And then there’s Lucien, standing too still, too quiet, as if he could force the weight of leadership back onto his shoulders like it hadn’t almost destroyed him. His eyes flick between the rest of us and the doorway like he’s already somewhere else.

Silas’s voice cuts through the thick quiet, casual and crass, like he hadn’t just fought for his life. Like he isn’t still bleeding under that grin.

“Well,”

Silas says, brushing marble dust off his torn shirt, “I vote we get the hell out of this haunted cathedral and drink ourselves into oblivion. Anyone want to come watch me embarrass myself in front of every bartender in that village?”

huffs beside him, mouth twitching like he’s trying not to smile. “Pretty sure you do that sober, Veyd.”

Silas clutches his chest like ’s words wounded him, eyes theatrically wide. “You wound me, brother. Truly. And here I was planning on dedicating my next shot of whiskey to your brooding ass.”

“Add a shot for me,”

Caspian mutters quietly from across the room, his eyes still locked on the spot where Branwen’s ashes used to be. His voice scrapes low, but there’s something resolute beneath it now, something heavier.

Silas snaps his fingers, pointing at him. “That’s the spirit! Look at us—one big dysfunctional family trauma bonding over alcohol.”

The others begin to move, slow and deliberate, gathering themselves like broken weapons. Even Ambrose, still quiet, gaze razor-sharp, brushing past without a word as if this night hasn’t rattled something deep inside him.

But Luna’s eyes meet mine as she follows, lingering for just a moment too long. There's nothing in her gaze but exhaustion—and something raw beneath it, something carved out and bleeding, even if she won’t let anyone see it yet.

I hold her stare, nod once, quiet acknowledgment, before I shift, swallowing the ache, and speak.

“We’ll need to move quickly,”

I say, my voice carrying the weight they’ll listen to, the weight Lucien’s too cracked to hold right now. “The path back won’t stay stable long. This place—it’s unraveling without the pillar.”

Lucien’s jaw tightens, but he nods, following me without a word.

The walk to the cathedral doors feels like moving through the ribs of something dead, hollow and echoing and far too quiet for the violence we left behind. The heavy magic is thinning, slipping through the cracks like smoke.

As we step out into the fractured moonlight, the forest waiting beyond the ruins feels different—less like it’s pressing against us, more like it’s breathing again.

Silas sidles up next to me, still smirking despite the fresh scrape along his cheekbone.

“You’re not gonna lecture me about how irresponsible it is to drink ourselves stupid tonight, are you?”

he asks, voice light but careful.

I glance at him, expression even. “I’m not your keeper, Silas.”

He grins. “But you could be. You’ve got that stern, brooding energy. All you’re missing is a drink in your hand and some emotional damage.”

snorts behind us. “He’s got plenty of that.”

I don’t answer. Because tonight, after everything, maybe we’ve all earned a little oblivion. And gods help us, we’re going to need it before what’s coming next. Because this was never the end. Only the start of something far worse.