Page 6 of The Sin Binder's (The Seven Sins Academy #4)

The stone leaves my hand with a flick of my wrist, skips once on the cobblestone before vanishing into the shadows of the courtyard. Normally, Silas would’ve made some stupid sound effect—something that echoed through the Hollow like a cartoon echo—but tonight he just watches the rock disappear like it might take all this damn heaviness with it.

Caspian’s still crying upstairs.

It’s not loud, not like the sobbing you’d expect from someone that pretty and composed when he’s destroying you in bed or with a whip. No, this is quieter. Stifled. Like he’s trying not to let anyone hear, which only makes it worse. Makes it feel like something’s broken in the foundation of this place, like we’re sitting on top of a grief that doesn’t belong to any one of us but still lives in all of us now.

“Do you think it’s, like... a permanent thing?”

Silas asks, pitching a rock so hard it actually cracks a statue’s wing across the courtyard. “The crying. I don’t know if I can handle Cas being the emotional one now. It’s throwing off my whole dynamic.”

I snort, because he’s trying. This is him trying. Joking to make the silence bearable, to fill the space Caspian’s sobs hollow out in all of us.

“Maybe he just needed to get it out,”

I say. “Like a trauma cleanse. Real crystal-girl vibes. I’ll buy him incense and a sage stick.”

Silas doesn’t laugh. Just drops his next rock into the dirt without throwing it. That says more than anything else could.

The Hollow’s quiet in a way that makes you feel like the walls are listening. The kind of quiet where you can hear someone’s heartbeat from the other room if you try hard enough. I know Luna’s inside. I can feel her, even when I don’t want to. The bond thrums with the knowledge of her. Awake. Tired. Sad.

“I hate this,” I mutter.

Silas glances at me. “The crying?”

“The guilt.”

I exhale and lean back on my elbows, staring at the stars that don’t really twinkle here, just shimmer like they know this place doesn’t deserve anything that pretty. “He’s already punishing himself more than any of us ever could. And I don’t even know if he wants forgiveness. I think he just wants it to stop.”

“Yeah,”

Silas says softly, nodding. “And none of us can make it stop.”

A beat of silence.

Then: “You think Luna’s gonna complete the bond?”

That question sits in my chest like a blade. I don’t answer immediately, because part of me wants to say no. Wants to say she shouldn’t. That he doesn’t deserve it. But another part of me knows—Luna is Luna. She’s never been able to walk away from someone she thinks she can fix.

“I think,”

I say carefully, “she’s going to do whatever hurts her the most, because that’s what she always fucking does.”

Silas hums. “Yeah. That’s what love looks like when it’s cursed.”

We sit there a while longer. Not speaking. Not moving. Just two shadows under the Hollow’s grieving sky, throwing rocks like boys trying to remember how to be something other than broken.

The stone skips once, then sinks. No dramatic splash, no satisfying plunk. Just gone. Like it knew better than to stay afloat in this place.

Silas leans back on his elbows beside me, his curls wild and wind-raked from our silent vigil out here. I don't know how long we've been sitting like this—long enough for the moon to drag its way higher, for the rest of the Hollow to settle into that breathless hush it always falls into when something's wrong.

"She's gonna complete it," I say aloud, not to Silas really, more to the air. More to the version of myself that keeps pretending maybe—just maybe—she won’t. That some miracle will show up and give her a third option. But there isn’t one. There never is.

“Yeah,”

Silas mutters. “I know.”

And he does. We all do. The universe doesn’t like imbalance. Especially not with something like her. A half-finished bond is chaos. Too much power left in limbo, no vessel steady enough to hold it. The kind of thing that warps everything around it—thought, will, even time. And with Luna? It would devour her from the inside out. Not dramatically. Not explosively. Just… erase her. Unmake her.

“We’ve seen it,”

I say. “Before. You remember.”

Silas nods slowly. His gaze tracks the ripples stretching across the pond, disturbed only by the rock he just threw. "That girl with the braid," he says. “In Prague. She begged him to stop. But Lucien kissed her and said, ‘you made the deal.’”

He mimics Lucien’s voice with a vicious bite that surprises me.

“Yeah,”

I breathe. “That girl.”

She’d clawed at her own chest before she bled out, her body rejecting the unfinished bond like it was poison. Because it was.

“She’s not like them,”

Silas says, sitting up now, hands on his knees. “Luna. She didn’t ask for this. She doesn’t twist us for power. She just... exists, and we all unravel.”

“Do you think she’ll survive it?” I ask.

Silas scoffs, but it’s not cruel. Just tired. “She’s survived us so far.”

I rub my palms together, fingers twitching like they always do when I want to cast a spell but know it won't fix anything. "Caspian’s not ready."

“No shit,”

Silas mutters. “The man’s a cracked vase trying to pretend he's still holding water.”

"She’ll try to fix him."

"Of course she will." Silas tosses another rock. Doesn’t even look to see where it lands. “She’s got that martyr thing going. Save everyone else even if it kills her. It’s fucking heroic. And it’s going to get her killed.”

I sit forward, elbows on my knees, and stare at my reflection in the dark water. I look tired. I always do. It’s the price of seeing too much and never doing enough.

“She loves you,”

I say to Silas without looking at him.

“I know.”

“She loves me.”

“She’s got questionable taste.”

I snort, because he’s right. We’re all disasters wrapped in sin and sharp teeth. And she chooses us anyway.

“She’s going to complete the bond,”

I say again, softer this time.

Silas doesn’t answer.

We don’t talk again for a while. Just sit in the dark, two devils watching the stars, and wait for the girl we love to decide whether or not she wants to live.

Silas yelps mid-thought, arms flailing as Ambrose's foot connects with his back, sending him tumbling off the deck like a ragdoll. There’s a splash—not dramatic enough to match Silas’s shriek—and then the chaos gremlin himself is sputtering curses from the shallow edge of the pond.

Ambrose steps over the spot Silas had occupied like he’s done it a thousand times. Maybe he has. He doesn’t even look down to check if Silas is alive—because of course he is. Instead, he brushes nonexistent lint from his immaculate coat, settles beside me with a sigh far too civilized for someone who just assaulted a fellow Sin, and says, “Why are we all so fucking quiet?”

I glance sideways. “Maybe because someone nearly died today.”

He hums like I just commented on the weather. “Nearly. Which means she didn’t. And Caspian didn’t. And you didn’t. Which makes it a good day by our usual standards.”

Silas hauls himself back onto the deck, soaked and snarling. “You boot me like a soccer ball and then sit in my spot?”

Ambrose doesn’t move. “It’s my spot now.”

“You can’t just claim it—”

“I did. Successfully.”

Silas glares at him, dripping wet, hair plastered to his forehead like a drowned feral cat. “You’re lucky I like my girl more than I like revenge.”

“Doubtful,”

Ambrose replies, his voice silk over steel. “You’re entirely revenge-driven. You just haven’t figured out who to blame yet.”

Silas grumbles but doesn’t argue. He flops down a few feet away with exaggerated drama, wringing out his sleeve with a flourish that flings droplets in every direction.

Ambrose leans back on his hands, stretches his legs out like he’s settling in for a show. “So,”

he says, his voice low and unreadable. “Do we think she’ll choose him?”

“She has to,”

I murmur. “We’ve been over this.”

“‘Has to’ and ‘wants to’ are rarely the same thing,”

Ambrose replies. “You know that better than anyone.”

“Maybe,”

I admit. “But it doesn’t matter. The bond’s already pulling. The universe will make sure it finishes.”

Ambrose tilts his head back, watching the stars with eyes that see more than they should. “It’s always the ones who don’t want to be gods that are forced to play like them.”

Silas, now lying flat on the deck, lets out a sigh. “I just want her to be okay.”

That silences the rest of us. Because beneath all the jokes and chaos and manipulations, that’s the one thing we all want. For her to survive. For her to stay.

Silas flings his arm over his eyes like he’s auditioning for a tragic role in a high school play, voice muffled by faux despair. “Do you think Caspian’s gonna stop crying once he sleeps with her? Or is he gonna sob through that too?”

I shoot him a look, equal parts exhausted and unimpressed. “Seriously?”

He peeks at me from under his arm, mouth twitching. “I’m asking the hard questions.”

“No, you’re asking the dumb ones.”

“Tomato, to-mah-to.”

He sighs again, long and dramatic like the universe personally offended him. “It’s a valid concern, though. Mood’s gonna be a bit weird if he starts weeping mid-thrust.”

I groan and tip my head back against the deck, staring up at the dark stretch of sky that’s too quiet, too still. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear the phrase ‘weeping mid-thrust’ tonight.”

“Bet Luna won’t be able to pretend.”

“Silas.”

He snorts, finally rolling onto his stomach like a cat that’s tired of being cute and wants to cause problems again. “Okay, okay. I’m done. Mostly.”

But the thing is…he’s not wrong. Not really.

Caspian’s never been the one to break. He’s always been the beautiful disaster, sure—too much lust wrapped in gold and blood—but never this. Never the kind of broken that looks like silence and sleepless nights and stifled sobs through walls too thin to block it out.

I don’t know how to handle it. None of us do.

I glance over at Silas, who’s busy flicking a pebble toward the pond with his fingertip like it’s some cosmic ritual. “Do you think she’ll be able to fix him?”

He doesn’t answer right away. And when he does, it’s quiet. Real. “I don’t think she should have to.”

“Silas!”

Luna’s voice cracks through the air like lightning—sharp, commanding, the kind of sound that makes even me sit up straighter. She’s storming across the deck barefoot, hair wild, one of my shirts slipping off her shoulder like sin made silk. She looks like she’s ready to end him. Or kiss him. Knowing her, maybe both.

“I didn’t fall in!”

Silas sputters as he resurfaces, eyes wide, curls dripping. “Ambrose pushed me. I was defending my seat.”

He points dramatically to the spot beside me—currently occupied by Ambrose, who lounges like a villain god with a glass of something expensive in hand, his expression carved from stone.

“I nudged him,”

Ambrose says without even looking up. “With purpose.”

“And that purpose was what?”

Luna asks, hands on her hips.

“Silence,”

Ambrose replies, as if that answers everything. For him, it probably does.

“You’re all insane,”

I mutter, and I mean it in the most affectionate, exhausted way possible.

Silas pulls himself up onto the dock with a series of wet squelches and noises no grown man should ever make in public. He flops beside Luna, who glares at him, then at Ambrose, and then finally—inevitably—at me.

“You look like you haven’t slept since the last Sin Binder war,”

Silas says, poking at my arm with one water-wrinkled finger.

“And you smell like pond sex,”

I shoot back.

Luna doesn’t laugh. Not really. But her mouth twitches at the corners as she drops to sit between us. Her hand moves like instinct, threading into Silas’s wet curls despite the muck. He leans into her like he belongs there. Maybe he does.

Ambrose watches from his perch, his gaze unreadable, fingers wrapped around the stem of his glass like it holds more than liquor. He says nothing. But I see it—the flicker of something behind his eyes. Want, maybe. Or warning. And then silence falls again. The heavy, waiting kind. The kind that doesn’t belong in a house full of gods.

Caspian’s still crying in his room. Riven’s pacing like violence given form. Lucien and Orin are still Branwen’s shadows. And Luna—our fucking anchor—is still dying a little more each day the bond with Caspian stays unfinished. But in this one sliver of breath, with Silas dripping and smug, Luna warm beside me, and Ambrose looking like he’s already five moves ahead—we’re together.