Page 18 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Fourteen

Selene

I didn’t sleep.

Not really.

I drifted. Floated in that strange half-place between exhaustion and adrenaline, where dreams turned sour and shadows turned into shapes.

My body lay still on the couch, but my brain paced the walls like Ghost did, back and forth, back, and forth, learning the apartment’s breath the way a medic learns a failing pulse.

Ghost stayed.

Didn’t say much. Just paced the apartment.

Checked locks. Sat near the window with his knife unsheathed and his jaw tight like he was chewing on gunmetal and rage.

The knife glinted each time a car passed on the street below, and something in me uncoiled in answer, not because I liked the blade, but because it belonged to a man who would use it for me without asking for anything first.

I pretended not to notice how he looked at me when I wasn’t looking. Pretended not to notice how safe I felt when I shouldn’t. But deep down, I knew something had shifted. Something had cracked open. And I wasn’t sure I’d ever close it again.

The morning light was gray. Flat. Like even the sun wasn’t in the mood for bullshit.

Ghost stepped out to grab coffee from the corner spot he claimed brewed drinkable sludge. “Ten minutes,” he said at the door, a promise folded into a warning. I used the moment to breathe. Brush my teeth. Pretend I was a normal person in a normal apartment.

And then I opened the drawer.

It wasn’t locked. Wasn’t even stuck. Just… ordinary. Until I saw it.

Another envelope. Cream. Folded cleanly. Same handwriting on the front. No stamp. No seal. Just my name.

My stomach dropped. Hands trembling, I opened it.

Inside was a photo.

I stopped breathing.

It was us. Me and Ghost. Last night. Sitting on the couch. Me leaning into him. His hand on my back. My face turned toward his chest, eyes closed.

Intimate. Unmistakable.

Taken from inside the apartment.

My blood turned to ice. I dropped the photo like it burned. But my eyes caught the message scrawled underneath in sharp, furious red:

You were meant to be mine.

Not his.

He’s poisoning you.

But I’ll fix it.

I’ll make you clean again.

I stumbled back. Hit the wall. Slid to the floor. My breath came too fast, too shallow.

He was here. Not days ago. Hours. Watching. While Ghost held me. Photographing us.

I didn’t even hear the door open. Didn’t register the footsteps until Ghost was kneeling in front of me, hands on my arms, voice like gravel.

“Selene. What happened?”

I pointed to the drawer.

He stood. Saw the photo.

And everything in him changed.

The fury hit his face first. Then his shoulders. Then his hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles cracked. He didn’t say a word. Just pulled out his phone.

“I’m calling Reaper,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “Pack what you need.”

“I—what?”

“You’re not staying here.”

“Ghost”

He turned to me, jaw set. “He was inside, Selene. He took that in this room. While I was holding you.”

“I know”

“You don’t know,” he snapped. “Because you’re still here. Still trying to keep your independence. Still pretending this isn’t what it is.”

I recoiled. The words stung because they were close to true. But before I could throw it back in his face, he exhaled. Stepped forward. Softer this time.

“I’m not locking you away,” he said. “I’m getting you safe. That’s it.”

I swallowed. “The clubhouse?”

“Yeah. It’s the one place he won’t get near. No way he walks past those doors without someone putting him in the dirt.”

The way he said it, calm, factual and terrified me more than shouting ever could. Because I knew, then, what Ghost was holding back. And how close he was to letting go.

I looked around my apartment. At the windows. The drawers. The place I used to feel untouchable. And I realized… I wasn’t safe here anymore.

I nodded. “Okay.”

His eyes softened. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He pulled me in again. Held me like he had the night before. And this time, when I leaned into him, I didn’t pretend it was just comfort.

It was need.

And maybe something worse. Something deeper.

Because I didn’t just want to be safe anymore. I wanted to be his.

We moved like a drill.

Ghost snapped photos of the envelope, the handwriting, the angle where the picture must’ve been taken. “Not your phone,” he said when I reached for mine. “Use mine. Yours is compromised until Cross scrubs it.”

“Cross is not touching my—”

“He’ll look at metadata, not your emojis,” Ghost said dryly. “Pack.”

I shoved clothes into a bag without care: jeans, black dress, two shirts, a hoodie. Toothbrush. Tarot deck. The tin with the red-thread bottle. Two knives. The old brass key that didn’t open anything anymore but felt like luck in my palm.

Ghost checked the windows again. The bathroom locked.

Closet clear. He scanned the air vent, the smoke alarm, the curtain rod, like a man who knew cameras had gotten small and intentions smaller.

At the door he paused, crouched, and set another hair across the latch: a ghost thread you only saw if you knew to look.

Reaper called back as I zipped the bag.

“Tell me,” Ghost said into the phone, then listened while Reaper told him who was where, who had eyes, who’d be at the curb in three minutes. I caught fragments: Bones on the alley, Cross on forensics, Vex doing a hard sweep of my block like he had bones to break and needed volunteers.

“Yeah,” Ghost said. “We’re coming down now.”

He slid the photo into an evidence sleeve Briar had left in her chaos tote. He tucked the envelope in another. Then he looked at me.

“You ready?”

“No,” I said. “But go anyway.”

He managed a half-smile. “That’s my line.”

We left through the back. Ghost before me.

The hallway felt narrower than yesterday.

The chalk line on the hinge we’d made was pristine.

The hair from last night, new, brittle, lay undisturbed across the latch.

Which meant whoever left the envelope had done it after Ghost put me on the couch and before dawn, using a different path. The idea sat like a stone in my throat.

At the bottom of the stairs, the heat slapped my cheeks.

The Quarter breathed its secret breath: damp, sweet, metallic.

A car idled one block over. Reaper’s. Another idled farther, Cross’s.

A third idled where I couldn’t place it and that was comforting in its own way because it meant Ghost had more eyes than he’d told me.

Briar stepped out of Reaper’s passenger side like a glitter bomb with fangs. “Don’t say I told you so,” she told me. “But. I told you so.”

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I did neither. “You have coffee?”

She produced a cup like a magician. “Black. I spit in Reaper’s so you’re safe.”

Reaper got out of the driver’s seat. He didn’t come near me. He didn’t need to. His gaze traced my face, my hands, the bag. He saw too much and said exactly enough. “You ride with Ghost.”

“Like hell she does,” Briar muttered, but without heat. She flanked me and pressed her shoulder against mine like we were about to take a punch at the same time. “You, okay?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Honesty is healthy.”

Ghost opened the passenger door of his bike, then stopped, corrected, and opened the truck door instead, a low, battered thing with a dashboard rosary someone had left years ago. “You’re not getting on the bike,” he said to me. “Not today.”

“I wasn’t going to argue.”

“Damn,” he said, “I was looking forward to winning one.”

The drive to the clubhouse was short and long at the same time.

Short in miles, long in the way silence stretches when you’re trying not to break.

Ghost kept one hand on the wheel and one on the console, close enough to touch mine without touching it.

Reaper followed two cars back. Cross peeled off to harass a traffic camera into compliance.

Briar texted me memes from the other car even though I could see her through the windshield, her face tilted, eyes scanning, mouth chewing a straw like it had wronged her.

We took side streets. Avoided stoplights that held us in place too long.

I watched the mirrors like a novice and the sidewalks like a pro.

We passed a man twirling a sign for po’boys and a woman walking three little dogs with bows in their hair, and I wanted to be the kind of person who only had to worry about leash tangles and sauce stains.

We pulled into the compound. The gate yawned open like a mouth. The clubhouse loomed like it always did, bruised wood, battered windows, a building shaped by men and storms and stubbornness. I used to love it in the way you love a dangerous church. Today it felt like a refuge disguised as a threat.

Inside, everything was already different.

Quiet. Men who were usually laughter and noise became angles and intent.

Bones stood at the far door with his crowbar held casual but not idle.

Vex leaned on the bar with a glass he didn’t drink, eyes pinned to the front like he could hold it shut by will alone.

Cross arrived a minute after us, hair mussed, shirt too neat, tablet under his arm like a sword.

Reaper put me in the small office off the main room, a space with a couch, a battered desk, a window that looked out over the lot. Ghost did a sweep, then a second. Vex ducked in, kissed my temple without making a big deal about it, and ducked out again.

“New rules,” Reaper said, voice level like he was reading a grocery list. “Door stays open unless you need it shut. You don’t go anywhere without Briar or Ghost. You don’t answer unknown numbers. Cross is scrubbing your phone. Ghost and Bones are rotating the perimeter. Vex is on the door. I am—”

“An overbearing tyrant,” Briar supplied, flopping into the rolling chair and turning it with one foot.

Reaper ignored her. “I am not leaving this building unless I have to.”

It should have made me feel trapped. It didn’t. It made me feel… held. And I hated how much I liked it.