Page 21 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

I didn’t bother to ask from where. “You walk past it again today, you’ll catch a boot to the throat,” I said, and I meant it. “You don’t look toward her window. You don’t breathe in that direction unless you’re told.”

His face colored. “I didn’t”

“You want to be the problem,” I said, low. “I’m looking for the man who actually is. Don’t make me split my attention.”

Banks swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

I hate “sir” from eager men with more torque than sense. But I let it ride. He needed a leash; he just didn’t want to feel it.

Inside, Briar met us with an energy drink and a grin that meant she’d gotten away with something small. “Selene’s sleeping,” she said, softer. “Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. She pretended not to need it and then she face-planted.”

The image soothed and needled at the same time.

“Dusk walk’s in two hours,” Reaper said from behind the bar. “We do it whether or not he shows his face. Eyes are already on the river route.”

“Briar’s decoy?” Cross asked.

“Obviously,” Briar said, flipping her hair. “New haircut. Same attitude.”

“You break routine but not silhouette,” I said. “Shorter hair means different sway. You’ll need to exaggerate her shoulder carry to sell it.”

Briar mimicked Selene’s walk and somehow made it look like a dare. For a second I had to look away, because something in my chest did that tighten again, and I didn’t need an audience for it.

I went to find Selene.

She slept like she was fighting. Not tossing, not soft. Braced. As if her body didn’t trust rest but her mind had mutinied. I stood in the doorway and watched long enough to be sure her breathing held steady, then left before I decided I had the right to watch longer.

In the hall, Reaper was waiting because of course he was. “You went back,” he said.

“I had to.”

He nodded. “You find the line?”

“He drew it for me.”

“Good,” Reaper said again, and it was worse this time. “Because when he crosses it, I don’t want to have to hold you back.”

“You won’t,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”

We didn’t look at each other when we said it. That made it truer.

The plan set itself the way good plans do, because all the bad ones had been tested and thrown away long before.

Cross took the west angle on the route toward the river, Bray with him because Bray looked like a tourist until he didn’t.

Bones would drift two blocks back on foot and then peel off if the sedan appeared; Vex would play the helpful idiot near a corner and log plates like license numbers were Sudoku.

Briar would be Selene, jacket, and all. Selene would be two cars back in a truck that looked like nobody’s truck because it was too clean to belong to us.

I would be the tide — in front, across, inside reflections and behind pedestrians, moving when the music changed, stopping when the street wanted a statue.

Reaper would be the cold star everything orbited whether it liked it or not.

At 6:14, we rolled.

Dusk peeled the day off the buildings and left everything raw and hot. The Quarter did its costume change, beads, drinks, a saxophone arguing with itself two streets over. The river pulled light away like thread.

Briar walked like Selene on a day she wanted to be left alone. Shoulder set. Chin lifted. A thousand-yard stare that meant I see you and I don’t. She passed a storefront, caught her reflection, adjusted the tilt of her head. Perfect.

The sedan came in not like a shark, but like current — subtle, steady, unhurried.

I caught it first in a restaurant window, the curve of a hood where there shouldn’t have been a curve.

The dent in the passenger door. The tint is too dark to be legal.

The rhythm of its crawl. He’d changed plates.

Of course he had. People like this read advice columns they should’ve ignored.

I texted left to Reaper and slid into the mouth of an alley to cross without being seen.

Briar paused at a corner like Selene would, not to check traffic, but to check distance. She fixed a strap on her bag and turned her head just enough that a man who hadn’t studied her would think she hadn’t turned it at all. The sedan’s brake lights feathered and then let go.

Selene’s truck rolled past ordinary. Reaper’s car ghosted behind extraordinary.

We made the river and the air got bigger.

Briar leaned on the rail. The sedan pulled into a parking lane thirty yards back and pretended to be a coincidence.

I moved to the far side of the promenade, phone to my ear, no call placed. Across the water, the other bank baked. Behind me, footsteps I catalogued and discarded, a couple arguing in low voices, a kid with a skateboard, two men who looked like contractors complaining about concrete.

Then him.

You can feel the center of gravity of a space tilt when a predator steps into it.

He walked not too fast, not too slow. He wore a ballcap lower now, beard trimmed tighter.

He’d changed jackets. But men don’t change gait.

His left stride still short by half an inch.

Knee healed wrong. He took the bench at my ten o’clock and turned his face away from Briar and toward the water like he was admiring it.

Men who admire water don’t hold their shoulders like a winch.

I didn’t look at him. I looked through him, past him. I angled my phone so the black screen could take his reflection. He rubbed his thumb against his knuckles — the exact two he’d used as a signal in the car days ago. Habit carved into bone.

“On your left,” I texted Selene, though she was two blocks back and not supposed to be part of the conversation in any way that mattered. The truth was it mattered to me.

“Copy,” she wrote. One word. Steady.

Briar didn’t move. Good girl. The sedan’s driver stayed in his car.

The man on the bench, my man, waited thirty-two seconds and then stood, hands in pockets, and drifted closer to Briar by two steps, then three, then stopped.

He breathed in like the smell of her, of Selene, could give him an erection or absolution.

“Take the third step,” I said to the air, and Briar, who had an earbud tucked in her hair under the hood, took the third step away. The man followed the exact distance and stopped again.

Got you.

“Now,” Reaper texted.

I moved first.

I crossed into his path and “stumbled,” shoulder-checking him hard enough that a man who wasn’t ready would’ve gone down. He didn’t. He caught himself, quick. Trained on balance if not on sense.

“Watch yourself,” he snapped, voice deeper than I expected.

“Yeah,” I said, bored. “You too.”

He looked at me. And I looked at him, really looked for the first time. And I smiled. It wasn’t nice.

“Afternoon,” I said.

Recognition flickered. Not oh, you’re Ghost — he wasn’t that stupid. More oh, you’re the problem between me and the thing I want to own. He banked it. Coward courage. He glanced past me toward Briar’s hood, toward Selene-who-wasn’t, and his pupils edged wide.

“Have a good one,” I said, stepping aside.

He did something sloppy then he sniffed. Not because he had a cold. Because he wanted to remember her. He moved on. Past me. Past Briar. Toward the water. Away from the car.

Reaper’s hold text came in hot. Not here.

I agreed. Not here where families walked and the river listens.

So, I let him go. For ten steps.

“Bones,” I said into the mic. “Lantern post, your one o’clock. Knee short on the left.”

“I see him,” Bones breathed.

“Cross,” I said, “plate on the sedan. It’s swapped. I want the old one.”

“Give me a minute and a saint,” Cross said.

The man pivoted at the rail, checked the angle again, told himself a story in which he was brave. He cut back toward Briar, closer this time.

“Now,” Reaper said.

We closed. Not all at once. Not like wolves. Wolves are messy. We closed like a tide; the kind people drown in because they didn’t feel it pull until it was too late.

I caught his wrist first. Soft. Like a friend. Then I tightened. Hard. The way you test a bolt before you trust it to hold weight.

“Walk,” I said.

“Get off me,” he hissed.

“Walk,” I repeated, and when he didn’t, I let my thumb find the tendon that makes a man see stars without leaving a mark.

He walked.

Into the mouth of an alley with light at the far end and a gap in the middle where cameras always fail. Where Cross was anyway, because he knows where machines lie. Where Bones leaned against a wall pretending to text his ex-wife. Where Reaper stood at the exit casual as Sunday.

We didn’t beat him. Not yet. We let him stand in the knowledge of exactly how outnumbered he was. He looked at each of us and did the calculation and realized finally, finally, that his story was wrong.

“You’re making a mistake,” he told me, voice trembling with anger he’d mistake for righteousness. “She’s not safe with you.”

“You’re right,” I said, smiling without humor. “She’s safe with us.”

He lunged, not smart, not planned, a deer kicking because its body said try. Bones caught him with a hand to the sternum that stole breath and pride. He folded, just a little, and came back up wild.

“Badge?” he spat. “You think you can—”

“We don’t need badges,” Reaper said from behind him, and the man finally understood he hadn’t walked into a cop movie. He’d walked into a family.

I bent close, voice for him alone. “You put a nail in a closet for me,” I whispered. “I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

He went still. “You went back,” he said, like I’d broken a rule.

“I always go back.”

Something in him cracked then. Not his confidence, that had been flexible all along but the thin thread that kept his delusion neat. “She’s dirty,” he whispered. “You made her dirty. I’m going to make her clean.”

I broke his thumb.

Not out of rage. Out of math. A man who wants to grab, to hold, to claim, needs his hands. I gave him one he’d remember every time he tried to make a fist.

He screamed. Bones muffled it with a hand. Reaper didn’t blink. Cross’s camera blinked for him.

“We’re going to talk,” I told him softly. “You’re going to tell me how many times you went into her space. You’re going to list the places you watched from. You’re going to hand me the names of anyone who helped you breathe near her.”

He laughed, high, ugly. “She’ll come to me,” he said. “You can’t stop fate.”

“Then fear will do,” I said.

We walked him out of the alley like nothing happened and put him in a car that didn’t belong to us and did anyway.

We didn’t take him to the clubhouse. We aren’t idiots.

We took him to a place where men go to work out disagreements with the world in ways the world can’t hear.

Cross called in favors I didn’t listen to. Bones whistled. Reaper drove.

I texted one word to Selene though I wasn’t supposed to: Soon.

She sent back: Good.

Not be careful. Not don’t go too far. Just good. Because she understood something essential that when a man puts a nail in your closet, you don’t ask me to be gentle.

You ask me to be done.

Back at the clubhouse later, I washed my hands and stood at the sink longer than necessary. I watched the water run red around a knuckle I hadn’t noticed split. I thought of the photo taken in the dark, her head on my chest, my hand on her back and the rage I’d folded tight and kept lit like coal.

I dried my hands. I looked up. Selene was in the doorway, shoulder against the jamb, hair shorter, eyes sharper.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Bad enough,” I said.

She nodded. “You, okay?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said, and the word sounded like a promise this time.

I stepped close enough to feel her heat and not close enough to take anything I hadn’t been given. She reached for my wrist. Her thumb rested where I’d rested mine on the other man’s. A mirror held up to a better story.

“He made it personal,” I said.

She tilted her head. “He made us personal,” she corrected. “That’s different.”

“Yeah,” I said, and for the first time that day, the knot in my chest loosened. “It is.”