Page 22 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Sixteen

Selene

The clubhouse hadn’t changed.

Not really.

Same creaky floorboards. Same faded pool table with initials carved into the corner. Same scent of motor oil, sweat, bourbon, and too much testosterone.

But the moment I moved back in, everything felt… off.

It wasn’t the building.

It was me.

Because now I wasn’t Selene, Reaper’s little sister, the one who burned herbs in the corner and read tarot for club girls during downtime.

Now I was the girl with a shadow.

The one they were all watching.

The one who might bring danger to the front door.

And no one said it.

Not out loud.

But I could feel it.

In the way Bones checked every corner before letting me walk into a room.

In the way Ash offered to sleep on the hallway couch like it was casual.

In the way Vex stopped joking altogether when I passed him in the corridor.

Even Briar wasn’t herself, quieter, more watchful, always near but never still. She vibrated like a neon sign: warm, bright, warning.

Only Ghost stayed steady.

Always nearby.

Always silent.

And somehow the only thing in the world that still felt real.

Three days until the Halloween party. The clubhouse was already half-decorated, mostly thanks to Daisy, one of the club girls, who was far too enthusiastic about fake cobwebs and black candles.

Somebody had spray-painted a skeleton riding a Harley on the back wall. Briar threatened to put glitter on it.

Ghost muttered something about “armed threats and body paint” and walked off.

“Don’t act like you don’t love it,” Briar called after him, then turned to me. “He’s brooding extra hard this week. You notice?”

I didn’t answer.

Of course I noticed.

I noticed everything.

The way he checked every door before I walked through it.

The way his hand always hovered near his knife when someone unexpected entered the room.

The way his eyes tracked everyone.

Especially Banks.

Banks tried to be invisible the way a flood tries to be quiet. The prospect scrubbed oil from under his nails like it was a personality trait and stared at the floor whenever I came near, which would’ve been sweet if he didn’t also have a history of lingering in doorways he didn’t belong in.

Reaper caught him once in the hall and spoke softly enough that I never heard the words, only the echo of them in Banks’s posture as he hunched away. He avoided me after that. Avoided Ghost more.

Small mercies.

Reaper cornered me in the war room that afternoon.

He didn’t sit.

Didn’t soften.

Just closed the door and folded his arms like I was a rival club and not his sister.

“We should cancel the party,” he said.

“No.”

He blinked. “Selene—”

“I’m not cancelling Halloween because some coward with a camera thinks he owns me.”

“You don’t have to prove anything.”

“I do,” I snapped. “To myself. To him. I won’t let him take more than he already has.”

His jaw tightened. “He’s still out there.”

“I’m in here.”

He exhaled. “You think you’re safe.”

“I know I am.”

He looked at me for a long time. “Ghost will be on you the whole night.”

I didn’t argue.

Because I wanted him there.

Even if I wasn’t ready to say that out loud.

Reaper nodded once, then turned to go. Before he left, he paused. “You let me know if anything changes.”

“It won’t.”

But we both knew that was a lie.

Because something always changes.

That’s how this worked.

He watched.

He waited.

And sooner or later…

He would strike again.

But not here.

Not inside.

I wouldn’t let him take this too.

Night stretched like old rubber. It had give, but no comfort.

I learned the new noises: the clink of ice in a glass at 2 a.m., Bones’s off-key humming during patrols, the hum of Cross’s printer spitting out camera stills like a secular rosary.

I slept in my old room with the blackout curtains and a borrowed shotgun leaned by the bed like a chaperone.

I placed a line of salt along the sill because it made my mother’s voice go quiet in my head.

I taped a hair to the latch because Ghost would check it even if I forgot.

I still dreamt.

Not the wanting kind. The watching kind. A door easing open and a breath I didn’t own fogging the glass. I’d wake with my palms pressed to my sternum and the taste of iron at the back of my tongue.

Ghost started teaching me how to breathe like a soldier breathes when the world narrows.

“Square breath,” he said, sitting on the floor with his back to the bed and his boots braced. “In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.”

“You counting me through a panic attack?” I asked, dry.

“I’m counting you through a fight,” he said, dry back.

So, I breathed. In, hold, out, hold. Over and over until the edges of the room stopped trying to cut me.

“Again,” he’d say. And I would. Because I didn’t want to be fragile. Because I didn’t want to give him the version of me who only broke.

Sometimes he’d wrap my hands with tape at the bar, slow and careful, like boxing and prayer shared the same grammar.

He’d nudge my stance wider and tilt my hips so my weight lived where it could do damage.

“Drive through, not at,” he’d murmur, and I’d hit the bag until my shoulders burned, and the inside of my mouth tasted like copper and victory.

“Anger’s a tool,” he said once when I fumbled. “Not a home.”

“It feels like both.”

“Then use it,” he said. “Don’t live in it.”

He didn’t touch me more than necessary. He didn’t have to. His presence moved the air the way heat does, visible only by what it made shimmer.

The second day, Cross delivered a manila folder to Reaper with the kind of care you give a live grenade. I knew what was inside. I didn’t ask to see. I also knew Ghost had left with Reaper and Bones the night before without telling me where. He came back with a split knuckle and a quieter jaw.

“You, okay?” I asked because I had to start somewhere.

“No,” he said, honest, and left it there.

Briar poured me coffee and whispered, “He’ll tell you when it won’t make you feel worse.”

“You’re not wrong often,” I murmured, and her look said Never.

That afternoon, Daisy dragged me to the storage room to sort costumes. “You’re a witch,” she declared, scandalized that I might be anything else.

“That’s stereotyping.”

“It’s branding,” she said, holding up a black corset with a flourish. “Trust me, you’ll look like vengeance.”

I chose a black silk slip and a velvet jacket instead. Witch adjacent. Functional. Easy to run in.

Briar picked a silver sequined jumpsuit and a cloak that made her look like if a disco ball learned profanity.

Ghost walked past the open door, clocked the pile of clothes with one glance, and kept going without a comment. I watched his shoulders and decided that was a comment.

After dinner — gumbo heavy enough to hold you down if you forgot to float, Vex brought in a cardboard box from the gate with a face that said you’re going to hate this.

“Delivery,” he said. “No sender.”

Reaper opened it with a box cutter. The room’s oxygen thinned a notch.

Inside lay a pumpkin. Carved. Not cute. The ridges turned to teeth. The eyes too round. The word MINE slashed across the side like someone carved with fury instead of a knife.

The scent of fresh pumpkin hit the back of my throat like nausea.

Briar swore, a delicate, vicious word. Cross put on gloves. “Residue,” he muttered, bagging the lid. “Blade scratches. Depths. If he carved it rushed, the motion marks will say something about his hand.”

Bones leaned a hip against the bar like he didn’t want to grab the crowbar and demolish something. “Trash day’s going to be fun.”

Reaper’s gaze cut to me. A check-in, not a question. I lifted my chin. “He’s running out of ideas,” I said, and if my voice sounded steadier than my insides felt, no one called me on it.

Ghost carried the box to the back room without comment. When he came back, his eyes found mine and held. You good? he asked without words.

No, I answered, also without words.

But I’m standing.

He nodded.

Later, when the clubhouse had softened into the quieter hum it saved for after midnight, I stood at the sink in the ladies’ room and stared at my reflection.

My hair was shorter now; Briar had cut it into something intentional.

It bared my throat. I didn’t hate it. It made me look like someone who wasn’t waiting to see what would happen next.

The door creaked and shut. I didn’t have to turn to know it was Ghost. His reflection arrived in the mirror behind me, big, quiet, inevitable.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” he said.

We stood like that for a second or three. I watched his face in the mirror, and he watched mine and the room shrunk to the two of us and the sound of water in pipes.

“How do you do it?” I asked. “Carry this much anger and still… not drown in it.”

He thought about the question like it mattered. “I make it useful,” he said. “And when I’m done, I put it down where it can’t find me.”

“Where’s that?”

He huffed a laugh. “Ask me after Halloween.”

I turned to face him. We were too close and not close enough. The space between us felt like a dare. My pulse climbed into my mouth.

“Selene,” he said, low.

“Ghost,” I said, lower.

He lifted a hand like he might touch my cheek and then didn’t. He curled it into a fist instead and dropped it to his side. “Not because of him,” he said, and it took me a second to understand.

I did. I hated that I did. “Not because of him,” I repeated. “Okay.”

A knock on the doorframe. Briar. Because of course Briar. “Hate to interrupt your romance novel,” she said, “but Cross found a match on Ballcap Beard.”

I exhaled. Ghost stepped back. The spell broke like glass.

We followed Briar to the war room. Cross had a face up on the screen, DMV crisp, expression devoid of anything useful. Name. Two minor arrests. Nothing to explain obsession. Enough to justify fear.

“Lives across the river,” Cross said. “Day job intermittent. Delivery gigs. Lots of time, lots of routes, lots of places to be no one.”

“Known associates?” Reaper asked.

“Two. One local. One maybe. I’m pulling their socials, but he’s the type who posts pictures of steak and calls it personality.”

“So, he’s boring,” Briar said. “Great.”

“Boring people do interesting crimes,” Cross said. “They need spice.”

Reaper’s phone buzzed. He glanced, nodded once. “We have his car.”

Ghost didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. The room shifted around that piece of information, furniture rearranged by gravity.

“Can we be done?” I asked, tired in my bones. “Can we just… be done?”

“Soon,” Reaper said. And it wasn’t a lie, and it wasn’t a promise. It was a timeline with variables he intended to strangle.

Ghost’s hand brushed the small of my back as we left the room. Accident. Not an accident. My skin pulsed where he touched — a single drumbeat that made everything else go quiet.

The day before Halloween, Daisy dragged us all into final prep. “If I don’t see at least three fake ravens, I’m mutinying,” she announced.

“Please do,” Briar said. “I’ve always wanted to be a pirate.”

“You already are,” Vex muttered and, miracle of miracles, smiled a little when I elbowed him.

Briar set a bowl of candy on the bar with a label that said FOR CHILDREN (and Ash). Ash flipped her off fondly and tested the hallway couch for the third time like he intended to actually sleep there.

I carved a tiny sigil on the underside of the front door with a pocketknife; a protection charm older than any of us. Cross pretended not to see me do it.

Ghost adjusted my jacket collar before I could. His fingers were careful. Impersonal, I told myself. Necessary, I insisted. A lie, I knew.

“You’re going to have a blade here,” he said, tapping the inside seam. “And here.” He tucked a second knife at my boot. “You don’t need them. But you’ll have them.”

“I’ll have you,” I said, before I could stop the truth.

He stilled. “Yeah,” he said softly. “You’ll have me.”

I swallowed a storm.

That night, I tried sleeping and managed something that felt like hovering over myself.

When I woke, the hair on the latch was intact; the shotgun was still a chaperone; my chest was not a cage.

I dreamt of the river and of a woman with my face walking away from a man who thought he was owed it. She didn’t run. She just left.

Briar knocked the next morning without knocking. “Coffee, witch,” she sang. “And a donut with black icing because I love you and want you to fear mirrors.”

Her makeup was a soft knife. Mine would be too. She drew a small sigil behind my ear with eyeliner. “For bravery,” she said. “Or vanity. Your pick.”

“I’ll take both.”

In the hall, Bones leaned his head into the doorway upside down. “You stab anyone, you gotta yell UNO,” he said. “House rules.”

“Go away,” Briar and I said in unison. He grinned and did.

We ate on the couch and watched the clubhouse wake like a beast rolling its shoulders. The party would happen. I’d be there. He’d be out there. And between those truths lay the only one I could stand on: I refused to disappear.

“I’m scared,” I said, because someone needed to hear me say it.

“I know,” Briar said. “You’re brave.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It never was.”

She squeezed my knee. “He tried to turn love into a weapon. We’ll hand it back as a mirror. He won’t like what he sees.”

“He’ll see Ghost,” I said.

“He’ll see all of you,” she corrected gently. “The parts that don’t beg.”

Footsteps in the hall. Ghost. Like I’d conjured him. He paused, took in the scene, coffee, black-iced donut, sigils and sarcasm, and the barest smile touched his mouth.

“Ready?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “Go anyway.”

He held out his hand. I took it.

We stood.

The room didn’t get bigger.

I did.

And for the first time since the envelope, since the nailed thread, since the photo taken in the dark, I felt the shape of my future settle like a weight I could carry.

Not because the danger had vanished.

Because I had stopped shrinking to fit it.