Page 26 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Nineteen

Ghost

I should’ve pulled back.

Should’ve kept my distance.

Should’ve given her space, time, breath.

But the moment she walked into my room with that look in her eyes—fire, defiance, need, I knew I was done pretending. She held the note like it was a weapon. Like she was done hiding. Done shrinking.

And when she said, “Make me forget,” I didn’t ask questions.

I moved.

She was in my arms before the door clicked shut.

The first kiss was a collision and a confession.

No preamble, no mercy, just heat, and the rough sound we both made when relief finally found a mouth.

Her fingers fisted in my cut; I shrugged the leather off without breaking, swallowed the small gasp that left her like I’d been starving for it.

“Selene,” I rasped against her cheek, breath dragging. “Say it.”

“Yes,” she said, not pleading, promising. Her legs bracketed my hips, her heart knocking wild where our chests pressed. “I want something that’s mine.”

“You have it,” I said, and meant more than I should.

She tugged me back to her mouth, fierce and sure, and the room narrowed to the span of her hands and the deliberate slide of her skin against mine. Fabric gave. Buttons surrendered. Clothes fell like secrets we’d carried for years, each one landing at our feet with the quiet shock of truth.

She wasn’t fragile.

She wasn’t breakable.

She was fire with a spine and a will made of tempered steel.

“Not his,” I growled, jaw against her jaw, a vow more than a warning. “You were never his.”

Her body arced, heat rolling off her like summer air on a road. “Say it again.”

“Not his,” I said, slower, like a litany. “Never his.”

I scooped her up and set her on the edge of the dresser.

Wood creaked; she laughed breathless and defiant, palms cupping my face like she’d decided where I belonged and dragged me there.

I traced a path down her throat with my mouth, a prayer said in a language older than either of us.

She shivered, nails biting my shoulders, and every muscle I’d trained to stay quiet sang at once.

“Tell me what you want,” I said, voice gone smoke. “All of it.”

She looked me dead in the eyes. “You.”

“Then look at me,” I said. “And take it.”

She did. The world blurred at the edges and sharpened where we met.

I let her lead and then I led her, a give-and-take that felt like a storm we’d been warning the horizon about for years.

When I lifted her again, she anchored herself around me without hesitation, as if she’d been made to fit right there, exactly like this, at exactly this time and maybe she had.

I carried her to the bed and laid her out like something I’d worship if I believed in gentler gods. She pulled me down and I went willingly, letting the mattress take my weight when her mouth dragged me deeper into the kind of kiss that resets a man’s clock.

“Ghost,” she whispered, and it wasn’t a question. It was my name given back to me clean.

“Yeah,” I said, forehead to hers. “I’ve got you.”

The rest blurred on purpose. I made it slow where it should be slow, certain where certainty mattered, careful where a bruise already lived beneath the skin.

I learned the pace that unraveled the tightness in her shoulders and built the heat in her voice, and when she reached for me with a sound like relief finally catching up to want, I met her there, not rushed, not rough, just right.

She held on like she’d decided falling wasn’t a risk anymore.

“Say you’re mine,” I told her, not to brand, never that but to remind her which story belonged to us.

Her mouth tilted into a reckless smile. “I’m yours.”

Something detonated quiet inside my chest. I didn’t say the word that wanted to follow. Not yet. But I gave her the shape of it with every breath after.

When she broke apart against me, she made a sound I’d never forget if I lived another hundred years, a cracked-open, rebuilt kind of sound and when I followed, I buried my face in the warm curve of her neck and let the last of the restraint I’d been white-knuckling slide out of my hands.

Fear.

Lust.

Rage.

Something bigger that I wasn’t ready to name.

I breathed it all out into her skin.

After, the room held the kind of quiet that feels earned. Her pulse fluttered at my mouth; mine steadied against her ribs. I felt the moment her body decided to trust sleep again and I held her through it; palms spread over the small of her back like a promise I had every intention of keeping.

She drifted for maybe an hour, curled into me like she’d always slept this way. When she stirred, warm, flushed, eyes heavy with something fiercer than exhaustion, I could feel it. The shift.

No fear.

No hesitation.

Just want, raw and honest.

She rolled on top of me and kissed me like it was hers to take and it was. “You’re not done with me,” she said into my throat, the words low and wicked.

“Not even close.”

I flipped her beneath me and this time I didn’t rush. This time I showed her. I drew her up, brought her knees toward the bed’s edge where the old standing mirror leaned in the corner, tall, scuffed frame, glass that had watched fights and homecomings and too many dawns.

She started to speak. I caught her chin gently between my fingers.

“Look,” I said.

Her lips parted, caution warring with curiosity. “Ghost…”

“You see her?” I murmured. “That woman?”

She swallowed, eyes lifting to meet her reflection.

“That’s mine,” I told her, not a claim on her body, but on the truth that lived in it. Not his story. Hers. Ours.

Her breath shook. I kissed the line of her jaw and let my hands teach what my mouth couldn’t say without breaking.

I moved with intention, contained and sure, an unhurried rhythm that rebuilt her sense of self where hands had once tried to unthread it.

Every time she tried to look away, I turned her face back, gentle but unyielding.

“Watch,” I said, voice husk and gravel. “Watch how powerful you are.”

Her cheeks flushed, not with embarrassment, but with dawning recognition.

Her body answered mine without flinching.

She stared like she couldn’t decide if she believed the evidence, the strength in the set of her shoulders, the fierce line of her mouth, the woman in the glass who took and took and took because it was hers to take.

“That’s it,” I whispered, a rough encouragement. “Look at you.”

“Ghost—” Her voice fractured, not with fear, never that now but with something like triumph.

“You see how beautiful you are when you come apart? When you let yourself?”

She made a sound I wanted to wear, and I held her steady and carried her through it, every breath a reassurance, every word a map back to the parts of her that had been doubted and dimmed and were busy relighting.

When the shaking eased, I didn’t leave her.

I kept her close and moved slower, deeper, not demanding anything from her that she wasn’t already giving freely.

The mirror caught the soft collapse of her smile, the slip of her lashes, the wildness tamed into something honest and owned.

I watched her watch herself and I don’t mind saying it undid me.

When the last of the tension left us, the bed accepted our weight and the mirror accepted our truth.

She lay with her cheek on my chest, breathing in the evening, heartbeat slowing into mine. I smoothed damp hair off her temple and kissed the spot my hand had warmed. “You see now?” I asked, voice dragged raw. “You’re not broken, Selene. You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met.”

She shifted, eyes finding the mirror again. A small, slow smile tugged at her mouth, the kind that means belief is finally louder than doubt.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I think I do.”

We stayed like that for a long time. Long enough for the room to cool and the outside noise to sink back into the background hum of a building that loved as hard as it fought.

Long enough for the part of my brain that always plans to whisper aftercare and for my hands to answer water, a warm cloth, the careful slide of fabric over skin, the soft reset of covers.

She let me, unembarrassed by the tenderness, almost greedy for it.

I could’ve said love right then and it would’ve fit, but I kept the word behind my teeth and let the actions hold its shape.

Eventually she propped herself on an elbow and studied me the way a person studies a map before they commit to a road. “You’re not going to be kind,” she said, not a question, remembering what I’d promised about the man who’d slipped notes into sacred places.

“Not to him,” I said. “Never to him.”

Her fingers traced the scar on my shoulder like a comet path. “But to me,” she said, testing.

“Always.”

That earned me another kiss, slow and deep, the kind that rearranges a future. When she pulled back, her eyes were clear. “Tomorrow, we dress up and pretend this is normal.”

“Tomorrow, we control the room,” I corrected. “You’ll be center, and I’ll be a step off your left. If he shows, we’re ready. If he doesn’t, we still win because you danced in your own damn house.”

“Ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“If he tries to take this from me again…”

“He won’t,” I said, with the certainty of a man who’d already decided the shape of the world he’d allow. “Not while I breathe.”

She nodded and settled again, cheek to my chest, hand in the center of me like she’d staked a flag.

I turned my head and looked at the mirror one last time.

It threw back two people I recognized and one I was just getting to know: the man I’d been, the man I was with her, and the man I could be if she kept letting me prove it.

Her breaths turned slow and even. I stared at the ceiling and let the plan for tomorrow slot into place: Cross on the feeds, Reaper at the door, Bones floating, Vex smiling mean, Briar sparking in all directions like a glitter fuse. Me, the tide. Selene, the center.

The note she’d brought me earlier “He kissed you. But I know you better.” still smoldered in my trash can, half-ash, half-threat. I watched the last ember go dull. Let the anger settle into something I could use.

In the quiet, she stirred and murmured my name, a soft sound like a password.

“I’m here,” I said.

She relaxed again, and that was the victory I’d take into the next fight: not that I’d touched her, not that she’d taken me, but that the part of her that refused to sleep finally trusted the darkness enough to rest. I pressed my mouth to her hair and breathed in sage and heat and something that smelled like home I hadn’t had before.

“Mine,” I whispered into the curve of her shoulder.

Not a brand. A bond.

Outside, the clubhouse moved, boots in the hall, a laugh cut short, Briar’s low whistle, the ice bucket getting refilled because Daisy forgot again. Normal, which meant everything, because normal is what he’d tried to steal.

I felt Selene’s smile against my chest, a lazy curve. “Yours,” she said, not submitting, choosing.

The night held. The plan held.

And when the mirror caught us drifting, it didn’t show a woman haunted and a man hunting.

It showed two people done being written by anyone else.