Page 3 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Three

Selene

There was something about the way Banks looked at me.

Not in a you’re hot and I know it kind of way. Not even in the “your brother will kill me for thinking about you” kind of way. It was different.

Still. Cold. Like he already owned the ending to a story I hadn’t agreed to be in.

He barely said a word, but I felt his gaze all the way down my spine.

Like fingers I didn’t invite. Like breath on a windowpane.

The kind of attention that makes you measure every step twice and spin a lock on the safe side so that the noise of the tumblers is loud enough to make your lungs forget to race. Ghost noticed it too.

I saw the way he moved. Quiet, deliberate.

A shift in his weight, hand near the knife at his hip.

No words spoken, but a message sent. I wanted to thank him.

I also wanted to punch him. Because the last thing I needed right now was Ghost all up in my business, acting like he was doing me a favor by brooding nearby.

He hadn’t even said hello when I walked in. Just gave me that look. The one he always used to give me before I knew what to do with it. Before I understood how dangerous men like Ghost could be. Before I wanted it.

Now I didn’t know what to make of it. Or him. And I sure as hell didn’t know what to make of Banks and the way my stomach flipped when he was near. Not excitement. Not nerves. Something else. Fear.

“I don’t like that guy,” Briar says as soon as we step out into the courtyard, her arm loops through mine like she is dragging me toward mischief. I didn’t have to ask who she meant.

“Which guy?” I play dumb. She rolls her eyes. “The creepy-ass prospect who stared at you like he was trying to figure out how you taste with a side of fries.”

I wince. “Thanks for the imagery.”

“You’re welcome. I’m a poet of red flags.”

“He’s probably just awkward.”

“Awkward is forgetting someone’s name. Awkward is spilling a drink. He was calculating your blood type.”

I hesitate. It feels stupid saying it out loud. Admitting it makes it more real. And Briar, being Briar, catches it immediately.

“Selene.”

“What.”

She stops walking. “Tell me.”

“There’s nothing—”

“I know you. And you’ve been twitchy for days.”

I sigh and glance toward the gate. The sun is dipping low, washing everything in gold, but it doesn’t warm the unease sitting in my gut.

New Orleans late afternoon light always makes everything prettier and more dangerous at the same time, as if the city is dressing itself up to look innocent so it could stab you with a smile.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Something’s been… off.”

Briar tilts her head. “Define ‘off.’ Like a weird smell? Or like someone-is-watching-me-while-I-sleep kind of off?”

I hesitate again. Her eyes narrow. “Selene.”

“I think someone’s been following me.”

She doesn’t laugh, not even a blink. “How long?”

“A few weeks. Maybe longer. I didn’t really… I brushed it off at first. But now—”

“Now it feels real.”

“Yeah.”

She grabs my hand and drags me toward a corner of the courtyard, lowering her voice. “Okay. So, tell me everything.”

I lean against the brick wall and look down at my boots.

The leather is scuffed where I’ve leaned them against the step at the shop, where I’ve spent too many nights turning tarot cards and sweating like the cards would tell me something I wasn’t ready to hear.

“I’ve found things. At the shop. At the apartment.

Little stuff at first. A charm left on my windowsill.

A wax figure burned at the bottom. Thought it was a prank. ”

“Then what?”

“A picture. An old one. From five years ago.” My voice loses its sharpness. The memory feels like a cut I know how to hide behind makeup and jokes, but it still stings.

Briar’s face tightens. “My face was scratched out.”

She exhales slowly. “Jesus, Selene.”

“I haven’t told Reaper.”

“What the hell, why not?!”

“Because he’ll burn the world down. And I need to know what I’m dealing with first.” Saying his name makes the courtyard feel smaller. Reaper is a constant, big hands, low voice, an anger that could be a promise or a threat. He didn’t do half-measures when it came to his family.

“So, you’re just… walking around with a target on your back?”

“No. I’m walking around with knives in my boots and spells in my purse.” I try to smile, and Briar actually laughs, which eases the edge off my panic for half a beat.

She raises an eyebrow. “So, the usual.” I manage a weak grin. Then she softens. “Selene, this isn’t a joke.”

“I know.”

“Have you told Ghost?”

That one hits different.

“No.”

Her mouth quirks. “But you want to.” I look away. Briar steps in front of me. “You trust him.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“But you do.”

I don’t answer. She steps closer, all warmth and steel. “He looked at you like he wanted to burn the clubhouse down just for breathing the same air as Banks.” Heat climbs my neck. “I’m not reading into anything.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It’s exactly like that.”

I push off the wall. “It doesn’t matter. He’s a nomad. He’ll leave.”

“Maybe,” Briar says. “But not before something happens.” I turn to her. “You think the spell was real?”

Her eyes flick to my pocket, where the charm the psychic gave me still sits heavy against my thigh.

I’d been skeptical when the woman at the tarot parlor, elbows smudged with cigarette ash, voice like gravel, told me to take a ride that would change my life.

I hadn’t believed in the kind of magic that rearranged your world.

I believe in making your own luck, in hard work and bigger locks.

“Magic’s real,” Briar says quietly. “I think the universe likes chaos. And I think when you walked into that room, she saw something.”

“Danger?”

“Or love.”

“Same thing.”

She grins. “Now you’re starting to sound like me.”

I smile too, but the truth is still buried in my chest like a splinter.

What if the thing following me wasn’t just a person?

What if it was a pattern that had been set in motion, an old hurt, attracted to the place where it started?

That was the part that made me keep my knives on me even when the air smelled like jasmine and bourbon and the club was loud with laughter.

That was the part that kept me from sleeping.

We fall into silence for a beat, listening to the muffled chaos inside.

Briar’s ridiculous rendition of a song, Cross grumbling about the taxes he’d pretend to understand, Vex’s laughter booming.

It was home, in its way. Dangerous, loud, full of people who would torch a town for one of their own. But home.

Later, when I get back to my apartment, the city has already shed the golden light and put on the deep velvet of night.

New Orleans took its darkness like a second skin; it hid and revealed in equal measure.

I lock the door twice out of habit, testing the deadbolt with a fingertip like reassurance.

The lock clicked and I breathed a little easier. For ten seconds.

Then I went through the ritual I’d been taught by a woman who smelled of rosemary and old books, the kind of woman who wove protection with voice and spit and thread.

I lit sage slowly and carefully, letting the smoke curl up and carry away unwanted things.

I whisper my mother’s charm under my breath, no rhyme, no show, words my mama used when the storms felt close.

I pour salt in a neat line under the window and tuck the folded paper charm the tarot woman had given me in the hollow between the curtain and the sill.

Superstition or sense? I couldn’t tell. I only knew the action calmed the part of me that thought in lists and worst-cases.

It was like tying a knot in the back of my throat where fear wanted to fall out.

I check every window twice. I adjust the sensor lights on the stoop.

I listen to the city breathe and pray it would not inhale me. I didn’t sleep.

The bed felt alien, too soft, too quiet.

The city outside hummed like an insect, a constant that kept me tethered to reality.

I close my eyes and try to imagine the tarot card the woman had slid across the table when I left: a sun half-hidden by smoke, a rider on a horizon that looked like a promise and a threat at the same time.

She’d told me I’d walked into a ride that would change my life.

I’d laughed at the dramatics. But laughter tastes funny when you’re afraid.

When dawn lifts the sky, it doesn't feel like escape. It feels like an hour longer to wait. I move slowly, careful with my hands, as if anything I did could rattle the fragile thread holding me upright. I check my phone again: no messages, no strange calls. The silence feels heavy, like someone holding their breath on the other end. And there was the thought. The one that had slipped into every corner of my day since I’d found that photograph.

What if the spell was the problem? What if whatever was following me had been invited by curiosity, by the whisper of something different, by the scent of me in a pocket of air so ordinary it hid the extraordinary?

I want to be practical about it. Practical means logging everything, tracing back who’d had access to the shop, who had keys, which customers lingered too long.

Practical means telling Reaper and letting him rip the world open, letting his fury bathe me in safety until nothing could touch me.

Practical also means calling Ghost and letting him be the dagger he so likes to carry across his chest.

But practical also means admitting I was afraid. And admitting that means admitting I’ve been wrong a hundred times about wanting certain kinds of danger because sometimes danger comes with a laugh and a hand on your back and the wrong kind of possessive light in someone’s eyes.

So, I do the only thing I can control. I read the cards again, slower than usual, fingers steady.

I set up talismans where they wouldn’t be obvious but would be close enough to bite, an old coin in the register, a sprig of rue under the counter, a scrap of iron hidden on the back shelf.

I number the locks on the storeroom with the kind of logic that made sense to me, three clicks forward, two back.

I hang a small bell by the door that chimes once for anyone who leaves without permission, a stupid little thing that makes me feel like I still have a line of sight even when I don’t.

I don’t tell Reaper. I don’t tell Ghost. I told Briar because she saw me through my own lies, and because she was a bright, ridiculous person who made fear less heavy by being incandescent about it.

At dusk I catch my reflection in the shop window, soft hair, sharp jaw, dark eyes, someone who knows how to fight in a thousand small and ordinary ways.

I keep all my weapons close, but beyond that I keep moving.

I walk the street where the light hits the bricks cold and hard, like everything was carved into the city’s memory. I listen. I watch.

Somewhere, a motorcycle coughs to life and the sound splits the night open.

There is a shape in the doorway of the clubhouse silhouette I recognize with a jolt and a thing that feels suspiciously like hope tangled up with fear, Ghost. He stands like a dark promise in the doorway, shoulders loose but ready.

For a moment I think about walking straight to him, leaning on him like a rope.

For a whole second, I want that, want to let him be the danger that feels oddly like safety.

But I don’t. Slow burn, I remind myself. Not everything that wants a fire needs to be lit. I step inside the shop and close the door behind me. The bell chimes a single, small note. The city hums on. The charm in my pocket warms at my thigh like a heartbeat.

Someone is watching. Someone is waiting. And I still aren’t sure if the spell has brought the danger to me or if the spell has revealed something that had always been there, patient, and hungry.

Either way, I’m already in too deep.