Page 32 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ghost

There’s a moment before violence when the world goes too still.

It happens in combat zones. Behind enemy lines. In safe houses that turn out not so safe. The quiet that means you’re either seconds from salvation or something worse.

That’s what this felt like.

Stillness before the strike.

I stood with Cross in the chapel, the old storage room we converted years ago into an intel hub.

Concrete walls, a ceiling fan that ticked when it felt like it, two folding tables loaded with gear.

Monitors lit the cinderblock like stained glass for men who pray with logistics.

Pins marked maps. Two burner phones buzzed with nothing useful.

One screen feed from the alley across from the shop pinged. Cross’s fingers were already on the keyboard before I told him to roll it back.

A man in a ballcap, hoodie, faded jeans.

Normal.

Too normal.

Adam Lane.

Cross froze the frame. Zoomed in. Ran a partial plate from the parked car nearby. Matched it to a rental flagged two days ago under the name Gavin Slate.

Bingo.

“He’s staying at the River Grove Motel,” Cross muttered, tapping another window open. “Room 12A. Paid cash after day one. Minimal activity. He moves nights. Leaves lights off. Keeps curtains thumb-width open. Likes to watch himself watching.”

I stared at the grainy image. The man I’d seen once and dismissed as background. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“I’m going to finish this,” I said, voice low.

Cross didn’t look at me. “You sure that’s what she wants?”

I looked up. His face was unreadable, but the weight behind the question was real. I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know. I didn’t go to Selene yet. I went to Reaper.

He was on the back stoop with a cigarette he wasn’t smoking, just holding like a habit he might take up again if pushed. He watched the lot the way kings watch borders.

“River Grove Motel,” I said, keeping it clean. “12A. He’s here.”

Reaper rolled the unlit cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “You want to take a team.”

“I want to take him.”

He considered me like a problem set he’d already solved three ways. “Alive.”

“I know.”

“Proof we can hand to Cross, then to the right people,” he said. “I don’t want this coming back to my door with sirens.”

“I know,” I repeated.

He flicked the cigarette back into the pack. “She’s going to want to choose her battlefield.”

“She already has one in mind,” I said.

Reaper’s mouth tipped, not a smile. “The party.”

“Yeah.”

He blew out a breath that was all steel. “I’ll flood the room with eyes. If he steps in, he doesn’t walk out the same man.”

“He won’t walk out at all if he touches her,” I said.

“Ghost,” Reaper said, and there was a warning and a benediction in it. “Alive.”

I nodded once. Deal I’d make and break if I had to—but I’d try to keep it.

I did a drive-by of the River Grove just before dusk.

The place had the charm of a bruise. Neon that buzzed like a gnat.

Two floors of doors that had seen more secrets than churches.

Room 12A’s curtain sat open that same thumb-width Cross mentioned.

A TV glowed a pale square on the far wall.

I parked two lots over, walked past with a soda and a phone to my ear like a man arguing with his ex, and catalogued.

Mud on the welcome mat. Ashtray empty. Air smelled like cleaner trying and failing. No movement behind the slit of curtain. My gut still said occupied—the sort of empty that isn’t empty, the kind a hunter uses to let the woods forget him.

I didn’t knock. I left a hair across the latch of the exterior stairwell like a ghost calling card and slid back into traffic. This wasn’t the place. Not yet. I didn’t want a motel corridor with three blind corners and a manager who’d sell my soul for a Marlboro. I wanted home field.

Selene knew before I told her.

Of course she did.

She was at the bar that night, legs crossed, sipping on a bottle of sweet tea like it was whiskey.

Hair up. Eyes sharp. Briar leaned beside her, carving a pentagram into a coaster with a steak knife because she likes to make art and threats at the same time.

Reaper sat across the room with Bones, watching. Always watching.

“He’s in town,” Selene said before I spoke.

I just nodded.

“I’m not running,” she added, voice cool and clear.

“I didn’t think you would.”

She turned and looked me dead in the eye. “I want to go to the Halloween party.”

The words hit harder than I expected. Not because of the party. Because of the choice inside them.

“Selene—”

“I’m going,” she said again, slower. “But I’m not just showing up to dance and eat candy corn, Ghost. I’m going because he’ll be there.” A certainty I could respect. “He won’t be able to stay away.”

She stood. Crossed the space between us. Pressed her hands to my chest.

“I want him to come to me,” she whispered. “I want to look him in the eye when he tries to take what isn’t his.”

I swallowed hard. “You’re using yourself as bait.”

“I’m taking my life back.”

I gripped her wrists. Not to stop her. To steady myself.

“I’ll be by your side the whole night.”

“I know.”

“And when he makes his move—”

“I want him to see exactly who I chose,” she said, fierce now, “and exactly how wrong he was to ever think he had a chance.”

Fuck.

She wasn’t just strong. She was savage. Mine.

And when I kissed her there in the low light of the clubhouse—with her brother watching, with half the club pretending not to look—it wasn’t about possession anymore. It was about partnership.

We were going to end this.

Together.

We planned like men who understood the cost of improvisation.

Cross spread a floor plan across the table, and I drew circles on it with a grease pencil until the paper looked like a target.

Vex on the door with Ash; their job was to move bodies in that easy way that keeps crowds from noticing they’re cattle.

Bones floated; if you needed a wall, he’d be it.

Bray and Thorne played anchors in the back hallway and courtyards.

Daisy ran interference with glitter and noise and a tote bag that could conceal a rocket launcher.

Briar stayed stuck to Selene like beautiful gum.

Reaper orbited. Not center. Not edge. Gravity.

“Colors for shifts,” Cross said, tapping the comms. “You move; you call a color. Red for immediate. Green for slide. Blue for eyes-only. We keep chatter clean.”

Selene stood across from me, arms folded, absorbing details like heat. “What do you want me to do?”

“Own the room,” I said. “You stand where I put you. You breathe when I say. If you see him, you don’t approach. You mark him and let me take the space.”

Her chin lifted. “And if he speaks to me?”

“You let him,” I said, and her eyes flashed sharp at that, anger, not fear. “You let him show us his tells. You let him step into our shape.”

Briar bumped her hip. “And you look hot while doing it.”

Selene’s mouth curved. “Non-negotiable.”

Reaper slid a small black box toward me. “Extra ear for you. Encrypted. If power dies, it still records.”

I clipped it. “Cross?”

“I’ll be in the office,” he said. “I’ll have the alley cam, the vent cam, the lot cam, and two floaters for when people insist on being mysterious.”

He looked at Selene. “You okay with that many eyes?”

She held his gaze. “Tonight? I want a thousand.”

An hour later, I took Bray and rolled back by the River Grove. We didn’t stop. We didn’t need to. We just let the motel see us. Let him feel the pressure of being preyed on for a change. Bray’s voice stayed quiet as the road.

“You ever think about walking away from all this?” he asked.

“No.”

He nodded like that’s the answer he expected. “You think she does?”

“She did,” I said. “Then someone tried to write her story for her.”

“And now?”

“Now she’s the author and I’m the editor with a mean streak.”

Bray laughed once, short. “Copy.”

We looped twice, then went home.

Back at the clubhouse, Daisy had turned the main room into a temple of petty gods—bats, candles, a skeleton on a motorcycle that grinned like it knew things.

Vex threatened to staple a bat to my kutte.

Briar threatened to staple Vex to a bat.

Ash tested the fog machine and cursed each time a bulb refused to glow; Daisy named the dead bulbs and held a funeral; Reaper told her to pick up the glitter after her own wake.

Selene disappeared and returned twenty minutes later in the black silk and velvet she’d chosen. My shirt from the morning was gone; in its place was a jacket I’d adjusted to hide a blade in the seam only I knew. Her hair, shorter now, framed her jaw like it had opinions.

“You ready?” I asked, the ritual again, because the ritual mattered.

“No,” she said. “Go anyway.”

“Good.”

I adjusted her collar. Slipped the flat blade where it belonged. She didn’t watch my hands. She watched my face, like she was cataloguing the parts of me that were hers. It did something in my chest I didn’t have time to diagnose.

The church bells in the Quarter rang out seven and people started to arrive. Costumes. Leather. Too much perfume. The beat from the band lifted the room into a single animal. I took my corner where I could see the door, the bar, the back hall, and—most importantly—her.

Selene didn’t shrink. She didn’t peacock. She existed like a fixed point and let the room rotate. Briar hovered a step off, laughing too loud at a joke on purpose just as Cross told me in my ear, “White van in the lot. Plate borrowed. Driver stays put.”

“Copy,” I said. “Eyes on the back.”

“Green,” Reaper murmured.

Bones drifted. Vex smiled his mean smile at a guy who didn’t understand he should leave. Ash counted teeth at the door, silent math.

At 9:12, Cross said, “Entrance. Cap. Beard trimmed. Hoodie new. He’s smarter tonight.”

I didn’t turn. I saw him in the reflection off the bar mirror and the window of a frame on the wall: Adam Lane or whoever he was this week.

He paused on the threshold the way he had in the shop.

Scanned the ceiling corners without looking like he was scanning.

Too normal, like he’d practiced normal in a mirror and gotten a passing grade.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at Selene.

I moved one step, not enough for a crowd, everything for a hunter.

He crossed the room in a path that avoided eyes and landed in front of her like he’d arrived at a destination promised to him. Briar turned slightly so his angle narrowed. Selene didn’t move. She met his gaze like she was measuring a fabric she wasn’t going to buy.

“Selene,” he said, and his voice had that fake softness, cashmere covering a chain. “You look—”

She tilted her head. “Don’t finish that sentence.”

He blinked, that half-second hitch of a man who can’t believe his script got interrupted. “I just wanted—”

“You wanted ownership,” she said. Calm. Clear. “You can’t afford me.”

I felt his anger hit the air before he showed it on his face. It’s a temperature shift. You learn to read it if you’ve lived long enough with monsters. He masked it with a smile and shifted his weight like he might reach, and that was my cue.

I took the inch between them.

“Problem?” I asked, pleasant.

He looked at me properly then. Really looked. Saw the man he’d tried to crop out of his story. “We’re just talking,” he said, hands opening like that made him harmless.

“Good,” I said. “Now you’re done.”

He flicked his eyes to Selene for backup he wasn’t getting, then back to me, then to the room where Reaper’s gravity had pulled three more bodies into place without any of us seeming to move.

He smiled again, and I admired how he kept going, delusion as discipline. “You think you’re saving her,” he said. “You’re ruining her.”

“I don’t save,” I said. “I stand next to.” I dipped my head closer, voice low enough for him alone. “And I ruin men who try to take what isn’t theirs.”

He swallowed. His throat bobbed once. He leaned in a fraction like he wanted to say something intimate, and I let him because Cross said in my ear, camera full, and we wanted his mouth on record.

“You’re poison,” he whispered.

“Then die slow,” I said back, still pleasant.

He laughed, high and ugly, and tried to step around me.

He didn’t get far. Vex arrived behind him like a joke with teeth. Bones drifted to his left, Thorne to his right, Briar adjusting her hood like a saint of bad ideas. The band lifted the volume right then; Cross’s cue and the crowd shifted like water.

Adam raised both hands, palms out. “You can’t keep me from a public place,” he said, louder now, looking for a sympathetic audience that wasn’t there.

“We can,” Reaper said from behind me, the room’s temperature dropping five degrees. “And we will.”

Adam’s gaze ticked again to Selene, desperate now, like if he could just get her to say his name the spell would reset. She didn’t. She looked bored.

“Leave,” I told him softly.

“For now,” he hissed, and that was the first honest thing he’d said all night. He stepped back, slow. He turned. He walked out with his shoulders square, the posture of a man who can’t afford to look weak to himself.

When the door clicked shut behind him, the room exhaled. Not relief. Readiness.

Selene’s hand found my wrist and pressed once, small, and strong. “You, okay?” she asked me, the audacity of it making something in me want to laugh and drop to a knee at the same time.

“I am,” I said. “You?”

“I’m excellent,” she said, and for a second, I saw her in the mirror the way she had seen herself—powerful, unafraid, hers.

Cross’s voice buzzed in my ear. “He went to the lot. Van. Passenger side. He’s not leaving.”

“Good,” Reaper said quietly. “Let him watch for a while.”

“We’ll finish this,” I said to Selene.

“On our terms,” she returned, lifting her chin.

I took my position again, a step off her left, and the stillness before the strike shifted into something else, something like a promise humming in wire. Violence hadn’t come yet. It would.

When it did, we were ready.