Page 34 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Ghost

Something felt wrong.

I knew it before the scream.

Before the lockdown.

Before Reaper flipped the war table and Cross punched a hole through the drywall.

I felt it.

A silence under the noise.

A cold pulse in my chest.

Selene had been gone too long. Not long enough for panic, but too long for peace.

I told myself to wait. To stay calm. To trust that she was just helping a club girl with makeup, or checking on Briar, or adjusting her corset in the bathroom mirror.

But I knew better.

I always fucking knew better.

The moment that prospect, Daisy, or Rose, I didn’t catch her name, stumbled into the room, and stammered, “Has anyone seen Selene?” the world dropped out from under me.

I moved fast. Bar. Kitchen. Bathrooms. Every room upstairs. Nothing. No red corset. No glitter crown. Just her scent, fading. Her presence, missing.

When I hit the hallway and saw her heel on the floor, one strap snapped, one drop of blood on the tile—

I lost it.

“FUCK!”

I roared so loud the room went still.

Briar appeared like a bullet, face pale, glitter sharp on her cheekbones. “What do you mean she’s not here?”

“She’s gone,” I growled, already storming back into the chapel, boot crashing through the door. “She’s gone, and someone took her from inside this fucking club!”

Reaper was already on his feet. “You sure?” he asked, voice razor-sharp.

I held up the heel. “Unless she decided to take a midnight jog barefoot through the bayou, yeah, I’m sure.”

Bones stood, chair screeching. “Lock it down.”

Cross was already at the wall panel. “On it.”

The steel shutters dropped over every entrance. Doors slammed. The back gate sealed. No one in, no one out. The clubhouse took a breath and became a bunker.

Ash grabbed his cut. “You think it was Adam?”

“I know it was,” I said. “But how the fuck did he get in?”

And that’s when Vex, silent until now, muttered, “He didn’t.”

Everyone turned. “What?”

“He didn’t get in,” Vex said, eyes flashing. “He got help from someone who already was.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

Then Reaper spoke. “Where the fuck is Banks?”

Heads turned. Ash bolted down the hall. Two minutes later, he returned, breath hard. “His bunk’s empty. So is his cut.”

My jaw clenched so tight I felt bone pop. “I knew something was off.”

Reaper’s voice was death. “We find her. We burn the fucking world if we have to.”

I was already moving.

First, the hallway.

I mapped it like a crime scene and a prayer. Heel on tile. Blood the size of a tear. A scuff mark where skin met wall, her ring had left a moon-scratch in the paint. Something fine and bright twinkled low to the floor, glitter dust. Good girl. Leave me a trail.

“Cross,” I said, dropping to a knee. “Pull every camera between here and the bathrooms, both ends. Time stamp from when she left the bar.”

“I’m up,” he said, already scrubbing video. “Trip line bell at 21:47, one jingle. Not enough to alert over the music, but it pinged the system.”

Briar’s breath caught. “I told her to keep her foot light. She—” She swallowed. “She tried.”

“She did,” I said, lifting the heel with two fingers. The strap was torn clean, not frayed—yanked. The blood smear was fresh, bright. “Chloroform,” I added, catching the sour-sweet residue on the cloth abandoned near the corner. “Rag dropped here.”

Vex produced a zip bag like a magician and I sealed the rag. Cross’s eyes flicked up. “If he touched that without gloves, it’s a gift.”

Bones knelt by the baseboard. “Look.” He tapped a fine line of dust disturbed under the vent, too high for regular boots, too low for an elbow. “He knew our blind spots.”

“He studied us,” I said.

“Or someone told him,” Vex replied.

Ash handed me a flashlight. I tracked a faint drag pattern where weight had shifted, he’d hauled her around the bend, not carried. Quick, practiced. Feet narrow, size ten maybe. A second set of prints, lighter, jittery, an accomplice. Two of them. One calm. One not.

“Cross?” I asked.

“Back hallway cam from the bar catches the edge of a cap at 21:45. Then static.” He swore softly. “He looped me. Ten seconds, just enough to blur a grab and a turn.”

“Vent feed?” Reaper asked.

“No access on this stretch,” Cross said, pissed at himself. “Adding one tomorrow is late today.”

“Door feeds,” I said. “Show me exit paths.”

Cross threw four windows to the wall. The back door: closed, then a blip. A sliver of light, shadow like a shoulder, the door easing shut. The lot: white van with a magnet company logo we’ve seen before. Passenger door open for three beats, then closed. Driver never leaves.

“Van plate’s borrowed,” Cross said. “Same cousin’s vehicle we flagged. He swapped magnets. Badge reads River Grove Heating tonight.”

“River Grove Motel,” I murmured. “Full circle.”

“Timeline,” Reaper snapped.

Cross pointed. “21:42 Selene peels off the main room. 21:45 cap at the corner. 21:47 bell jingle. 21:48 back door opens and closes with a body in the shadow. 21:49 van door shuts. 21:50 they’re moving.”

I checked my watch. “We’re at 21:57.”

“We have a window,” Reaper said. “We use it.”

Briar’s eyes were wildfire. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” Reaper and I said together.

She set her jaw. “You think I’ll slow you down?”

“I think if he sees you, he learns our tells,” I said. “You stay with Cross. Find me that van if it breathes wrong.”

She hated it. She stayed.

Vex brought me gear already prepped: gloves, a low-vis comm, a slim pry. Bones traded me his extra blade without words. Ash handed over a small, ugly pistol I didn’t need and took it back when I didn’t take it.

I rolled my shoulders, tried to force my breath into squares, and failed. The drum in my chest wasn’t fear. It was the beat before war.

“Ghost,” Reaper said quietly as the shutters parted for us. “Alive.”

“Alive,” I repeated, and meant Selene. Not him.

We split. Reaper and Bones took a truck out the main. Vex and I went on foot to the back lot’s blind corner where the van had idled. Cross guided us in our ears like a god who preferred spreadsheets.

“Van’s two blocks south, westbound,” he said. “Stopped at a light. Passenger looking back. Driver fidgeting. Blue hoodie. Hands on ten and two like a teenager.”

“Chase or catch?” Vex asked, already grinning like he hoped the answer was hit.

“Neither,” I said. “Follow and learn. They’ll bring us to her.”

We moved parallel streets, cutting through a courtyard I knew better than my own pockets. New Orleans at night will swallow you if you let it; I used the noise as cover and the shadows as lanes. Vex flowed with me, a devil on my shoulder who knew when not to joke.

Cross called turns like a metronome. “Left. Straight. They pass the grocery. Slowing. Right again. Gravel now. You’re losing streetlight.”

“Industrial,” I said. “Back lots and storage units.”

“River Grove’s behind you by four blocks,” Cross added. “This is east of that. I’ve got three possible buildings with vacancy and bad locks.”

“Pick one,” Reaper said. “We’ll clear.”

“Start with the cinderblock with the blue door,” Cross replied. “Thermal says two heat signatures inside. One pacing, one still. The van just parked. Passenger out. Driver stays put.”

Vex and I rounded a corner and the van’s silhouette cut the dark like a cheap omen. Another turn, and the cinderblock box appeared, blue door, one high window with cardboard slapped crooked, a single security light that flickered like a heartbeat trying to decide.

“Eyes on,” I whispered. “Two outside?”

“One,” Cross said. “The jittery one.”

“Let Reaper take the driver,” I said. “Vex, you and me on the blue door.”

“Copy,” Reaper said, voice of a weight that settles men.

I moved to the side of the door and pressed my ear to cool paint. Inside: a hum, fluorescent. The shape of pacing, a scrape of chair leg, and God, her. A cough, small and mean, the kind chloroform leaves behind. Rage scalded the back of my throat, and I swallowed it because I needed hands steady.

“Ready?” Vex mouthed.

I nodded and counted down with fingers for Cross’s cameras and Reaper’s rhythm. Three. Two. One.

Vex hit the light above the door with a gloved fist; it popped, shorting the world to darker. I slid the pry bar into the latch like a secret and levered once. The door gave with a whisper. Inside, the pacing stopped.

I went in low and left. Vex went right.

What I saw in the half-light did something to me that will never undo.

Selene. Tied to a metal chair. Crown crooked. Lip bitten. Eyes open and clear, not broken, not begging. Furious. There was blood on her wrist and glitter on her throat and a blade tucked high in the lacing of her corset like she’d planned for a moment just like this.

The man nearest her, gloves, cap turned too slow. I had him by the wrist before his brain decided what to tell his body. I wrenched his arm back and down; he folded the way men do when a joint is a better negotiator than words.

“Stay down,” I said, very calm, because the part of me that screams had gone quiet now that I had eyes on her.

“Ghost,” Selene said, voice rough silk. “Took you long enough.”

I huffed a laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “You leave sharp edges everywhere,” I said, eyeing the blood and the cut tie. Proud. Wrecked.

“Driver’s gone,” Cross warned. “Ash is on him.”

“Alive,” Reaper murmured, far away and close.

Vex had the jittery one pinned against the wall with a forearm like a door bar. “You like errands?” he asked lightly. “Run this one: don’t move.”

The gloved man under me twisted and I gave him a pressure lesson he’d remember when it rained. “You came into my house,” I told him softly. “You took my woman. You don’t walk out of here the same man.”

He hissed, “She’s not—”

“She is,” I said, and let him feel the truth of it in his bones.

I looked at Selene and everything else went out of frame. “You hurt?”

“Annoyed,” she said. “And armed.”

“Good.” I cut her ankle ties first, then her left wrist, and palmed her right hand where the skin had burned from sawing plastic. “You did perfect.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she said, echoing the shop. Her eyes burned. “I didn’t run.”

“You did the hardest thing,” I said, and my voice wrecked itself. “You waited.”

She swayed when she stood and I caught her, not gentle, not rough, ours. She tucked herself under my arm like she’d always fit there. Vex cuffed the gloved man with zip ties so tight he’d remember us every time he looked at his hands. Outside, a shout, Reaper.

“Driver down,” Cross reported. “Alive. Bones with him.”

“Bring them,” Reaper said.

I walked Selene past the table with the knife someone had laid out like a ceremony and felt the world go hot again. I wanted to take the blade and write a language this man would never forget. I didn’t. Alive.

At the door, Selene paused. She turned, eyes on the cheap print of The Lovers with the black X over the man. She reached up, pulled the crown from her hair, and hung it on the nail above the card like a benediction flipped inside out.

“Not his,” she said.

“Never,” I said.

We stepped into the night, and the air hit my face like absolution and gasoline. The van idled silent now, driver cuffed against the wheel, Reaper and Bones flanking like gravestones. Briar’s voice came frantic and furious in my ear, “Tell me she’s with you.”

“She’s with me,” I said.

Briar sobbed one syllable and then cleared her throat and turned it into a threat. “Good. I was about to hex the entire parish.”

“Save it for court,” Cross muttered, and I heard keys clicking, evidence logging, the tidy music of a man building a cage out of facts.

I tucked Selene closer. She looked up at me, blood-red mouth, glitter collarbones, eyes that had watched herself in a mirror and decided who she was. “You’re late,” she said again, smaller now, teasing and trembling.

“Never again,” I said, and for once in my stubborn fucking life, I meant the promise I made before I knew the path to keep it.

Someone had declared war.

They’d just learned what kind of soldier I am.