Page 37 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Selene

“You always wore red when you were sad.”

Briggs crouched in front of me like we were swapping secrets at a sleepover, not chained in a candlelit garage that stank of gas and stale obsession.

“I noticed it back in May,” he went on, earnest as a Sunday school boy. “You wore that red dress for a week straight after your mom’s anniversary.”

I didn’t answer.

Didn’t twitch.

Didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.

He continued, pleased with the sound of his own noticing.

“And your hair… you always do that messy bun when you’re overwhelmed. People think it’s just boho, but I know the truth.”

My stomach turned, but I forced my mouth to smile. “Then you really should’ve seen what I wear when I’m pissed off.”

He laughed. A quiet, dreamy sort of sound, like I’d said something sweet. “I missed you the week you went to the Gulf. You and Briar. You wore that yellow top I hate.”

“Shame,” I said, “I was thinking of wearing it to our wedding.”

His face lit up like a goddamn firecracker. “Really?”

“Sure. We can get married right here. Just you, me, and the rats in the wall.”

The glow in his eyes flickered, just for a second.

I leaned in—or tried to, bound as I was. “You want me, Briggs? Then prove it.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Untie me. Let me touch you.”

He inhaled, sharp and shallow. “I—I can’t. You’ll run.”

“No,” I whispered, “I won’t. But if you want me to see you the way you see me, you need to let me in. No more hiding behind duct tape and zip ties.”

He hesitated.

Then stood.

Paced.

“I knew you were smart. But you never saw me, not until now.”

“That’s not true,” I lied with a sugar-sweet smile.

He turned back to me, eyes wide, shining with delusion. “We can start over. I’ll fix this. I just need time.”

“How long?” I asked softly. “How long have you been watching me?”

He stepped back toward the altar, ran a finger across the blade laid beside my lipstick. “Since the day you brought me that free coffee.”

“What?”

“You were working the counter at the shop. It was raining. I didn’t have cash on me yet—I was waiting for the club to process my hangaround paperwork. You gave me a coffee and said, ‘Don’t worry, the first one’s on the house.’”

I remembered. Barely. A blur of customer faces. Wet streets and exhausted smiles. But he’d held onto it like a vow.

“I knew then,” he whispered, “you were mine.”

No.

I wasn’t.

Not then.

Not now.

Not ever.

But I kept my mouth shut and my face soft. Because if he kept talking, maybe he’d slip. Maybe he’d give me something I could use.

Or maybe… maybe Ghost was already close. And maybe this bastard was about to die screaming.

“Why the roses?” I asked, tilting my head like a girl in a perfume ad. “They bruise too easily.”

He brightened. “Because you’re delicate and strong at once. You know how roses get tougher when you prune them? It’s like that. They’re prettier when they’ve been… guided.”

“Pruned,” I echoed. “Cut back until they fit your garden.”

His smile faltered and then regrouped. “Until they thrive.”

“And the card?” I nodded to The Lovers—the cheap knockoff with the man X’ed out and another card under it, edges greasy from too much touching. “You always cross out him. Why not her?”

“You never needed erasing,” he said, and there was genuine hurt there, a warped kindness. “You just need reminding.”

I let my gaze slide to his hands. He wore thin latex gloves—the kind you buy one pair at a time at the corner store.

They smelled like citrus and garage sink: our degreaser.

I pictured him at the clubhouse sink washing away prints, invisible as a shadow in a busy house. Average men make the best ghosts.

“You looped the camera in the west hall,” I said, casual, like I was asking who’d taken the last donut. “Ten seconds.”

His chest puffed. Pride likes being seen. “Cross thinks he’s clever, but he’s predictable. The junction points were old. No one fixed them because no one thinks about the west hall unless you live there.”

“Except me,” I said.

Except Ghost, I didn’t add.

He drifted closer, candlelight cutting hollows into his cheeks. “He changed you.”

“He didn’t,” I said, and kept my voice soft, not sharp. You don’t spook a man like this; you let him step into his own trap. “He just held up a mirror.”

Briggs’s mouth twisted. “Mirrors lie.”

“So do men who watch women sleep and call it love,” I said, still gentle. “Tell me about Adam.”

He stilled. Then he laughed, a thin high wire barely holding. “Every story needs a villain.”

“He was a decoy,” I said. “You wanted us to waste time. You wanted him blamed. Convenient that he also had a thing for me.”

“He didn’t deserve you,” Briggs snapped, heat breaking the glass. “He was… loud. Like all of them. Like your brother and his dogs.”

“And you’re what,” I asked, “quiet thunder?”

His chin lifted. “I’m patient.”

“Patient enough to sit in a motel room and wait,” I said, watching his pupils, “and when he walked in, you… what? Said amen and cut him open?”

Briggs’s eyes unfocused, like replaying a favorite movie. “He thought he was the main character,” he murmured. “He didn’t even look up at first. It was almost… peaceful.”

The blade on the altar gleamed. The edge was clean. He’d washed it since. Pride again.

“And the driver?” I pressed. “The jittery one. He ran.”

“He’s nobody,” Briggs said, dismissive. “He owed me a favor.”

“Does nobody have a name?” I made it a tease, not an interrogation.

He hesitated. “Ty.”

“Ty,” I repeated, tasting it. Not Banks. Not anyone with a patch. Just a skinny cousin who likes fast money. Good. Cross would find him. Reaper would turn him into a warning.

“Why the vent,” I asked. “Why show me you could snake a petal into my hallway?”

“So, you’d feel me,” he said simply. “So, you’d know I wasn’t touching what was his. I was touching you.”

“You don’t listen,” I said, and let my mouth curve. “I’m not his either. I’m mine.”

“Not anymore,” he said, and the softness in his tone hardened into something devotional. “Not when I’ve done all this. You can’t walk away from a covenant.”

“Covenants need consent,” I said, voice still in that calm place I used for skittish customers and unpredictable storms. “And rings. And paperwork. You brought zip ties.”

He blinked.

“Speaking of,” I added lightly, wiggling my fingers, “they’re too tight. Kind of ruins the romance. If you want me to feel you, you should let me feel something besides plastic.”

He swallowed, pacing again, the blades of his shoulders twitching with each turn. “You’ll run.”

“Where,” I asked, widening my eyes in mock innocence and letting it catch candle flame. “There’s a door with a lock. A window with bars. You planned too well for me to be clever. Didn’t you?”

Pride won again.

He came back with a small craft knife and cut the tie on my left wrist. The nylon whispered as it parted. Pain flooded back in pins. I didn’t flinch. I kept my right wrist still so he wouldn’t notice the slack I’d already worked into it by heat and stubbornness.

He stepped behind me to cut the right tie.

“Wait,” I said quickly. “You’ll do it wrong. There’s a ritual for this.”

He paused. “What?”

“You think I’m joking about cleansing? We’re in a garage pretending it’s a church. If you want anything you believe in to stick, you have to follow some rules.” I nodded toward the plastic cup he’d abandoned. “Water. Both hands. Otherwise, you offend the element.”

He stilled. Ritual and control wrestled in him. He wanted to be the priest and the prophet and the lover and the hero. He wanted to be right. He set the knife down. Retrieved the cup. The tap coughed old pipes into a thin stream. He brought the water back like a man bringing wine.

“Both hands,” I said again.

He cut the right tie too.

Blood roared back. I kept my hands open, palms up, offering. He cupped water over them, clumsy and tender. Drops slid through glitter and grime and pooled in my lifelines. He watched, rapt.

“See?” he whispered. “See how clean you’ll be?”

“Mm,” I said, and tilted the rest over my ankles.

He flinched. “What are you—”

“Memory,” I said, using his earlier line against him, and slid the wet nylon against the cold chair leg until friction kissed friction, and the cord gave another sigh.

I kept my ankles together, kept the illusion, tucked my blade—my small, flat seam knife—back into the corset while he looked at his own miracle.

“Briggs,” I said softly, while he was still high on his sacrament. “Why didn’t you ever ask me for coffee again? After that day. If we were inevitable.”

His mouth trembled. “You were always with them.”

“You were too,” I pointed out. “Carrying crates. Fixing the light in the back hall. You could’ve said hi.”

“No,” he said, eyes sharpening to anger’s edge. “They poisoned you. Made you… loud.”

“What they made me,” I said, finally letting steel into my voice, “was free.”

He recoiled like I’d spit.

“I freed you,” he insisted, and the calm snapped into fervor. “From Adam. From the staring. From him. I cleaned your door and your hallway and your room. I took away the noise. I gave you me.”

“You gave me trash cards and a violated purse,” I said. “You gave me swallowed sleep and jittery mornings and a hand on my mouth in my own home.”

“That was for your safety,” he said.

“Say that again,” I said, voice flat now. “Say it and see what it feels like in your mouth.”

He swallowed. Didn’t repeat it. Good. He wasn’t fully lost to the kind of fantasy that can’t hear itself. Not that it mattered. The end was the same.

He watched me for a long beat, and I let him. I let him see a woman with red on her mouth and glitter on her throat and a crown that didn’t belong to any altar of his. I let him mistake my stillness for surrender.

Outside, something in the air changed.

Most people don’t hear it. It’s the smallest tilt—the pressure in a room moving like a tide. Cross would call it a draft. Reaper would call it a window of opportunity. Ghost taught me to listen for it the way you learn to hear a storm before you see it.

I felt it now.

He didn’t.

“Give me your hands,” he said, gentle again, regaining his sermon. “I’ll show you. I’ll make you remember.”

I held them out.

When his fingers touched mine, I leaned in like I was leaning into a kiss and whispered, “Last chance.”

He smiled, indulgent. “I forgive you.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You won’t have time.”

He blinked.

The candles guttered again, barely. The draft became a breath.

He looked up, finally, suspicion flooding in. His head snapped toward the door. He froze—caught between checking the sound and keeping his hand on me.

He chose wrong.

I made my wrists small and slipped the right free, blade already palmed. His thumb pressed hard on the bone where it meets the base of my palm and I leaned into it, borrowing his leverage. I brought the flat of the blade up—not to stab, not yet—but to lay it along his wrist like a warning.

“Touch me again without my consent,” I said softly, “and I’ll decorate your altar with your fingers.”

He went very still. The candles threw his shadow enormous on the wall—a saint of nothing.

“I love you,” he said, one more weapon.

“You don’t,” I said. “But for what it’s worth?”

He waited. Hope is loud.

“I believe in monsters,” I said, and smiled like a lit match. “And I brought a bigger one with me.”

Something clicked at the door. Not a bang. Not a battering ram. Just the quiet sound of a lock deciding it liked someone else better.

Briggs finally moved—to the knife on the altar.

I moved faster.

I kicked the chair back, the metal screeching, the sound I wanted. He grabbed the blade; I grabbed his wrist. He was stronger than he looked, but not stronger than a woman who’s been told to be small her whole life and learned to make rage into leverage.

We went sideways, a tangle of breath and devotion and hate. He hissed my name like a prayer, and I laughed, breathless.

The door opened.

Vex popped the flickering security light outside with a gloved fist; it died like an omen. The blue door spilled shadow.

Ghost came in low and left, a storm on legs, Reaper’s gravity behind him, Bones somewhere like a wall with a pulse.

Briggs looked up and saw what I’d promised him.

He let go of the knife.

I didn’t let go of him.

“Hi,” I said, smile all teeth. “You’re late, baby.”

Ghost’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something better. A man who’d just been handed back his heart.

“Get your hands off my woman,” he said to Briggs, polite as a funeral.

Briggs tried to speak. Ghost didn’t need him to. He took his wrist and language out of the equation in one clean motion. The blade clattered harmless. Vex had zip ties on him before the candles could finish trembling.

Ghost cut the last of my ties. The nylon fell away. Blood rushed where fear should have been.

“You hurt?” he asked, voice a rasp.

“Annoyed,” I said. “Hydration would help.”

He handed me a bottle from nowhere like a street magician and tucked me under his arm like I’d always fit there. I let myself lean, just enough to remind my body we were done being hunted.

Reaper’s shadow filled the doorway; Bones hauled the jittery driver past us by the hood like a cat with a mouse. Cross’s voice in someone’s ear said, I’ve got the feed. Briar’s voice in my head said, About time, and I smiled.

Briggs watched me like I’d betrayed a map only he could see. “Selene—” he started.

I turned my head and looked at him the way you look at the last paragraph in a book you hated.

“You were never the author,” I said. “You were a torn page.”

Ghost guided me past the altar. I stopped long enough to lift my little golden crown from my hair and hang it on the nail above The Lovers card—the one with the black X over the man’s face.

“Not his,” I said.

“Never,” Ghost said.

Outside, night breathed. The city tuned itself back to the key it prefers. And when the cold hit my cheeks, it felt like a promise.

He thought red meant sad.

Tonight, red meant war paint.