Page 39 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Thirty

Selene

He was spiraling.

Briggs had moved from whispering devotions to arguing with himself in the span of fifteen minutes.

One candle toppled and rolled under a crate, casting warped shadows across the wall; the flame threw a halo over rust and oil stains like it was trying to bless a crime scene.

His little shrine to me, lipstick, Polaroids, a cheap Lovers card with the man X’ed out, trembled every time he paced too hard.

“I know you love me,” he muttered, back turned, voice high and breathless. “You just forgot. They made you forget. Ghost… that nomad bastard… he poisoned you.”

I didn’t speak.

Didn’t flinch.

Not while my fingers worked the seam of my boot.

The blade was still there. Flat and mean, the one Briar insisted I carry, and Ghost pretended not to notice when he tucked my hair behind my ear. I bent my wrist inside the nylon bite until it burned, found the hilt with my fingertips, eased it loose one millimeter at a time.

Keep talking, Briggs.

“After tonight,” he said, voice falling back into a dreamy hum, “it’ll all be different. You’ll see. We’ll see.”

I waited.

Breath even.

Heart steel.

He turned back to me, smile wide as salvation. “I’m going to cleanse you. Free you from his touch.”

He took a step toward me.

That was his first mistake.

I moved fast.

No scream.

No warning.

Just steel catching candlelight as I slashed the nylon at my wrists in a single, ugly pull.

The cord parted with a hot whisper; blood rushed back in pins.

He flinched, surprised, and that half-beat was a lifetime.

I shoved my weight forward, heels skidding on concrete, chair legs screeching a distraction as I came up off the seat.

My dress was torn. My crown was gone. But I was fire.

“Selene—”

I lunged.

Blade toward his throat. He got a forearm up by panic and instinct, good for him and hissed when the tip kissed skin and left a thin red line. He reached for my wrist, grip clumsy with shock.

I didn’t stop.

This wasn’t a fight.

This was justice.

I let his hand have me for half a second and then turned with it, spinning the way Ghost taught me, hips, not arms, use your enemy’s grip like a hinge.

My knee drove up into his gut, hard and low.

He grunted and folded; I caught his shoulder and shoved him into the concrete pillar so hard the candles rattled on their cheap altar.

The steel blade slid under his chin and pressed, just shy of puncturing. Close enough to let him feel the truth.

“I’m not yours,” I growled, voice low and lethal. “I never was.”

Blood slid down his neck, a crimson thread over Adam’s favorite color theory. He choked on nothing. The hand not pinned tried to find purchase on my arm and failed.

“I just wanted...” he wheezed.

“You wanted to own me.” I leaned in until he could see everything he’d misread in my eyes. “You watched. You plotted. You came into my home and stole my sleep and called it love.”

He whimpered. “They—They poisoned you.”

“You poison your own head,” I said, blade steady. “You did this to yourself.”

His eyes flicked past me, toward the door, toward escape that wasn’t coming. Good. Let him feel what it is to be small under someone else’s hand.

Outside, the low thrum of motorcycles grew louder, closer. It vibrated through the cinderblock, through my bones. Ghost. Reaper. The cavalry. But I didn’t step away.

Not yet.

Not until he saw it.

Because the woman he thought was soft?

She’d burned.

And now she was something he couldn’t ever touch again.

“On your knees,” I said.

He blinked, confused. Men like him don’t know what to do with orders that don’t sound like worship.

I dragged the blade just enough to make the point.

He sank, slow, hands lifting like surrender might buy him dignity.

It didn’t. I kicked the knife on his altar out of reach, and it clanged under the workbench.

“Hands behind your head,” I said. “Interlace your fingers.”

He obeyed, breath hitching.

“Now,” I added, sweet as venom, “say my name the way you said it outside my window.”

He swallowed. “Se—Selene.”

“Wrong,” I said softly. “You said it like a prayer. Try again.”

His eyes went shiny. “Selene,” he breathed, reverent and sick.

“Better. Remember that tone,” I said. “You’re going to need it later.”

I didn’t take the blade off his throat. With my free hand, I felt blindly behind me for the chair.

It wasn’t bolted, good and the nylon tie at my ankles had loosened when I doused it earlier.

I stepped back half a pace, used my knee to trap his shoulder in place against the pillar, and reached down, sawing the wet nylon until it sighed apart. My feet were free. My balance doubled.

Briggs licked his lips. “We can talk about this.”

“We are,” I said. “You talk. I listen. Then I decide.”

His chin wobbled against the blade. “You don’t want to be that person.”

I smiled, showing teeth. “You don’t get to define ‘that person’ for me.”

He tried a different angle, petty and familiar. “Ghost won’t like it.”

“Ghost will love me exactly like this,” I said, and the truth of it landed in my chest like a battle flag. “On your belly.”

“Selene—”

“Don’t make me say it twice.”

He hesitated. I pressed a fraction deeper. He eased down, cheek to concrete, hands behind his head like a suspect in a movie he thought he wasn’t acting in.

I slit the hem of my skirt to mid-thigh. The velvet sighed. I needed range more than aesthetics. I moved like I belonged in my own skin again.

I found the zip ties he’d used earlier on the table, grabbed two with one hand, and knelt without giving up blade position. “If you twitch,” I said conversationally, “I’ll make you sing soprano.”

He went still. I looped one tie around his wrists and yanked it tight until plastic bit. With the other, I cinched his ankles. He flinched at the second bite; I didn’t apologize.

When he was secured, I stepped back a pace, blade still ready, and took a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been stealing. Heat shook through me, delayed adrenaline, ugly and holy. I let it burn.

“Look at me,” I said.

He rolled his head so one eye could catch me. I let him see me: dress torn, thigh bare, blade steady, hair wild like smoke. Not broken. Not prey. Mine.

“Repeat after me,” I said. “I don’t love you.”

His mouth opened, closed. Obedience has grooves; he fell into them. “I… don’t love you.”

“I love the person I invented,” I said.

“I… love the person I invented.”

“She’s not me.”

“She’s not you.”

“She never will be,” I finished, and cut the ritual off with a flick of my wrist that sent a line of blood trickling a little faster under his jaw. He gasped. I held his gaze until he dropped it.

The door rattled, then stilled. A lock’s tiny surrender. A breath of colder air washed across the room and the candles stuttered, then found their burn again.

“Company,” I said, and the word wasn’t relief. It was punctuation.

Briggs twitched like he might try one last lunge. I put the toe of my boot on his wrist and the point of my blade against his ear.

“Think about it,” I whispered. “Is your last act on earth going to be sloppy?”

He stilled.

The door swung inward. Vex’s gloved fist popped the security light outside; it died like an omen. The blue door spilled shadow. Ghost came in low and left, a storm with a pulse, Reaper’s gravity right behind him, bones, and bad intentions in the doorway.

Ghost’s gun was up until he saw me. He froze, not with fear. With recalibration. He took in the blade in my hand, the man at my feet, the altar I’d already desecrated.

“You’re late,” I said, without taking my eyes off Briggs.

His mouth twitched. “Not the first time you’ve said that.”

“Won’t be the last if you keep stopping for coffee,” I said, and finally, finally let the blade ease away from Briggs’s throat.

Ghost holstered his weapon in one clean motion and crossed the room. He didn’t touch me first. He touched the back of my hand, the one holding the knife, his fingers closing warm over my knuckles for a single beat that said I see you. I know what you did. I approve.

Then he took my face in his palms and kissed me like I was everything, because I was. Because I am.

I let him. Not because I needed saving. Because I needed that mouth on mine to close the circle I’d drawn. Because victory tastes better shared.

“Hydration would help,” I said when we broke, and he huffed a sound that might’ve been a laugh if he weren’t halfway to murderous.

“On it,” Vex said brightly from somewhere, because of course Vex was the man to inventory water when violence was done.

Behind Ghost, Reaper dragged the jittery driver past the door like a cat with a mouse. Bones cuffed him to a pipe and started reciting a prayer that sounded like Miranda rights if Miranda had grown up in a bar.

I tossed the blade from one hand to the other and leaned down to Briggs again, casual as a woman at her vanity.

“You live or die on my timing,” I told him. “Not because you deserve either outcome. Because I choose.”

His throat worked. “Selene, I—”

“Don’t say my name again,” I said, and he didn’t. Obedience, groove, silence.

“Cross has the feed,” Ghost murmured in my hair, as much to me as to the air. “Petal in the motel sink. Briggs’s gloves. His phone. We’ve got him clean.”

“Good,” I said. “I want him remembered for truth, not myth.”

Briar’s voice crackled over the comm in someone’s ear, sarcasm lacquered over panic. “Tell me she’s breathing or I’m setting the parish on fire.”

“She’s breathing,” Ghost said.

I lifted my chin toward Vex. “Tell her I did the first part.”

Vex grinned around a zip tie between his teeth. “Oh, she’ll monogram a dagger for you.”

I tucked my knife back into my boot, re-tied the slit in my skirt with a quick knot, then reached up and plucked my little gold crown from where it had tangled near the altar. I hung it on the nail above the Lovers card with the black X over the man’s face and left it there like punctuation.

“Not his,” I said.

Ghost’s hand found the small of my back. “Never.”

Reaper’s eyes found mine, silent question, silent answer. He nodded once, almost a bow. Bones offered me a water bottle with the solemnity of communion. I drank, throat raw, and let the cold settle the shake in my hands.

Then I turned back to Briggs, because I wasn’t done with the part that mattered to me.

“Listen carefully,” I said. “You will tell Cross every detail. Every time you followed me. Every time you touched something that was mine. Every name you used for the van, the magnets, the gloves. You will not make poetry of it. You will not ask for forgiveness. You will not offer explanations. You will stick to facts, or I will come to your cell and teach you a vocabulary that includes silence.”

His eyes filled. “Will you… visit?”

“Only if the court allows knitting needles,” I said flatly, “and you don’t want that version of me.”

Vex made a choking sound that was definitely a laugh this time. Reaper didn’t smile, but the corner of his mouth did something that acknowledged my existence as someone who could scare him if we played the wrong game.

“Let’s go,” Ghost said, the heat easing out of him, replaced by the kind of calm that comes after you almost lose God and find her again. “You’re getting checked out.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Humor me,” he said, and the please in it was a whole language he didn’t say out loud.

I let him guide me toward the door, then paused. I bent, picked up the lipstick Briggs had stolen from my purse, and pocketed it. It was my favorite red. It looked better on me than on his altar.

At the threshold, I looked back one last time. The candles were guttering, smoke smearing the air, the shrine a sad, cheap thing once you took the horror out of it. Briggs looked small. Not helpless. Small. I wanted to remember him that way, not like a shadow.

I lifted two fingers in a mock benediction. “I forgive you nothing,” I said.

Then I stepped into the night.

The cold hit my cheeks like truth. The bikes shivered in the lot like big cats. The sky was a bruise that would fade. Ghost’s hand settled at my waist again, quiet, sure. He didn’t ask if I needed to be carried. I didn’t pretend I hadn’t just rewritten the ending myself.

Back at the clubhouse, Briar would throw her arms around me and cuss me out for scaring her, then hold me so tight my ribs creaked.

Cross would hand me tea I didn’t want and ask for details I didn’t want to give, and I’d give them anyway because we close loops here.

Reaper would stand in a doorway and not speak for a long time, and when he did, he’d say, “Good,” like a man saying grace.

And me?

I’d wash my hands. I’d sleep when I could. I’d wear red whenever I felt like it.

Not because I was sad.

Because it looks like war paint on me.

Because I chose it.