Page 102 of A Witchy Spell Ride

It was cold.

But I wasn’t scared.

I was focused.

My mind was clear in that way it gets when the world narrows to two things: you, and the choice you make next. This wasn’t some stranger who took a wrong turn into nightmare. This was someone who’d watched me for weeks. Who knew my patterns. My routines.

This was personal.

And I knew something else now, too:

It wasn’t Adam.

Not the dating app prophet with the fake name and real vacancy.

This?

This was someone closer.

Footsteps creaked behind me. Wood grain complaint over concrete quiet. Not heavy. Measured. The kind of walk men practice when they want to look like they’re not hurrying toward the thing they can’t wait to touch.

I didn’t look.

Not yet.

Let him think I was foggy. Let him talk.

“Did you like the card?”

That voice.

Familiar in the way a background hum is familiar, there long enough that your brain taught itself to ignore it. The hair along my arms lifted like a forest waking.

I turned my head, slow. Took him in like evidence.

Briggs.

A hangaround. Always in the periphery, running errands, fixing ice machines that refuse to fix, hauling crates from Cross’s van like a man who understands leverage. The kind of man you don’t bother learning the last name of because he never seems important enough to keep.

Average height. Average everything. The face of a man you hand change to and forget before the next step.

Nobody paid him much attention.

That was the point.

Right now, he looked like a magician playing priest. Grinning behind a makeshift altar of candles, Polaroids, and little thefts that turned my stomach. My lipstick, the shade Briar calls Homicide, rolled on its side. A broken keychain from my purse. A copy ofThe Loverstarot card with the man’s face scratched out in jagged black like a wound that wouldn’t heal. And Ghost—his face cut from a flyer, X’ed out with a fury that had dented the paper.

“You were never supposed to be with him,” Briggs said softly, as if we were having a conversation in a kitchen at three a.m. “He doesn’t see you the way I do.”

I kept my face calm. I kept my voice flat. “My brother’s going to kill you.”

“No, he won’t,” he said, stepping closer. “Because I’m going to make you see. I’m going to fix this. Once you stop letting them poison you… you’ll remember.”

“I don’t even know you.”

That made him flinch. A small, human crack. Good. Cracks widen.

“I’m the one who leaves the notes,” he said quickly, patching his own hole with words. “The roses. I followed you home, Selene. I watched you before he ever came back.”