Page 11 of A Witchy Spell Ride

And I was ready to wait.

Chapter Five

Selene

The dream clung to me like smoke.

Thick. Sweet. Suffocating.

A man’s hand on my back. Heat at my throat. His voice low, rough, whispering things I can’t remember when I wake, but that makes my skin flush all the same.

Love spell.

Damn that witch and her velvet grin.

I sit up slowly in bed, heart thudding against my ribs like it wanted out. The charm she’d given me, the one wrapped in red thread, had fallen to the floor. Or maybe it was placed there. I don’t remember knocking it off. But there it is, in the center of the rug, almost like it had been laid there.

Deliberately.

I rub a hand over my face. It was probably nothing.

It was always probably nothing, until it wasn’t.

“Something’s off,” Briar says twenty minutes later, standing in my kitchen like she lives here. She is wearing one of my hoodies, shorts, and socks with glittery bats on them. She looks like chaos and comfort rolled into one.

“Morning to you, too,” I mumble, pushing past her to get to the coffee.

“I’m serious.”

“Do you want sugar or just raw panic in your mug?”

She doesn’t laugh.

That makes me pause. Briar is always laughing. Even in a thunderstorm. Especially in a thunderstorm. If the world ended tomorrow, she’d make a joke about finally skipping jury duty.

I turn. “What’s wrong?”

She gestures around the apartment. “That.”

I blink. “What that?”

“The shelf. The little green vase you keep next to the tarot deck. It’s on the left side now.”

My stomach dips. “So, I moved it.”

“You didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

She raises both brows. “Because I made you clean this place two days ago, remember? And you screamed at me for touching your sacred aesthetic flow.”

I wince. “God, I say the dumbest shit when I’m angry.”

Briar doesn’t let up. “You didn’t move that vase. And your charm was on the floor.”

I open my mouth to argue and stop. Because she was right.

I hadn’t moved that vase.