Page 114 of A Witchy Spell Ride

“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 withthem.”

“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 youme.”

“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. Reaperwould 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.