Page 122 of A Witchy Spell Ride

“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 saidI 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.