Page 17 of A Witchy Spell Ride

He swallows. “I wasn’t—”

“Don’t lie.”

He closes his eyes, then opens them. “I was just—”

“Don’t.”

He exhales, “I’m not the bad guy here.”

“Good guys don’t need to say it.”

His jaw set. “You don’t know me.”

“I know enough. If you’re smart, you’ll stick to the garage and the bar, and the list Reaper hands you. If you’re stupid, you’ll keep making yourself a pattern.”

“Selene isn’t—” He cuts himself off, but the word he doesn’t say hangs there anyway. Ours. Mine. Whatever possession sounds like in a man who’s never earned anything from a woman but a look.

“Not yours,” I say, voice flat enough to cut. “Not mine either. That’s not the point. The point is you won’t like what happens if I catch you where you don’t belong again.”

He flushes with anger or humiliation; they look the same at that age. “You gonna jump me behind a planter, old man?”

I smile without humor. “I’m not gonna do anything. I’m going to let you do it to yourself.” I let the words sit, then step back so he could feel the distance. “Be invisible in all the right places, Prospect. That’s how you live long enough to patch.

Back at the bench, Briar tells a story with her hands and Selene tips her head back and laughs, the sound small and real. It hits me weird, like relief and ache in the same breath. There are men who mistake that sound for invitation. I knew better. Laughter is armor for women like her. If you can make her laugh, you can make her forget fear long enough to choose the next move.

They head home just before full dark. I take the long route to check my telltales. Back door hair intact. Chalk line unbroken. I set one more, a tiny smear of grease on the underside of the window latch, a ghost of a print only I would check. The city’s music softens, then shifts to something with bones.

At 01:06, I wake from a crouch with my neck screaming and knew I’d slept because the hair at the door was broken.

Not a clean break. A smear. Someone had brushed it with clothes. I move to the alley wall and listen. No movement. No voices. I crouch by the hinge and saw the chalk disturbed like someone had tested the door but not opened it. A test can be worse than an entry; it means patience.

I text. Reaper: “Probe.”

He: “Who?”

I: “No eyes.”

He: “Ghost.”

I: “I’m on it.”

I stand in the alley and let the drum in my chest find a meter I could use. I thought of Fallujah. I thought of the last op, the smell of cordite, the way a briefing read like a prayer until the wrong man said amen. I remind myself that patience is a weapon. You hold it until the other guy thinks you dropped it.

Sun bleeds into the sky slowly the next morning, and I was still here. Someone had to be. Selene comes down for trash with her hair in a knot and a shirt that said BUY YOUR OWN CRYSTALS. She looks tired. She sets the bag down, props the door open with her hip, and bends to brush something off the threshold, a fine hair she didn’t know she’d disturbed. She frowns at it like it had insulted her, then sweeps it away with her foot.

“Don’t worry,” I say to the empty air, a habit I’d never break. “I’ll set another.”

I wait until she’s upstairs again and replace it. New hair. New chalk. I wedge a sliver of mirror under the eave to catch a face if someone leaned too close. Low-tech is best. It doesn’t crash.

By noon I’ve logged three more passes of the sedan over two days, none lingering long enough to convert suspicion into action. I’ve noted Briggs twice, never close enough to accuse, always close enough to remember. I’ve pushed Banks back intohis lane. I’ve watched Briar bait Reaper with a smile that said she knew exactly what she was doing and a heart that would do it anyway.

And I’d watched Selene breathe through it all.

The job said stay cold.

The man said stay close.

The man won.