Page 28 of A Witchy Spell Ride

She smirked. Then sobered. “We have three working theories. One: Banks. Possessive, inexperienced, eager, with too much time and too little sense. Two: random nut job who latched onto you because you’re pretty and you smile at vendors, which you will stop doing. Three: someone from the past, which opens the whole blood-and-bourbon Rolodex.”

“Four,” I said, voice thin. “Someone who thinks the spell made me his.”

Briar didn’t blink. “Magic doesn’t absolve monsters,” she said. “It just gives them new excuses.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I rubbed the heel of my hand over the ache between my eyes. “It felt like a message. Not to scare me. To claim me.”

“People like this don’t understand the difference.” She reached across the table and squeezed my fingers. “We are going to get ahead of him, Selene. But you have to let me call in help.”

“Not Reaper.”

“Not Reaper,” she agreed. “Yet.”

I waited for the name I knew she’d say next.

She didn’t make me ask for it.

“Ghost.”

The room felt smaller when she said it. The lights seemed brighter. My breath sat wrong in my chest.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to. I will.”

“He’ll tell Reaper.”

“He won’t if I frame it as a favor, not a threat.” She held my gaze. “You can hate me later. I’ll take it. But I’m not letting you stand here with a rose and a note and a target on your back because you’re being brave.”

“It’s not about brave.”

“I know what it’s about.” Her voice gentled. “I know you want to choose your own war. Ghost doesn’t take that away. He just makes sure you have time to choose.”

I closed my eyes because she was right, and I hated that she was right.

“Give me tonight,” I said. “Just tonight. We set the traps. We reset the shop in the morning. If anything, else happens, you call him.”

“Deal,” she said without hesitation. “But my definition of ‘anything else’ is broad.”

“I figured.”

We ate. I didn’t mean to. But the garlic did its work, and so did the way Briar kept the conversation on safe ground long enough to let my nerves stop buzzing. We talked about meaningless things, the way Cross kept pretending he didn’t like her weird horror podcast, how Bones swore he could hear a mouse in the garage, and everyone told him he was haunted, how Vex bought a candle and pretended he didn’t.

Later, we turned her apartment into a trap masquerading as a living room. Fishing line at ankle height. Bells on doors. Flour dusted lightly across the doormat to catch a footprint. A glass balanced on the front knob. An empty wine bottle perched on the back handle. Cheap tricks. Old tricks. They worked because people underestimated them.

I took the couch. Briar took the floor. She insisted the floor was her “kingdom.” We slept in shifts. When it was my turn to lie awake, I listened to the city’s pulse through glass and brick, counted the breaths between cars, cataloged every creak.

At 3:12, I sat up. Not because anything had happened. Because the kind of silence that presses a hand over your mouth crawled across my skin.

“Briar,” I whispered.

“I’m awake,” she whispered back without opening her eyes. “Any bells?”

“No.”