Page 39 of A Witchy Spell Ride

I frowned. “You’re turning me into a spreadsheet.”

“Spreadsheets save lives,” Briar chirped. Then, more serious: “He’s counting on you feeling alone. We’re going to make you feel annoyed instead.”

Against my will, I smiled. It didn’t last.

Ghost moved a fraction closer, enough that his shoulder brushed mine when he turned. “Decoy walk tonight,” he said. “Same jacket, hair up, hood. Briar runs point as a false Selene. We cover from three angles, catch the follower if he bites.”

“Irun point?” Briar echoed.

Reaper glared. “No.”

“Yes,” Ghost and Briar said together, like they’d rehearsed it.

“She’s the only one he’ll accept as your shadow without blinking,” Ghost said. “A club girl in your clothes reads wrong. Briar reads right.”

Reaper and Briar locked eyes. Her chin tilted; his jaw did that tick that means he’s two seconds from swearing. He looked at me. “You sign off on this?”

I hated that I had to. I hated that I didn’t want to be left behind either. “I sign off,” I said. “On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“I’m in the car. Close.” The words surprised me as I said them, but they felt true. “I won’t sit in a basement while everyone else plays chess with my life.”

Reaper’s mouth flattened. Ghost’s gaze flicked to me, unreadable. Cross’s pen paused over paper. Briar grinned like she’d been waiting for me to say it.

Reaper exhaled. “You don’t step out.”

“Unless I decide to,” I said before I could stop myself.

His eyes went glacial. “Try me.”

I shut my mouth. I wasn’t stupid.

Bones clapped his hands once. “Okay then. Boss lady in the car, fake boss lady on the sidewalk, shadows in the shadows. What could go wrong.”

“Plenty,” Ghost said, not smiling. “Which is why we control the field. We choose streets with long sightlines. No Mardi Gras crowds. We stay away from glass reflections that give away positions.”

Cross nodded, already sketching a tiny map in the margin of his notes. “Take Governor Nicholls to the river. Circle back on Chartres. Blind corners minimal. Good lamplight. Two exits at every block.”

Reaper looked like he wanted to veto the whole plan on principle. Instead, he said, “You get one mistake. Make it small.”

Briar saluted him with two fingers and then promptly stole his pen to draw a tiny bat in the corner of Cross’s map. “For luck,” she said. Cross didn’t look up, but his mouth twitched.

I felt the shop change as the plan settled. Fear stopped being a fog and became a vector, arrows on a page. It didn’t make me less scared. It made the fear useful.

“Go upstairs,” Reaper told me. “Pack for two nights.”

I bristled. “I have a bag ready.”

He stared. “Of course you do.”

Briar leaned in as I passed. “Good girl.”

“Shut up,” I muttered, and she bumped my hip with hers, soft.

Upstairs, my apartment felt smaller. I checked the bathroom window again, pointless, and the closet, also pointless. The red-thread charm sat where I’d left it; the box with the photo might as well have been a live wire in the drawer. I didn’t open it. Notnow. Not with everyone below me building a net with my name stitched into it.

I added two more knives to the bag, a spare phone charger, the little tin with the red-thread bottle sealed inside. I paused at the mirror and looked myself full in the face, the dark circles, the set jaw, the way fear had sharpened me. Then I blew out a breath and went back down.