Page 67 of A Witchy Spell Ride

She moved without questioning, cutting through the crowd like water. I followed the wake she made, the parting, the exhale of bodies that recognized a current.

He came in at 9:23.

Not through the door. He slipped with a group, someone’s cousin wearing a cape, two hangarounds too high to notice another shadow. He was shorter than I remembered, or maybe the room was just tall. He didn’t look at Selene first. He looked at me. And that told me everything I needed to know about the story in his head.

I didn’t let my expression change. I angled my body like a man boxing out a corner.

He shifted left, testing. I moved left. He shifted right. I shifted right. He smiled, a small private thing. He wanted a dance. I gave him a choreography he hadn’t rehearsed.

“Office,” Cross murmured. “I’ll have his entry full on camera in ten, nine, eight—”

“Got him,” Reaper said, voice a knife slipping through cloth.

Selene’s fingers brushed the bar three inches from mine. She didn’t look up. Her body was still except for the pulse in her throat. She was not prey. She was a fuse.

Adam Lane—Elliot—whatever the hell his mother named him, stepped closer than two feet from Selene and stopped. The room seemed to contract around that lack of space.

“Now,” Reaper said.

It happened fast and slow at once. Bones came from the side and folded the man’s elbow with a polite cruelty that made noise bloom behind us. Vex’s hand landed on the back of the man’s neck, friendly as a bartender, immovable as a vise. I stepped into the open inch and took his wrist like we were old friends, and this was a reunion.

“Walk,” I said.

He looked at Selene, not me. “You don’t have to be scared,” he told her, voice soft, and I felt her flinch like she’d been kissed by a dead mouth.

“She’s not,” I said. “I am.”

I turned his wrist, and he followed the pain like a leash. We moved through bodies that pretended not to see because the music lifted exactly then, because Reaper had told the band to lift exactly then. Cross’s camera caught everything exactly then because he lived to be infuriating.

In the corridor, the noise died. Two doors. One locked. One open. We took the open.

The office held nothing but a table and the weight of choices.

He finally looked at me. Really looked. Saw the thing he’d been photographing without understanding. I saw the thing I’d been hunting, not a monster, not a genius. A man with a hole where a self should be.

“You’ll thank me,” he said, almost gentle.

I smiled like a wolf with good manners. “You first.”

He lunged. Of course he did. He went for the throat that wasn’t mine, the door, the distance, the idea of her. Bones stepped into him like a wall. Vex closed the door with a soft click.

Reaper’s voice was quiet behind me. “Alive.”

“I heard you,” I said.

I didn’t break his thumb this time. I took his palm and pressed until I felt the distinct shoulder of the scaphoid roll. He went white. He sat.

“You went into her home,” I said. “How many times.”

He swallowed. “Enough to know she needs help.”

“How many,” I repeated.

“Three.”

“Liar,” Cross said through the speaker in my ear, and God bless him, I loved him then like a brother. “Four by Wi-Fi scans. Five by motion at door cracks. Seven by the dust I found on the hinge.”

“Seven,” I said.