Page 68 of A Witchy Spell Ride

He stared at me, a good liar who’d just learned he’d been talking to a better one.

“Who helped you,” I said.

He looked proud. “No one. Fate.”

I hit the tendon again and his pride died.

“Names,” I said.

His mouth opened. Closed. Broke.

He gave me a landlord. A cousin. A kid at the bodega who loaded prepaid cards for cash. He didn’t give me anyone in our walls. Good. I don’t like killing my own.

When we were done, I stepped out and left him to Reaper’s shape of mercy and Bones’s shape of memory. Vex scrubbed his hands like he’d been chopping garlic.

Selene stood in the shadow of the bar, her breath level, her body quiet, her eyes bright and terrible. I went to her and didn’t touch her, and she touched me first, two fingers at my wrist, right where my pulse ran.

“Done?” she asked.

“Soon,” I said, and the word didn’t taste like a lie this time.

She exhaled and gave me something that wasn’t a smile and wasn’t not. “Good,” she said. “Because I have a party to survive.”

I looked down at her, at the line of her jaw, at the new haircut that made her look like a blade. I looked at the room that belonged to her because she decided it did. I looked at the door we’d just taken a man through and the corridor where we’d carry him back out into whatever the law or our version of it looked like tonight.

“Stay with me,” I said.

“I am,” she said, and it sounded like a vow.

I took her back into the room and the music swallowed us. The band rolled into something dirty and joyful. Briar glittered like a dangerous constellation. Cross texted me uploading and backup and redundancy because he has romance in his own language. Reaper came to stand where he could see the door and his sister and me and the future.

And for the first time in too many nights, the drum in my chest that had been warning finally adjusted its rhythm.

Not quiet.

Never quiet.

Just… ours.

Chapter Eighteen

Selene

I couldn’t stop touching my lips.

It was stupid, I know. But they still tingled. Still held the weight of him, of that moment, like it was burned into my skin.

Ghost kissed like a man who’d been holding back for years. Like someone who’d wanted something too long and finally gave himself permission to feel it.

And when he kissed me…

God help me, I felt everything.

Desire.

Relief.

Rage.