Page 74 of A Witchy Spell Ride

“Tomorrow, we control the room,” I corrected. “You’ll be center, and I’ll be a step off your left. If he shows, we’re ready. If he doesn’t, we still win because you danced in your own damn house.”

“Ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“If he tries to take this from me again…”

“He won’t,” I said, with the certainty of a man who’d already decided the shape of the world he’d allow. “Not while I breathe.”

She nodded and settled again, cheek to my chest, hand in the center of me like she’d staked a flag. I turned my head and looked at the mirror one last time. It threw back two people I recognized and one I was just getting to know: the man I’d been, the man I was with her, and the man I could be if she kept letting me prove it.

Her breaths turned slow and even. I stared at the ceiling and let the plan for tomorrow slot into place: Cross on the feeds, Reaper at the door, Bones floating, Vex smiling mean, Briar sparking in all directions like a glitter fuse. Me, the tide. Selene, the center.

The note she’d brought me earlier “He kissed you. But I know you better.” still smoldered in my trash can, half-ash, half-threat. I watched the last ember go dull. Let the anger settle into something I could use.

In the quiet, she stirred and murmured my name, a soft sound like a password.

“I’m here,” I said.

She relaxed again, and that was the victory I’d take into the next fight: not that I’d touched her, not that she’d taken me, but that the part of her that refused to sleep finally trusted the darkness enough to rest. I pressed my mouth to her hair and breathed in sage and heat and something that smelled like home I hadn’t had before.

“Mine,” I whispered into the curve of her shoulder.

Not a brand. A bond.

Outside, the clubhouse moved, boots in the hall, a laugh cut short, Briar’s low whistle, the ice bucket getting refilled because Daisy forgot again. Normal, which meant everything, because normal is what he’d tried to steal.

I felt Selene’s smile against my chest, a lazy curve. “Yours,” she said, not submitting, choosing.

The night held. The plan held.

And when the mirror caught us drifting, it didn’t show a woman haunted and a man hunting.

It showed two people done being written by anyone else.

Chapter Twenty

Selene

I didn’t wake up scared.

Not this time.

I woke up warm. Held. Centered. Ghost’s arm was draped over my waist, his breath soft against my shoulder, his body wrapped around mine like armor. The sheets smelled like sex and leather and cinnamon bourbon, and I didn’t want to leave them.

But I did.

Because I wasn’t hiding anymore.

I slid out from under his arm with the kind of care you use when you want to keep something, tugged on one of Ghost’s shirts because of course he slept shirtless and had zero interest in pajamas, and padded barefoot to the door.

It was early. Pale light slipped through the blinds; the clubhouse had that half-awake hush. Somewhere in the kitchen, a fridge hummed, and a spoon clinked against a mug. Farther off, the garage thumped faintly with Bones’s playlist, classic rock that sounded like an oil stain.

I pulled the door open.

And froze.

Not because I was scared.