Page 80 of A Witchy Spell Ride

“No,” I said. “Go anyway.”

He held my gaze. “Good.”

On my way into the main room, I passed the hallway camera. I paused, looked up again, and let the lens take me in. Not a taunt, not a plea. A notice.

You wanted to see me. See me.

The music kicked. The door opened. The night began to do what nights do: stretch, test, reveal.

I felt the petal ghost in my fist again, felt the crush and the decision hidden inside it, and walked into my own party like I owned it.

Because I did.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ghost

Cross sent the footage to my phone while I was stripping down one of the garage bikes, a rebuilt chopper we’d been patching since Thorne laid it down last spring. The frame was a quilt of old decisions and new welds, stubborn in the way machines get when they know you’re not going to give up on them.

Message came through at 9:04 a.m. sharp.

No words. Just the file.

I thumbed it open without thinking.

Then stopped cold.

Selene.

Standing outside my room.

Hair messy. One of my shirts hanging off her like sin. Barefoot and proud.

She bent, picked up the rose petal, held it like a knife in disguise. Then she looked directly into the camera lens tucked up in the corner where Cross likes to play God and spoke.

“Get ready,” she said. “Because I’m not scared anymore.”

And I swear to God, I felt my heart break and rebuild in the same breath.

She wasn’t hiding.

She was rising.

And it was the sexiest goddamn thing I’d ever seen.

I played it again. And again. Until the file burned into my brain like a war cry.

That’s my girl.

Mine.

And nobody, not some punk with a camera, not some stalker with twisted fantasies, was going to take that fire from her.

“Something good?” Bones asked from under a different bike, boots sticking out like a crime scene.

“Yeah,” I said, pocketing the phone. “Something good.”

He slid out, grease stripe on his cheek like a badge. “You look like a man who just remembered why he likes breathing.”