Page 93 of A Witchy Spell Ride

The church bells in the Quarter rang out seven and people started to arrive. Costumes. Leather. Too much perfume. The beat from the band lifted the room into a single animal. I took my corner where I could see the door, the bar, the back hall, and—most importantly—her.

Selene didn’t shrink. She didn’t peacock. She existed like a fixed point and let the room rotate. Briar hovered a step off, laughing too loud at a joke on purpose just as Cross told me in my ear, “White van in the lot. Plate borrowed. Driver stays put.”

“Copy,” I said. “Eyes on the back.”

“Green,” Reaper murmured.

Bones drifted. Vex smiled his mean smile at a guy who didn’t understand he should leave. Ash counted teeth at the door, silent math.

At 9:12, Cross said, “Entrance. Cap. Beard trimmed. Hoodie new. He’s smarter tonight.”

I didn’t turn. I saw him in the reflection off the bar mirror and the window of a frame on the wall: Adam Lane or whoever he was this week. He paused on the threshold the way he had in the shop. Scanned the ceiling corners without looking like he was scanning. Too normal, like he’d practiced normal in a mirror and gotten a passing grade.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at Selene.

I moved one step, not enough for a crowd, everything for a hunter.

He crossed the room in a path that avoided eyes and landed in front of her like he’d arrived at a destination promised to him. Briar turned slightly so his angle narrowed. Selene didn’t move. She met his gaze like she was measuring a fabric she wasn’t going to buy.

“Selene,” he said, and his voice had that fake softness, cashmere covering a chain. “You look—”

She tilted her head. “Don’t finish that sentence.”

He blinked, that half-second hitch of a man who can’t believe his script got interrupted. “I just wanted—”

“You wanted ownership,” she said. Calm. Clear. “You can’t afford me.”

I felt his anger hit the air before he showed it on his face. It’s a temperature shift. You learn to read it if you’ve lived long enough with monsters. He masked it with a smile and shifted his weight like he might reach, and that was my cue.

I took the inch between them.

“Problem?” I asked, pleasant.

He looked at me properly then. Really looked. Saw the man he’d tried to crop out of his story. “We’re just talking,” he said, hands opening like that made him harmless.

“Good,” I said. “Now you’re done.”

He flicked his eyes to Selene for backup he wasn’t getting, then back to me, then to the room where Reaper’s gravity had pulled three more bodies into place without any of us seeming to move.

He smiled again, and I admired how he kept going, delusion as discipline. “You think you’re saving her,” he said. “You’re ruining her.”

“I don’t save,” I said. “I stand next to.” I dipped my head closer, voice low enough for him alone. “And I ruin men who try to take what isn’t theirs.”

He swallowed. His throat bobbed once. He leaned in a fraction like he wanted to say something intimate, and I let him because Cross said in my ear, camera full, and we wanted his mouth on record.

“You’re poison,” he whispered.

“Then die slow,” I said back, still pleasant.

He laughed, high and ugly, and tried to step around me.

He didn’t get far. Vex arrived behind him like a joke with teeth. Bones drifted to his left, Thorne to his right, Briar adjusting her hood like a saint of bad ideas. The band lifted the volume right then; Cross’s cue and the crowd shifted like water.

Adam raised both hands, palms out. “You can’t keep me from a public place,” he said, louder now, looking for a sympathetic audience that wasn’t there.

“We can,” Reaper said from behind me, the room’s temperature dropping five degrees. “And we will.”

Adam’s gaze ticked again to Selene, desperate now, like if he could just get her to say his name the spell would reset. She didn’t. She looked bored.