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“But mostly you.”

“That is not helping your case.”

Willow grinned and picked her phone back up. “Well, since we’ve confirmed your identity, go ahead and hit Buy Now before the delivery date changes.”

Willow went back to sorting decorations, but every few seconds, I caught her looking at me, then toward the staircase, then back at me as though she knew something had happened upstairs and was simply waiting for me to decide when I was ready to tell her.

After I paid for items on Amazon, I opened a box and still decided to help her, smiling to myself.

For once, I had something I wasn’t ready to share.

Not yet.

Not until Halloween.

Chapter twenty-five

Caspian

Halloween

Tonight.

After six years, tonight was finally the night.

The mothafuckas who thought they had gotten away with taking my life were about to find out just how wrong they were.

I stood in my bedroom, looking at the black suit hanging near the closet. It was freshly pressed, tailored, expensive as hell, and exactly the way I liked my shit.

I had never been so ready to attend a damn party in my life, and not even for the reason a normal person would want to go to a Halloween party.

Lakelyn and Willow had been gone most of the afternoon handling last-minute shit for the party, leaving the mansion quieter than it had been in days. Neither one of them could see me moving around upstairs anyway, and they damn sure couldn’t see the suit or anything else connected to my spirit form, so I wasn’t worried about getting caught. I was just glad to have a little peace while I got my head right for everything that was about to happen.

More than anything, I was still satisfied that I had managed to get Lakelyn to agree to come at all.

A week before, she had been dead set against it. I understood why, though. Halloween carried too much weight for her, too many memories of me, too much of that night she had spent waiting for a man who never showed up. I knew getting her to change her mind wouldn’t be easy, which was exactly why I had made sure she found that dress, those roses, and the invitation. I needed her there, and not because I wanted her at some damn party, but because after six years, I was finally about to give her the truth she had been owed all this time.

“Miss Veda,” I called out.

I waited, but nothing happened.

I looked toward the ceiling. “Miss Veda!” I yelled a little louder.

A few seconds later, the old woman’s voice filled the room. “Boy, what the hell you hollering for?”

She stood next to the window, dressed in a long purple robe with a matching scarf wrapped around her head. Her arms were crossed like coming to me had interrupted a much better part of her afterlife and she was already calculating how much aggravation I was about to cost her.

I laughed. “I been calling you.”

“And I heard you the first damn time. You know you ain’t the only dead person I service, right? I got other spirits needing help too.” She rolled her eyes. “I swear, I need to figure out how to start charging y’all or set up some damn appointments. At least when I was alive, folks had the decency to put money in my hand before they started asking me to fix their problems. Now I’m dead and somehow working overtime for free. Ain’t that some shit?”

Miss Veda noticed the suit, letting her eyes travel over it before bringing her attention back to me.

“Well, look at you. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were about to get married and forgot to send me an invitation,” she joked.

“Nah… not a wedding. Something a little more important. Tonight, I’m taking my life back.”

Her smile slowly faded.