The Taking (Seven Deadly Sins #3)(66)
Author: Erin McCarthy

But then she saw the satisfaction on Beau’s face and she snatched her hand back.

He thought he had won.

But he hadn’t.

The ring was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Just an ordinary key chain again, holding his car key.

“Just think about it,” he told her. “It’s best for everyone, really.”

Beau kissed the top of her head, his lips warm and hard against her skin, and Regan stumbled backward, not bothering to answer. Whirling around, she turned and ran back to Chris’s house, exerting more energy and speed than she had in weeks as she ate up the distance. Within a minute she was pounding up the steps of the front porch and slamming the door shut behind her.

“Chris! I need a ride to Felix’s!”

The pain was different this time. Instead of being random, a lightning strike of torment he could never anticipate, this time the pain was constant. An endless, ever present barrage of agony, from the roots of his hair to the ends of his toenails.

He was in a rack, being stretched so taut he was surprised he was still in one piece.Maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe this time Alcroft had taken away his immortality and he was in death, in Hell, being punished for his many, many sins.

“Felix!”

The voice penetrated the fog of his pain and his incoherent thoughts, and Felix blinked, trying to find focus, a glimmer of light to break through the darkness and allow him to see his hallucination. In Hell or merely hanging in insanity, Felix had heard Regan’s voice, and he wanted to see her beautiful face just one last time.

But no matter how hard he strained, there was nothing but darkness.

“Oh my God!” Regan came grinding to a halt in the doorway of Felix’s bedroom, stunned at the horror of what she was seeing.

Chris crashed into her back. “Why are you stopping—”His voice changed to a shocked whisper as he looked up and saw what she did. “Holy Jesus. What the hell am I looking at?”

“I don’t know.” Regan swallowed hard, fighting back the bile that had shot up her throat. She wanted to step forward but her feet seemed to have turned to stone at the sight of Felix, hanging suspended in the air, arms and legs drawn out like he was being pulled in four different directions.

There was nothing holding him at all. He was just … there. His eyes were open, but he stared at the floor, and he definitely didn’t see her, didn’t react to her presence. The only way she was certain he was even alive was because she could see his chest rising up and down rapidly, though he made no sound. Moisture and blood stained his bare chest, and his jeans were dark to the knees, wrung with sweat. His dangling feet were covered in crusted blood, and a glance up showed his fingers were the same.

That’s when she realized his nails had been ripped out.

Regan clapped her hand over her mouth and fought the urge to throw up. There was no time for sickness, no time for weakness, no time to debate why none of this was logical in the world as she had known it. It was real and that was all she needed to know.

Felix had told her the truth about him, Beau, Camille, and that meant that everything he had felt for her, the entirety of their relationship, had been real. This was the man she wanted to be with, regardless of what he had done in the past.

That gave her the courage to step forward and circle around the front of him, trying to assess what she was looking at. It was an invisible torture device of some kind, but the question was, how did she get him out of it?

“Felix!” she said, willing him to react. She needed to know he was still in there, needed him to guide her, to explain how she was supposed to free him from this binding.

Maybe it would be as simple as removing the binding rings they’d both worn. Felix had pulled hers off, and she had slipped his off with no impediment. Maybe if she just pulled him down it would break the invisible chains holding him.

Regan stepped forward. A second later she was lying on her back on the floor, almost back in the doorway. She blinked, struggling to suck in some breath, the wind knocked clean out of her, with no idea how she had shot through the air so quickly she couldn’t even remember moving.

“Regan?” Chris’s worried face popped up in front of her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, dizzy, a gnawing knot of nausea in her stomach. But nothing hurt, and she forced herself to sit up. “Yeah, I’m fine. What the hell just happened?”

“You reached out, and bam, you shot backwards like you’d taken a cannonball in the gut.” He reached out his hand to help her up. “Re, this is serious shit” His voice was a shaky whisper. “I don’t think we can handle this ourselves. I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”

Regan dragged herself to her feet, fighting to clear the dizziness. “We don’t have time to get anyone. And who exactly would we get?”

She moved toward Felix again, fear being replaced by the agony of seeing him so clearly in pain. It was devastating to imagine how he was suffering, and she would help him, somehow, some way. “Go downstairs into the shop. It should be unlocked from the back. Find a book of spells. There has to be something in there about breaking someone free … I think it’s called uncrossing a spell.”

Chris didn’t move and Regan looked back at him. He was just staring at Felix.

“Chris! Go downstairs.”

He blinked and shook his head. “Right. Sorry. It’s just … it’s like, how can that be real? How is that even possible? But it is and I’m going right now to find a book. Uncrossing. Got it.” He put his hands out and repeated the words several times as he left the room.

Regan circled Felix, murmuring, “It’s okay. We’re going to get you out of this somehow. I’m here.” She wanted to touch him, wanted to stroke her hands across his blood-stained face and reassure him, ease his pain somehow. But she knew if she reached out, she would get slammed to the ground again.

“I love you,” she told him, moving all around him in a slow circle, too agitated to stand still. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I had no faith in what I couldn’t see. You mentioned once that I try hard to be perfect for everyone, to please everyone but myself, and you were right. I try to be perfect because I’m afraid that if I’m just me, it’s not good enough. That no one will love me.”

That was her legacy of being the child who survived, she knew that. And it was a pattern she wanted to break, a limitation she didn’t want to place on herself.

“But you do, don’t you? You love me just the way I am, and I didn’t believe in that. When you told me the truth about who you are, it was like confirmation to me that if you were making up a crazy story about immortality, everything else you said and did was suspect too. That you couldn’t possibly just love me, flaws and all, unless you were crazy. My fears, made real.”