“Stay away from her,” Alcroft said. “I’ll show you no mercy, and trust me it won’t be worth it. She’s terrible in bed. It’s like f**king a blow-up doll.”
Charming and sensitive as always. And Felix didn’t believe for one second that Regan would disappoint in the bedroom. More likely Alcroft didn’t know how to coax pleasure from her. Whereas Felix knew he could. Knew he would. “Then why do you want to stay married to her?”
“Who said I did?” Alcroft tilted his head, a smile turning up the corner of his mouth. “So what do you think of Regan buying Camille’s old house? Great memories there for you, huh?”
He’d been waiting for Alcroft to bring that up. “I find it an amazing coincidence.”
“It’s no coincidence,” Alcroft said, picking up a paper-weight off his desk. He turned it in his hand, over and over, then lifted it up high. The crystal sculpture had turned into an opaque image of Camille‘s—Regan’s—house. “I’ve always liked that house. Such a pretty balcony, isn’t it?”
The words were soft-spoken, innocuous, but Felix heard the warning. He wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but it was a threat, to Regan, and the cold fissure of fear trickled up his spine. “What are you doing?”
Alcroft tossed the miniature house into the air, and when it landed in his palm, it was just a crystal rock again. “What? Nothing. Nothing at all.” He smiled. “Just remember that while I’m not nearly as fond of Regan as I was of Camille, I still don’t want to hear that you laid one of your filthy fingers on her. Not now, and especially not later.”
Felix didn’t understand what the game was, but he knew one was in play, and Regan was nothing more than a poker chip to Alcroft.
“You may own me and my filthy fingers.” Felix held up his hands, flashing the silver binding ring he wore. “But you don’t own Regan anymore.”
“I own everything,” Alcroft told him, his eyes glowing the amber hue of his hatred. “Never forget that.”
Not waiting to be dismissed, Felix said nothing, just turned and left.
For the first time in a hundred years he realized that while Alcroft owned his actions, his money, and his immortality, he didn’t own Felix’s soul.
He was going to protect Regan from his own fate regardless of what it cost him.
There was no light. No sound except for the staccato of Felix’s breathing and the rustle of his clothing as he shifted occasionally.
He had thought he had been set on a stool when he had arrived, yet there was nothing beneath him, no furniture, no ground, no sense of the bottom, the top, the walls, or anything other than an infinity of darkness. Plato’s Myth of the Cave melded with Dante’s Inferno, a vast empty chasm of quiet, shadows, and the occasional lick of the flame of pain.Felix had no concept of how long he had been suspended in nothing... whether a day or a month or a year he couldn’t say, only that he was slowly and increasingly going mad, like Camille had in the torture of her grief, every second an agonizing suspension of time, every moment endless in its nothingness.
There was no food, yet he wasn’t hungry. No water, never thirsty. He had no need to relieve himself and no sexual desire, a strange physical lethargy coupled with acute discomfort stretching each minute that much longer. He was aware of every inch of his body as a heavy, crushing burden, simply struggling to hold himself upright as weighty as balancing a tree trunk on his shoulders for months on end. No longer attempting to move, he hung, suspended, like a ham in the slaughterhouse, swaying, blood trickling down his sweaty backfrom the latest slash of pain.
His thoughts moved quickly, like cockroaches scrambling across his brain, purposeful and startling in their approach. They didn’t belong to him, and came and went as they pleased, scattering with the unexpected glare of lacerating agony. The pain was like being thrust into the heat and light of the sun after the darkness, pricking and burning, slashing and tearing, sometimes here, sometimes there, never in the same place twice, the pattern so random as to not be a pattern at all, maddening in its anticipation.
The fear intertwined with the pain, which kicked the numbness with the force of a boot heel, bringing back the fear, which preceded the pain, until there was nothing but numb, fear, pain, the trio that confirmed Felix still in fact lived.
He wished, when his mind was not screaming, for death. If it were bestowed upon him, he would embrace it, caress it, make love to it as a groom does his bride. Without hesitation he wouldfall into it, accept the oblivion, the freedom of a true nothingness.
His hands had found their way to his neck, had tried to choke off his life breath, to end the infernal agony, but they didn’t have the strength to complete the task, not even enough to produce the bliss of unconsciousness.
It simply went on and on and on... until it didn’t.
Felix blinked and he was in the parlor of his own house, sitting on the sofa, body still stiff and wracked with the aftereffects of pain, but clean and whole.
Alcroft stood infrontof him in evening clothes. “You’re released from your punishment. But if you ever touch another woman I have chosen as my own, it will be much, much worse. Ponder that, slave.”
Felix did.
Chapter Ten
Chris paused in front of Regan’s house. “Are you okay being here alone?”
She shrugged with an aplomb she wasn’t sure she felt. “Sure. I’m fine. I do love this house, you know. It’s been a ten-year dream to live in it, and I’m not going to let a ghost scare me.”So she said. Her racing heart didn’t seem to get the instant message from her brain.
He looked unconvinced, too. “Hey, you have a package on your doorstep.”
Regan glanced down and saw the bubble mailer propped against her front door. “Geez, I think I need to talk to the mailman about that. It’s a miracle it didn’t get stolen.”
She picked it up and winced. “It’s from Beau.”
“The bastard. Maybe it would have been better if it had been stolen. What is it? A knife for you to shove in your back?”
Ripping open the packaging, she slid the interior box out and frowned at it. “It’s a box of chocolates. And a note that says, ‘I love you.’”
“Lame. Like a fifty-dollar gift is going to make you change your mind.”
“Especially considering he just agreed to the divorce. My lawyer said this afternoon it will be official, all filed and done.” Regan shoved the gold foil box back in the mailing envelope. “I would say it’s meant to be a truce gesture, but that doesn’t strike me as something Beau would do.”