Warning: NSFW

Chapter 3

He woke in the morning with a nightmare-fueled start and a crick in his neck. He ignored the familiar rush of adrenaline to instead grimace and slowly lift his head, rolling his shoulders to get rid of it. After beating his own knuckles bloody well into the early hours of the morning, he'd collapsed into his office chair and passed out. A glance out the window told him he had woken just after dawn—he'd slept in, to his surprise. He almost wished he hadn't, considering how poor the actual rest had been. He shrugged off the bleariness to hurry up to his rooms and change, unwilling to miss his morning routine.

He skipped washing his face or shaving again (has to be soon though) in favor of heading straight out for a jog, trying to shake off the weary feeling that his bones were too heavy for his body. Jacob was met by Peaches when he was just finishing up, holding another towel for him and his clipboard.

"The Chosen have spotted the Deputy being taken from the hotel by the Whitetails, sir," he said blankly, when Jacob jogged up to him sweaty and panting.

"Excellent," Jacob replied, wiping at his damp face and neck. "Track her movements on the cameras. I wanna know what the Whitetails plan to do with her, and where she goes afterwards."

Watching her on the cameras was a precautionary measure, not just for Jacob's side of things but for all of them. Either word would get out that the Deputy was killed, probably causing a major divide between the Whitetails and the other arms of the Resistance, or she'd go right back to fucking up activity in his region, and he'd be able to send a defensive team to put it down before she could do enough damage to matter. That, or she'd flee to the Henbane or Holland Valley again, and he could shore up defenses for his siblings. This time she wasn't going to get close enough to John to even breathe in his direction, let alone try to kill him.

Except nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.

A week rolled by, and there was complete silence. She wasn't spotted on the cameras, there was no word of her from the other regions, and the Resistance stayed the same. In the Valley, they struggled; in the Henbane, they remained holed up in their prison sanctuary; in the Mountains, the Whitetails kept up their feeble efforts to rescue their people and fuck with his mission. Nobody was up in arms about the mysterious disappearance of their Deputy.

He hoped (if only because he wanted his sleeper agent intact, of course) that she was only laying low and figuring out her options. It was doubtful she'd been killed—the Whitetails would have been dealing with two wars if they had killed her, he presumed. Unless word got out that she was his soulmate? No, he decided, there was no way she'd tell them, right? She wouldn't be stupid enough to sign her own death warrant by admitting one of the Heralds of Eden's Gate was her soulmate.

Still, Jacob spent the week with a knot in his stomach, finding himself glancing towards the cages more often despite knowing full well she wasn't in them anymore. The awe of the sheer power packed into that tiny feminine body had since waned, replaced with grudging respect and a bit of apprehension—he would have to train his Chosen harder to combat that level of strength, even if it had been triggered by the conditioning.

The persistent itch of her under his skin wasn't enough to keep him from his duties, of course. He rose with the sun and spilled blood until the moon was well overhead; he read, wrote and sent reports in the yellow light of his office; and he spent nights laying on his back with his hands clasped over chest, thoughts roiling and failing to sleep.

He had just begun to drift into the anxious middle between awareness and dreaming, the purgatory that would decide whether the night was peaceful or if he would be startled awake every few minutes, when he heard the quiet, almost totally silent patter of footsteps on the roof outside. Jacob's body kicked into gear at once, slipping out of bed with nothing more than a split second rustling of sheets, before carefully grabbing the pistol he kept on the top shelf and positioning himself behind the wardrobe. How had anyone managed to climb all the way up here without alerting every guard in the area? He listened as he checked the barrel—loaded, three bullets, two more than he needed—and watched as a shadow spilled through the window, casting a tall silhouette onto the carpet. A pair of jean-clad legs sidled along the decorative railing from the left, one boot dangling off as his would-be assassin slid the blade of a knife through the crack in the window and undid the latch (security breach, he noted, get that fixed asap) before dropping inside with an impressively soft step.

Cocking off the safety, Jacob stepped out and pointed the gun right between the intruder's eyes.

Later he would marvel at how close he got to killing his own soulmate, finger twitching on the trigger as shock-blown eyes met his and she stood up straight, gloved hands already scrabbling for her own weapon. The gesture made him visibly tense, but when she took him in properly she threw up her gloved hands and hissed, "Jesus Christ!"

He kept the gun trained on her on pure instinct, even as awe washed over him at the sight of the Deputy, back from the not-quite-dead and able to sneak into his personal rooms without alerting anyone but him. She looked… certainly more cleaned up since he'd last seen her, cheeks still slightly sunken from malnutrition but near to full recovery, bruises fading. The moonlight painted her with an enchanting white glow, making strands of her now clean and braided hair seem wispy and white and her eyelashes look snow-dusted, like a bomber jacket-wearing fairy had flitted in through his window. His own thoughts surprised him, and he lowered the gun slowly when she did nothing but stand there and stare back, the alarm in her stance disappearing with the threat of imminent death.

"You always this fucking jumpy?" she snarked, a hand going to her hip—not the side her gun was holstered on, smartly.

"You broke into my room," Jacob grunted in response, making a show of clicking the safety back on but not setting the gun aside, not yet. "How'd you get all the way in here without tipping off my guards?"

She snorted like a cocky little thing. "Your men aren't that good, Seed." He blinked in response as she waved a hand idly and continued, "I mean sure, out of the three of you yours are definitely the best, especially compared to John's, although John's Peggies couldn't find their own ass with both hands in their back pockets so that's really not saying much."

He had absolutely no idea what to say to that, so instead he just smirked at her with a mirth he wasn't feeling and remarked, "Thought you were smarter than to wander into the lion's den, kitten."

Her nose wrinkled at the moniker, but she shot him a deadpan look. "You know exactly why I'm here."

"Do I?" he replied with interest, crossing his arms as he leaned against the wardrobe.

"Fingers crossed you don't, I guess." She snapped her fingers and pointed at him, and he stared in absolute awe at the fucking audacity of this tiny thing, this five-foot-nothing woman trying to direct him like a butler in his own goddamn bedroom. "Show me the mark."

That wasn't what he expected. "What?"

"Show me your soul mark!" the Deputy barked. "I don't know what the fuck happened when I was in that cage, but there is no way in hell that a sadistic psychopath like you could be my soulmate." He reeled—how could he not be offended by that?—but she was unperturbed, her volume still carefully under the level that could attract any attention despite her tirade. "Especially considering you locked me in a cage, starved me for days and then left me for dead in some basement, never mind whatever the fuck that homicidal song thing was. Did you try to brainwash me, you shit? The Whitetails were jumpy as hell just talking to me, after taking me outta your fucking crap hole hotel—"

"You done?" Jacob huffed, jaw clenched in annoyance.

"No, as a matter of fact, Seed," she replied curtly, "I'm not done 'til you show me this wasn't just a fucked-up fluke. I want honest-to-God proof we're soulmates, because everything else about how the world works says that makes no fucking sense."

This was when he slid the gun onto the end table, eyes narrowing as he took in her hip-cocked stance and her glare that seemed to darken the room a bit more.

"You really wanna know, kitten?" he murmured.

The quiet tone of his voice seemed to shift something in her, because her cocky contrapposto softened to something slightly more cautious and she moved to grip her arms in a defensive self-hug, nodding with her jaw set and her brows furrowed. He almost smirked at how easy it was to blow her arrogant façade down like a straw house; but, not to waste the opportunity to up the ante, Jacob gripped the hem of his ratty old tee and pulled it over his head.

He threw it onto the bed, and when he shook the hair out of his eyes she looked stunned, a silver-tinged blush ghosting over her cheeks briefly. When she took in his blistered arms and torso, the mottled skin twisted and rippled from chemically-fueled heat, she didn't recoil like he expected. Instead her eyes went round in—what was that, fascination?—as she took a step forward and craned her graceful neck to see better. He was so captivated by her reaction that he started when she frowned, and gestured impatiently towards herself.

"Will you stop hiding over there and let me see?" the Deputy snapped, and he scowled.

"I don't hide."

"Looks like you have two things to prove, then."

With an annoyed huff, Jacob marched over to her without hesitation, smirking as they both noted how he towered over her with almost a foot of extra height. She frowned at him, wary, but when he presented his soul-marked arm to her (and definitely did not flex his muscles a bit, he had nothing to prove to her, of course) she forgot her ire in favor of peering at the blistered skin. Her words wove in and out of the thick swathes of scarring, and he knew it would likely be of no help—he hadn't been able to make out the sentence for close to two decades now.

"I can't read it," she said softly, glancing up at him from under those light-whitened lashes like a sweet little flirt.

Shaking off his own thoughts, he told her in a tone matching her own, "It's 'let me go'. It always has been."

The Deputy looked one more time at the blistered arm as though trying to look past the mess to confirm it, before her eyes met his again with a look of uncertainty and frustration. A small wisp of hair had escaped her braid and fallen over her face, and Jacob had the bizarre urge to brush it out of the way.

Instead of acting on that insanity, he lowered his arm and said lowly, "Now show me yours."

"You—huh?"

"You heard me, Deputy," said Jacob, pleased by the way he caught her off guard. "I want my own proof."

He hadn't been doubting she was his soulmate longer than a second after the shock had worn off, but now that the opportunity had presented itself to him on a moonlight-silver platter, he desired nothing more than to see the tangible evidence in front of him. She looked at him for a few moments, glaring like she thought he was trying to trick her somehow, before another blush prettied up her cheeks. Scowling, she turned her back on him, and for a moment he thought she was going to march right back out of the window and tell him to go fuck himself.

Instead, she shrugged off her jacket and left it in a pile on the floor, revealing a tight camo tank top along with several hidden throwing knives and a grenade holster—Jesus Christ, he'd let a walking bomb into his bedroom. Jacob's breath actually hitched when she slid her fingers under her shirt strap to pull it down to the side, looking for all the world like a striptease in the making. It was only when she stopped, top pulled down to expose half her back, that he remembered he was supposed to be looking for something.

A humorless laugh escaped his lips at the sight of 'get your hands off me, weakling' carved like God's graffiti along the delicate arch of her spine, right between her shoulder blades. It was black and stark against the pale expanse of her back, which was lightly freckled and dusted with tiny nicks and scars that were easily overshadowed by his mottled skin. He didn't remember his being this dark. The thought occurred that it might somehow be faked—a clever ploy on the part of the Resistance to bring the almighty warrior Herald to his knees by dangling a pretty young thing in front of him. Perturbed by the idea, he reached out to touch the mark to see if it was tangible, if he could wipe it away if he tried hard enough.

Sweet… ruinous… ecstasy.

His throat closed the second the rough pads of his fingers connected with the impossibly soft skin of her back, absolutely punched in the gut by the sheer force of good that poured straight out of her and into his blood. He'd absolutely forgotten what 'good' even felt like, but this was an explosion of the concept, and he had to be dying from it, surely. Once again, his world narrowed to exist only within her, only this time it was wonderful. His eyes closed, his head tipped back, and a strangled noise punched its way out of his throat as the totally foreign experience of pure goodness, the polar opposite of pain and fear and rage, erupted from the bare contact. He had no capacity for thought left to even question what this was; he was a slave to it, knees quaking as fiery bliss shot from his fingertips right to the ends of each limb. His skin buzzed like an excited beehive to get more, need more, and he grasped like a blind man with his free hand to grope for more skin to connect to, unable to do anything more than chase this incredible high.

Rook—sweet, wonderful, beautiful, his—had the same idea, it seemed, moaning like a tart for all to hear (no one else here, only for him) and scrabbling for purchase against his flailing arm. Her hand gripped his forearm, but her precious skin was covered up by the stupid leather of her gloves, and he balked right up until she pressed herself backwards into his hold. They cried out in chorus when her half-bared back connected with his cratered chest, but Jacob snarled at the dampened, not-enough feeling in the places where his nerves had been burned away—he couldn't feel her, but he needed to, he needed to, so he hiked up the other side of her top and slid his other hand around her lithe waist, then his whole arm when the searing pleasure made him almost sob. He trailed his hand up, needy, desperate, thumbing at her ribs and circling her belly button. Her stomach jerked, and she whined divinely and rubbed herself against his sweatpants. His cock strained against the soft roundness of her ass, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to grind himself into coming against her bare skin, paint her with his seed, claim her as his, only his.

Their souls were unquestionably connected in this moment, as Rook seemed to read his mind and whirled around in his hold to face him. He let out another savage noise as the hand on her back was momentarily displaced, tightening the one around her waist in reflex, but she met his protest with a snarl of her own and a plunge of her leathery fingers into his hair, hauling herself on tiptoes to steal his mouth in a desperate kiss. He groaned into her mouth at the hum of ecstasy passing through her lips, the two biting and sucking at each other like they could steal away the good from the other and hoard it inside forever. He thrust himself like an animal against her denim-covered thigh, pushing her backward with each press of his hips until her back connected with the wall. She writhed in his grip, trying to lift her legs to straddle him but failing from how closely he was pressing himself to her, and when she made a noise like an angry cat and pulled her hands out of his hair to push him back, he snatched both her wrists in one broad palm and pinned her to the wall in a show of sheer strength, their lips parting from the almighty shove.

For this single moment, he was able to see her, take in the sight of her with her wrists in his hold and her body twisting provocatively in search of him, plump lips kiss-swollen and twisted in the beginnings of a sob of protest, hips jerking up towards his to encourage him. He thought briefly to take her flushed cheek in his hand, cradle it like the precious thing it was, but the second his arm unwound itself from her body and reached up to do it, reality hit the both of them like an arrow to the thigh.

The Deputy's eyes blew so wide he thought she might somehow hurt herself, but he was distracted again when she brought her gloved fists to his chest and shoved with all her strength. It was enough to send him stumbling back, tripping slightly but not falling, and he hissed in offense at the abrupt gesture before having the good sense to take another step back, remembering all at once why this was a very, very bad idea. His blood still hummed, his dick was still throbbing and he'd been seconds away from spilling in his pants like a keyed-up teenager, but his soulmate was looking at him like he'd just ended the world and fuck, it hurt to see.

"Oh fuck," she whispered shakily, yanking at her top to righten it. "It is you."

She sounded so disgusted by the revelation that it replaced all the good feelings, all the desperate screaming in his head to just reach out and do it again, take it, she's right there, with an overwhelming concoction of hurt and rage.

Fists clenching, he hissed out, "What's the problem, Deputy? You scared of being tied to a burnt up old man?"

Her head reeled back, and she replied on a half-shout, "I don't care about your stupid scars! You destroy people! You hunt them like animals and starve them to death and let them tear each other apart!"

"I cull the herd," Jacob said coldly, reaching for his crumpled shirt for some sense of dignity (and failing miserably, when he noticed his arm trembling). "It's what I do. The Weak fall, the Strong survive."

"Oh sure, it's so strong of you and your lackeys to burn children alive," the Deputy snarled, ignoring or perhaps missing the confused look he sent her. "You're a fucking monster, Jacob, and it has nothing to do with how you look."

"You don't know anything about me, kitten," he shot back, glaring at her in the dim light. "I do the worst of our work so that Joseph's vision can be protected. I am the shield between my brothers and anything that threatens them. I can afford to be broken, as long as Joseph can stay whole."

"How long have you thought that about yourself?"

The question was not at all the response he was expecting, and once more Jacob was left shocked by the fiery glares and quiet disappointment in the Deputy. He didn't answer—he didn't know how to answer.

Rook scoffed. "No wonder you act like you're an empty husk. You literally view yourself as expendable."

"Sacrifices are needed to strengthen the herd," Jacob reiterated, crossing his arms again.

"Does that include me?"

He hated how this woman threw him for a loop with every new word she spoke. He narrowed his eyes at her, frowning, wondering where the fuck she was going with this. Was she, who not ten minutes ago was calling him a psychopath, asking whether he cared for her, at least enough to spare her? She just approached him, fearlessly—always fearless, surely his soulmate—staring up at him with stubborn defiance, almost arrogance. She looked like she was expecting an answer, but he kept his mouth shut, just watching.

"I'm a weakness of yours now," she murmured, and how could he have ever thought he'd be rid of her when she was literally reading his mind somehow, voicing his own thoughts like they were her own? "I always will be. And you'll always be a weakness of mine. Only makes sense that one of us needs to be culled. Who's it gonna be, Jacob?"

He inhaled sharply at how she strode into his space, crooning out his name like a dark secret. She was right—he knew she was right. She leaned in close, so close, a power move considering they were both still shaking from the memory of ecstasy and bare skin—he was still hard, for fuck's sake—but her next words struck him breathless.

"Is there anything human left in you?" she whispered, eyes searching his face like the truth of his humanity was hidden somewhere there. "Or did you get rid of all that years ago, so you could be the perfect tool?"

He all but proved her right with his stock-still position and his statuesque expression, carefully crafted so he didn't show how much her words stung. This was how his soulmate thought of him. She had looked inside him, spoken his thoughts like they were her own… and found nothing.

"Guess we'll see," were the Deputy's parting words, before she spun on her heel and slipped through his window like a thief in the night.

And Jacob was left standing there, bemused, upset and still frustratingly turned on, utterly unable to process what the fuck just happened. Almost without thought, he hurried over to the window and peered out to watch her, but she'd disappeared into the darkness… and left a plethora of bodies in her wake, Jacob's own highly-trained guards trailing around the building towards the northern hills like breadcrumbs in the forest. His commander's instincts muttered about security breaches in his mind—they'd taken the St. Francis stronghold because of its strategic positioning, assuming the cliffs were virtually impossible to climb down, foolish thought, have to rectify that—but the rest of him was buzzing with a weird mixture of anger, hurt and desire that he had absolutely no idea how to deal with. He itched to climb out the window and go after her, but the thought was so irrational that it actually frightened him a little, so instead he ignored the bodies his men (whoever survived, that is) would surely wake him about soon and slowly closed the window.

His soulmate thought so poorly of him. That… hurt.

The feeling was foreign, and almost defensively his body replaced it with anger, his hands clenching into fists. He had no idea why her opinions of him were so upsetting—they weren't news. She had thought him an empty husk, but so had he. Jacob never did well with emotions to begin with, and the ones he allowed himself to feel were used for the betterment of the Project, to make Joseph happy. His job would be best done if there was nothing to get in the way of progress, so he suppressed what little there had been before—the sadness of not knowing where his brothers were, the betrayal of ruining himself for a country that discarded him for all his efforts, the anxiety of wondering what terrible memory he'd relive in his dreams this time, the fear that someone else in the shelter might try to shank him in his sleep—and made himself into the perfect soldier, one who could stain his soul a thousand times over without feeling any particular ways about it.

But here he was, irrationally and maddeningly offended that the soulmate he never intended to acknowledge in the first place already thought so badly of him. He wanted her to look at him with at least a fraction of the awe he felt when he watched her rage through his trials like violence given form. He wanted to see that look on her face, the one when she'd coaxed him into showing off the skin-deep brand of her words and peered with parted lips and intrigued eyes at his scarred flesh, and keep it there forever, remain an enigma worth looking at.

Snarling to the empty room, he stormed back to his bed and laid down, clenched hands settling on his chest again in an angry mockery of his routine and ignoring the erection still pulsing against cotton. There was almost no chance of falling asleep—not after the distress of having his safe space broken into, not after being reminded what pleasure felt like after twenty years of numbness, and certainly not with his dick still harder than it'd ever been in his life. He stubbornly tried to ignore it, trying to treat it like another one of the morning erections he was getting less and less of the older he got and failing miserably.

But that feeling…

So many years of being physically and mentally disconnected from society had made Jacob forget the crummy love stories from TV or the radio. He'd never been much of a reader either, not even for the Biblical passages that espoused the so-called 'gift' from God of a perfect, harmonious union that was soulmates—and Old Man Seed only ever taught them the ones that solidified his drunken, half-assed authority, in any case. He should have been better prepared, should have looked at the basics and done proper research in his brief internet foray, instead of asking his stupidly specific questions about how to get rid of her, and he could've kept her at a distance so she wouldn't have left him utterly wrecked by how good just touching her felt. His hands flexed against his chest as his cock gave a particularly vicious throb at the memory of grinding himself against her ass—it felt so fucking good, and he wanted it.

But his hands remained stubbornly clasped (clenched, more like it) over his ribs, breath coming out in angry puffs. Jacob hadn't had so much as a quick fuck since the early days in the army, when there was still time and hormones and amusement enough in his life for him to seek out a woman to sink into, before he was too broken to hold so much as a civil conversation. Here, especially, was impossible—most of his recruits were men, and the few women he viewed as nothing more than tools like himself, things with a job to do and a purpose to fulfill—and he would never let anyone anywhere near him to begin with. So Jacob was allowed his fifty-foot comfort zone, with the rare jerk-off session if the urge ever struck enough to be distracting, never because of another person, until now.

His breath rattled out of him at the remembrance of the Deputy disheveled and arousal-drunk, pouty lips parted to moan out her pleasure, her slender body arched and curved under his grip like a tease. He felt robbed by how little he actually managed to do with the gift of her—he hadn't gotten to touch more than her waist, hadn't gotten to grip the backs of her powerful thighs and feel the flex of muscle that carried her through battle, hadn't gotten to slide his hand down between her legs so she could fuck his fingers into completion. Was that what she was doing now? Was she half as turned on as he was, running so quickly from him into the mountains so she could find a safe place in the dark to sink down on her own fingers and take the edge off?

Jacob blinked, and found himself out of bed and already across the room, a hand reaching for the doorknob to… go after her? He had no fucking idea what, but the discovery that his body had moved him across the room of its own accord made him unequivocally furious.

Fix it, his thoughts urged, and Jacob moved to obey.

With rage fueling his strength, he pushed the wardrobe from its spot by the corner up against the window, sealing it with a makeshift wall so that anyone who dared try and invade again would have to try extra hard to make it past. The door he barred with his own bed, sealing himself in and the rest of the world out, hissing at the sheer painfulness of his erection as he worked.

With the room secured, Jacob could do nothing but reach into his pants and pull out his cock. He choked out a shredded breath at how the mere act of wrapping his hand around the base pushed him right back to the edge, like he was seconds from coming with next to no stimulation. This was what she did to him, what the mere triviality of his skin connecting with hers did to him, and it would have been utterly terrifying if it didn't feel so fucking good. One cautious stroke had his knees buckling, his free hand flying out to steady himself against the wall; the second stroke paired with the repeated question of whether or not Rook was touching herself to the thought of him had Jacob coming so hard and fast he shouted out a groan at the surprise. His knees finally gave way and he collapsed to the floor, fucking his own fist through the aftershocks, eyes almost rolling back into his head at how good it felt after so, so long.

For a solid minute, Jacob couldn't do anything but struggle to breathe and stay hunched over on the floor, leaning on the bed for purchase, hand still holding his dick. The strength of his orgasm sapped him of all the upset energy from earlier, and despite the fact that his bed frame was stained with splashes of his cum, nothing seemed more tantalizing than the idea of collapsing into it and spending the night dreaming of her. The thought was startlingly out of character enough to cut through the haze, and he began to frown as he pushed himself back into his sweatpants.

This could never happen again.

A/N: Little late with this one but in my defence, I forgot 3 Things are slow to start, but they'll speed up soon!