Chapter 6

Jacob was the first to wake this time, unused to the warmth and movement of another body beside him. A faint alarm bell in the back of his mind urged him to snap to attention, reach over and eliminate the threat, but the steady thrum of his soul bond kept him pliant and calm with the knowledge that this was no threat, this was merely an extension of himself. His rest was peaceful again, he noted with sleepy interest—there must be something to this soulmate thing if it got crazy old him to sleep undisturbed for this long. Their bond pulsed to the rhythm of their heartbeats, and Jacob was glad to find himself growing used to the pleasure of it—it wasn't so wholly overwhelming anymore, wasn't setting his blood on fire and making him lose all capacities to think beyond get her, touch more, need it. Now it was gentler, more of a warm ebb and flow of goodness than it was a crushing tidal wave of pure desire, and it was just as good.

Still, he was overheated and sore from staying on his back so long, so Jacob shifted himself up from their nest of furs with a yawn, taking care not to jostle the arm his Deputy's head was resting on. Sunrise hadn't yet broken, but the waning moon was just bright enough to cast a faint blue light into the cabin, intermixing with the glow of dying embers from the fireplace. Not late enough for him to care, he decided, and shifted himself to turn on his hip and examine his sleeping soulmate.

Rook softly snored and clung to his blistered arm like ivy, beautifully nude legs tangled in the furs, hair a wild mess of earthen brown strewn across the floor. The curves of her body twisting in their shared nest were like the dips and hills of the mountains, and Jacob found himself shifting closer to get a better look at her, take the opportunity of her stillness to map her terrain. She was a landscape to traverse and familiarize himself with, every freckle a new marker he took note of in his mind, and he smirked at the trail of bruises and bites he'd left on the flawless parts of her skin. There were finger-shaped bruises on her hips that briefly surprised him for their unintentionality—that must have been from when he'd been pounding into her from behind, seizing hold of her to keep her in place while she pressed her face to the counter and moaned like a little tart.

His dick twitched at the memory, but Jacob ignored it in favor of sitting up and studying his soulmate some more. His amusement waned when his attention switched to mapping out her scars, many of which he recognized the source. There were nicks on the backs of her thighs from explosive shrapnel, and several faint cuts like she'd ripped herself up in wild foliage fleeing from pursuers. Some were deeper cuts, like the one on her collarbone, a similar nick to the truly awful one on her throat in its imprecision and jaggedness. And there were far, far too many bullet holes for his liking, mostly concentrated around her sides, like she'd tried to dodge them and almost succeeded.

He found himself growing more and more upset as the implications of all these scars set in. Each one was now seen as a close call or a pain she didn't have to experience, whereas before he'd thought of them as a testament to her resilience and strength. Once he'd found the way she faced down danger and came out on top awe-inspiring, but it now just made him angry. Why couldn't she just stay put somewhere, where it was safe?

He had to swallow down the sour bile that rose in the back of his throat at the sight of the round scar on her thigh, surely from the arrow that brought her to him all those weeks ago. He thumbed at it with unease (regret, even?) in a silent apology. This one answered his question—she couldn't have stayed safe, not in this world, because then she would never have come to him.

She wouldn't have been his.

Not that he deserved her in the first place. His attention drifted further to the brand of his own personal making stamped between her shoulder blades like God's mockery.

Get your hands off me, weakling.

She was not weak, he thought fiercely, covering the offending mark with his palm. He was a fool, and if by some miracle he survived this war, if she didn't someday wake up and realize having him for a soulmate was an absolutely terrible lot in life, he was going to have to deal with the advertisement of his own foolishness every time she turned her back on him.

A fitting punishment for his Pride, a quiet voice that sounded uncannily like John's whispered in the back of his mind.

Rook let out a quiet hum in her sleep and shifted, startling him from his melancholy thoughts as she rolled herself onto her back, arm draping itself over his stomach. In her movements she'd slid off his arm, and he reclaimed it only to discover that she'd been drooling on him. The Deputy, almighty war machine who ran with wild animals and threw herself into danger on a daily basis to appease her own bizarre moral compass, fell asleep in his arms and drooled on him.

Jacob Seed had no earthly idea how to deal with that—with any of it—so for the first time in his life, he took the coward's way out.

Lifting himself up slowly so as not to jostle her, Jacob arranged his side of the furs around her and draped her with them in case she grew cold, a favor returned, before snatching his clothes and his weapon and stumbling nude out of the cabin. He clothed himself in the semi-darkness urgently, before slinging his bow over his shoulder and trudging away with a quicker pace than normal. It was safer and easier to maneuver through the woods at night, hardly fearing being spotted as much as last time, and he reached the Veterans Center in record time. The guards on duty lifted their weapons until Jacob remembered to pull down his hood, and they acknowledged him with little more than a nod before returning to their patrols.

It was too early to do anything but wait for sunrise, so Jacob headed to his cold, empty rooms and lay flat on his back, hands clasped on his chest and legs straight in total contrast to his untamed positions when he was with her.

She was right, he realized with a scowl at the cracks on his ceiling. How the fuck were they supposed to do this?

He had no idea how to be… whatever it was they were. Soulmates, obviously, but what the hell else could they call two warlords sneaking into neutral ground to fuck each other senseless? He had to actively resist the urge to hide his face from the empty room at the thought of being called her boyfriend. They weren't even partners, for fuck's sake—they knew nothing about each other.

When it came down to it, she was a stranger, and she was his enemy to boot. She spent every moment away from him destroying his work, and he did the same, in a way. Yet here he was, lamenting her battle scars, caught in a paradox of wanting her safe and thrilling at her vengeance being unleashed upon the world like the Hell she was predicted to be.

Everything just made so much sense when they were together. The complexities of the world, the weight of his duty to the Family and the Project… all of it fell away when he was faced with the chance to touch her skin and breathe in the scent of her and let her pull at his hair, filling the hole where happiness had never been. She brought him dinner, let him inside her, cried out her pleasure and then held him while he slept, convinced some unconscious part of him that he was safe with her. And every time he was able to pull away from her siren's call and come up for air, he felt a little more out of control, like he'd been thrust into a world that was just slightly off from reality and left a part of himself behind in the process, and the only fix was to go back, return to her, let her help—

Jacob snarled to the empty room, digging the heels of his hands into his tired eyes. Was this his existence now? Was he doomed to be caught in an uncontrollable cycle of falling into her without a care for consequences, fleeing her presence to regain a shred of sanity, and then running right back so his world didn't feel so upside-down?

One thing he decided for certain: today, at least, he would do his fucking job.

Come dawn, the Herald of the Mountains was found jogging laps around St. Francis, a slightly surprised Peaches greeting him with a towel as usual. Jacob clung to his routine like a lifeline, from hollering himself hoarse at recruits during 0600 PT to stubbornly writing (and pretending he was interested in reading) reports at 0900, to stalking like an angry bear through his inspection of the Center's happenings at 1200.

Much was left to do in the wake of the Deputy's break-in and the Whitetails' semi-failed attempt to charge the Center, work that Jacob had shamefully neglected to focus on how to coax Rook to his side (figuratively and literally). The few cages the Whitetails had succeeded in emptying were now filled twice over, some of them with militiamen who had personally heralded the attack—including one of Eli's favorites, Walker, whose annoying stutter had worsened in his fear to the point where he wasn't even a reliable source of information, too tongue-tied to say anything coherent let alone useful.

"I want doubled security after nightfall," Jacob told his head of security, Peaches trailing behind him to scribble his every word down on the clipboard. "Two snipers on each of the walls, at least. Make sure whoever tries scaling down that mountain will be spotted before they even get their fuckin' gear together."

"Should we lay mines, sir?"

Mines? Jacob paused in his stride, considering. That would secure the northern cliffs should anyone dare to scale them, and the explosion would put the entire Center on red alert instantly…

But what if it was Rook? What if she tried to sneak in to see him again, for whatever reason?

"No," Jacob snapped, a little too abruptly. The scratching of Peaches' pen stopped, but to the Chosen's credit his expression remained blank behind his neckerchief. "Wouldn't want the local wildlife setting them off and putting us all on edge for nothing. The snipers will do."

"Yes sir."

The head of security saluted him before marching off to carry out his orders.

"Have the Chosen not currently out in the field meet with me in the courtyard," Jacob barked to Peaches, who frowned and flipped over the paper to check the schedule.

"Sir?"

"Now," he said sharply, sending the other man scrambling without an explanation.

He didn't have to wait long for the Chosen to march in lockstep towards his position by the fountain, saluting him in such perfect unison he nodded his head in satisfaction. Several of his veterans long predating the start of the Reaping were at the forefront, faces dirty, eyes reverent, posture respectful.

But Rook's words about the Cook could not go unquestioned, no matter how loyal they seemed on the surface.

"It has come to my attention," Jacob said slowly, crossing his arms behind his back as he approached his men to tower over them, "that some of you have not been doing your duties as ordered."

The deadened gazes of the newer, broken recruits never wavered, but there was a glance or two from the veterans. Backs straightened even further, awaiting explanation.

"When I send you out into the field," Jacob continued, eyeing up a tanned man who was staring in deference at his boots, "I expect my orders—and only my orders—to be carried out, as I order them. Isn't that right?"

"Yes sir," they chanted in booming voices.

"Then why am I just now receiving reports of one of our own taking on his own name, stealing sinners away from the Project and setting them on fire for his own amusement?"

One man swallowed. Jacob's eyes narrowed at him. Peaches had taken his place behind Jacob's right shoulder, shoulders hunched deferentially from his earlier scolding, but he perked up and nodded when Jacob jerked his head at the offending Chosen—that one knew something. The others might have as well, but were smart enough to remain stock still.

"Under my authority, you have no names," Jacob snarled, his voice cutting through the courtyard so loudly a hush fell over the din of rattling cages and snarling wolves. "You are Chosen, and you are the Father's Faithful. That is all you are. Only the Weak take false titles. Only the Weak hide behind excuses of doing God's work for his own entertainment. And we all know what happens to the Weak here, don't we?"

"Yes sir."

Another swallow from the skittish one. Jacob would have smirked if he weren't so angry.

"Do your goddamn jobs, nothing more and nothing less. Is… that… clear?"

"Yes sir."

"Good," Jacob hollered, stepping back to glare at the guilty one. "And if I ever hear of anything like this happening again, every single one of you will be culled like the diseased herd you are. Dismissed."

He watched his Chosen march away stone-faced. If he squinted, he could trick himself into thinking some were paler than earlier. Good, he thought. Hopefully, the threat of having the entire pack weeded out for one stray would keep them in line.

"Make sure that one gets taken to the Stone Ridge for interrogation," Jacob told Peaches coolly. "Find out what he knows about the last one, and any others we might have running around out there. If he confesses willingly, put him through training again. If not, kill him and string him up at the front gate as an example."

"Yes sir," Peaches muttered at the ground.

"And Peaches?" Jacob added, watching with amusement as the other man made towards the building with a straighter back than normal. The other deputy turned to address him again. "Tell the Chosen I'll be joining them in the field this time."

At 1400, true to his word, Jacob Seed joined his men in the day's scouting mission, under the thinly veiled guise of replacing the weakling currently being tortured at the Stone Ridge Chalet. In truth, Jacob felt the best way to weed out the garden was to lord over it with metaphorical pruning shears—up close, he'd be able to spot if any of his men had spent the Reaping being as creative with their combat tactics as the so-called Cook. Those with nothing to hide would show off the tricks they'd picked up in the field, whereas guilty parties would revert back strictly to old training to mask it. The Reaping and his… unique situation… might have temporarily distracted him from the realities beyond St. Francis' gates, but Jacob would not let his Flock fall to weakness now, not at the cliff's edge of the Collapse.

Nor would he fall to weakness himself, when he stalked the woods in a way he'd only been doing for her lately, and decidedly did not wonder where she was now, whether she'd risen soon after he'd left or later, if she was disappointed waking up alone.

Thankfully after a solid few hours in the field, gathering or putting down stray Whitetails and checking on the remaining holdings his Deputy hadn't yet destroyed (he'd have to have a word with her about his wolf beacons sometime soon) it seemed the stray he'd pulled from the pack was the only weak link in the chain—or, at the very least, Jacob had frightened the rest into compliance.

The day's work ended in scouting a small supply base south of the old McNeill residence, where Faith's latest shipment of Bliss tanks had been temporarily housed before it was to be split according to need, and where Jacob's cameras had suspiciously gone dark. It wasn't often the Whitetails found and destroyed his cameras, but Jacob hoped to get the drop on them before they fled the area.

Unfortunately, he and his small team of four—two veterans, two post-Reaping recruits—arrived to find the area, for lack of a better word, upended. His men were scattered in broken-limbed positions across the bloodstained grass, every one of them covered in a cluster of arrows like overgrown porcupines. A small fire blazed on the side of the unhitched trailer his men had set up as a kind of makeshift office, likely started from whatever explosion caused the mounted gun to be blown to pieces. The generators they'd been using to power the trailer were also shattered, charred and lightly smoking, and all of Faith's Bliss containers were blasted open as well, the fog of Bliss long dissipated in the breeze. The Eden's Gate banner had been thrown onto the pyre set up in the middle of the fenced enclosure, several boot marks visible where it hadn't yet melted.

Wordlessly, Jacob signaled to his team to clear the area, raising his rifle a little higher out of caution. Whoever did this was sending a message—whether that message was a threat or a simple tantrum-like 'I hate you' had yet to be seen. The carnage was enough that Jacob immediately thought of Rook, toeing at the nearest body. It was uncharacteristically angry of her, if it even was her. He knew from reports Rook tended to lean towards stealth, clean and unseen… unless she was tooling around with the two Drubman idiots, in any case. When had she begun favoring bows over rifles? No, this couldn't be Rook. A Whitetail, then? He should—

Jacob's arm immediately raised to aim his gun when the shuffle of boots on metal met his ears, and through the scope he saw a hooded girl with a deep scowl standing tall and proud on top of the trailer, an arrow of the same variety aimed at his head. Instinct screamed at him to pull the trigger, put her down before she even had a chance to take a breath, but the remembrance of ordering wanted posters made for that battered face made him freeze in recognition.

Jess Black.

The name rang clearest through various reports from the past year or so, but settled with a curiosity on one of Rook's offhand comments from the previous night. Was this the friend who'd abandoned her for being soulmates with the enemy, whose family had been killed by his wayward Chosen? He should have known Rook would pair herself up with one of the Project's biggest nuisances; she was a nosy snooper even before the Reaping began, spurred on by what he'd always assumed to be her loudmouthed uncle.

He lowered his gun after a moment of consideration, when the girl did nothing but remain posed with her bow primed, as though waiting for him to make the first move… almost like she wasn't sure whether or not to kill him.

"Jess Black, right?" Jacob said, almost smirking at the way she shifted uncertainly in the face of his lack of fear.

"Shut the fuck up, you fuckin' Peggie cunt," was her eloquent reply, drawing her bow back tighter.

"Brother Jacob!" shouted one of his men, and Jacob heard the telltale sound of his Chosen's own brand of arrows being loosed from their quivers.

"Stand down," Jacob barked.

His men obeyed without hesitation, though all remained in a cautious posture with their arrows resting on their bowstrings. He turned back to address Jess again, whose frown was looking decidedly more unsure the longer he went without trying to kill her.

"What is it you want, girl?" he said, gesturing to the chaos she'd caused. Was this mess supposed to be vengeance?

Jess' glare deepened, fingers twitching on her stretched bowstring in a way that had his men shuffling impatiently in place. "The fuck do ya think this arrow's for? I wanna kill your smug fuckin' face."

"I don't think you will," Jacob said smoothly, chancing a smirk in her direction with a confidence he was only half feeling. "Not when you know the truth."

She pulled her arrow back even tighter, so hard Jacob thought her bowstring might snap. His men remained stalwart, ready to jump in despite having no earthly idea what he was talking about—another confirmation of loyalty, at least for now. Then, with a frustrated scream like an angsty teenager, she lowered her bow, teeth gritted like it took all the effort in her body to admit defeat.

"You're toein' a thin fuckin' line, Seed," Jess said threateningly, jabbing at him with the end of her bow. "I like the Deputy all right, but dogs like you deserve to be put down. Better watch your fuckin' back."

Jacob ignored the frankly pathetic insult and glanced around at the still flaming supply station. "From the looks of things, you attacked first."

"And I'll do it again," she snarled, raising her bow in foolhardy pride.

He almost sighed. Where the fuck did Rook find these people?

"What exactly is the point of all this, huh kid? You tryin' to get yourself killed or something?"

"Don't talk to me like I'm a fuckin' child!" Jess hollered, aiming her arrow at him again. "You and your men are all goddamn evil. Stealin' people, killin' kids. What the fuck kind of god saddles the Dep with someone like you?"

Jacob's stare hardened, though he tried not to show it, because she was right. "Fucked if I know. But frankly, I don't give a shit about what you think of me or the Project. I just don't wanna have to be the one to tell Rook that one of her best friends threw herself into danger and got herself killed while she was… what, playing out some kind of stupid revenge fantasy?"

Jess flushed angrily, her eyes briefly skirting to her boots. "The fuck do you know about our friendship?"

"I know she trusted you enough to tell you her secret," Jacob said lowly, watching with disguised interest as the rage fell away from Jess' face to make way for something like guilt. "Maybe return the favor and don't do anything stupid."

There was a brief silence permeated only by the rustle of wind through the trees and the light crackle of flames, Jacob watching intently as the girl processed his words, her booted feet shuffling awkwardly in place. Then, with a finality, she slung her bow on her back and glared at him.

"Don't tell me what to do," she snapped petulantly, before hopping down out of sight behind the trailer. Without re-emerging, in tandem with the thump of footsteps hurrying away, she added on a shout, "If the Dep ever gets hurt 'cause of you, I'll put an arrow through your fuckin' brain!"

Jacob just blinked, shaking his head at the bizarreness of the day's encounter. The Deputy had always had a knack for picking up strays who'd follow her into carnage at a metaphorical snap of her fingers, but Jacob had always assumed it was due to the shared goal of fighting the Project (and the fact that, objectively, Rook was their best bet for doing so). Evidently it was more than that. He couldn't help but shake his head again despite his men's questions for further orders, wondering if all of Rook's friends were this fiercely loyal to her, enough to look their sworn enemy in the eye and not shoot them down where they stood.

Admiration blossomed in his chest, in a way he'd only ever felt for the likes of Joseph. That was dangerous, so he shook it off and forced himself to return to the task at hand.

"Get a team to clear this up," Jacob commanded, once he'd successfully torn his mind away from the topic of Rook. "This location has been compromised. And inform the Henbane the Bliss shipment has been lost."

His team barked their affirmation. With one last glance towards Jess Black's mess and the implications hanging over it, Jacob left them to their work to head to the Grand View and resume overseeing the remaining conditioning trials for the day. Peaches was waiting for him in the observation room, greeting him with a meek, "Sir," in a way that almost disgusted him. He was pathetic compared to Rook—he'd never have been able to inspire loyalty like she had, if he had been the one to escape that night at Joseph's compound.

"Out," he snapped to Peaches, who to his credit didn't even frown with confusion before hurrying out of the observation room.

Jacob huffed out the breath he was holding and allowed himself a moment to fall apart. That morning's anxiety came back in waves, causing him to slam his hands down on the console, letting his head hang like the weight was too heavy for his neck. Jess Black had questioned aloud why God had tied something as powerful and beautiful as Rook to him, broken and old and so totally out of his element, and Jacob felt wholly inclined to agree. If God had granted Joseph visions of the Collapse so that he and his Family might build a new world from the ashes, why would he want Jacob distracted from the tasks necessary to do so with the Deputy for a soulmate?

He thought back to Joseph's advice and his granted permission to snatch the Deputy into his clutches and break her until her world consisted of nothing but him. Was this what he was meant to do? Break her down and piece her back together in their image, so that her talents might be used for God's work? A little desperately, he scrambled through the file cabinet in search of Rook's tapes—surely the answers would be in there, the first and only time he'd tried to break her.

And God fucking help him, he actually felt the air leave his lungs at the sight of her, presented on the glassy monitors with her arm in the midst of breaking one weakling's neck like a twig, the other already bloodied and prone on the floor. Despite the clear malnourishment—Jesus, he could see the outline of her skull, he surely must have overdone it, what was he thinking?—his Rook was ruthless and perfect in her carnage.

And he felt… disturbed.

Underneath it was the same thrill as the first time, of course (with the embarrassing addition of an unexpected erection, knowing that he'd bent that holy terror over and fucked her into total submission) but the more Jacob watched, the more he regretted his meddling. In his cowardice, his denial of their soul bond, he'd ruined the strength he'd been too blind to see in Rook and implanted a weakness into her mind that didn't have to be. It was like he'd taken perfection and sullied it with his ignorance. Fuck the Whitetails and his conditioning project—why did Jacob have to ruin everything he touched?

Jacob's fist slammed down on the pause button, freezing it on a frame where Rook was splattered with blood and in the midst of hurling herself at one of his recruits, snarling in preparation to tear out his throat. He glanced down at the music box laying on the dashboard, innocent and innocuous like it didn't have the capacity to call an army to battle. It would be so easy to just call her up on the radio, play the song, send her rushing into his clutches and have her locked in his bunker, all without even noticing what she was doing until it was too late.

But he replayed her tape, watched her bathe in the blood of the man whose jugular she'd just torn open with her teeth and then throw herself through the doorway before his body even hit the floor, and the more he watched, the more he was certain he wanted her wholly. He didn't just want her body, the one she'd willingly offered up to him without the need for a song's trigger—he wanted her mind. He wanted the mind that talked back to him, the one that thought to whisper dirty things he couldn't even dream of in his ear, the one that was so wholly better than him she inspired enough loyalty for one vengeance-driven girl to lower her weapon in the face of her sworn enemy. And he wanted her to want him too. If he broke her, she wouldn't be able to want anything but the Project's success and the sweet release of death.

For once, the solution wasn't to do as he'd always done, and it left Jacob reeling.

Like a battle plan, Jacob's mind couldn't help but map all the possibilities for how whatever-this-was would turn out, all the risk factors, the pros and cons—and there were far more of the latter than the former. All roads led to one solution: he had to bring her over to their side, without breaking her.

Last night demonstrated that it wasn't going to be easy. She was deeply tied to her cause, he knew, but once she saw how close to the brink humanity was, if she caught even a sliver of the chaos going on outside of the isolated bubble they'd created in the county, doubt might be sown and he'd have a way in. Her bloodlust would match his once she saw the necessity of their task, and they wouldn't have to worry about sneaking around to meet each other with the fear that they might be ambushed and killed for their transgression—she'd be his, in this world and the new one, always.

The thought was so tantalizing he almost groaned aloud. He was still hard from watching her tapes and half-tempted to jerk himself off right there in the booth, but knowing Peaches was just outside waiting to be let back in like a puppy sent out of the house and not having anything to clean up with and having a sliver of goddamn self-control, he refrained. Taking a second to adjust himself, Jacob snatched the music box off the dashboard and stomped out to meet Peaches, barking orders for another round of conditioning trials to be set up. Soon, he could indulge in the insane ecstasy that was his soulmate.

But not until his work was done.

However, as many times before, Rook ruined his plans.

It was around 2100 hours, as Jacob was returning from the day's final inspection of the Center's work, when his radio crackled to life.

"How come this time I was the one waking up alone?"

The shock of hearing Rook's voice from his pocket made him trip on the step going into the building. He ignored the scattered questions of, "All right, sir?" and hurried into his office for privacy, staring hard at the black plastic he'd fumbled into his hand. Jacob had thought to give her some time apart from him before asking her for another meeting, to regain his head and a little bit of stability before he dove back in (and to let her own uncertainty at how to deal with the fucked-up nature of their situation settle) but Rook knocked him right off course again. He really wished she'd stop doing that.

"Had work to do," was all Jacob could think to come up with, because there was no way in hell he was going to tell Rook he fled her presence in an existential crisis for the comforting familiarity of his work.

"You robbed me of the privilege of waking up naked with you to go and do Peggie shit?" the Deputy said, a smirk in her tone as she threw his own words right back at him.

Unable to help it, he grinned like an idiot and let it show in his voice. "At least I wasn't fuckin' fishing."

She laughed, a sweet, breathy sound. He wished he could see it.

"So…" she said after a moment of silence, stretching out the 'o' in a way that sounded simultaneously tantalizing and… nervous, almost? "Wanna maybe try and get it right this time? Third time's the charm, and all that."

The sweetness of having the cocksure Deputy awkwardly asking to see him again flew right over his head, as he stared down at the plastic in his hand with total bemusement. There was no way he'd heard that correctly. She wanted to see him? Without the need for convincing, or him opening the invitation first, or the promise of doing anything other than sex?

"You busy or something?" Rook said after too long in silence, her dry tone not enough to cover up the tentativeness of earlier.

"No," Jacob said, but it came out more like a bark in his haste. "Not for you," he added to try and smooth things over.

"Is that a yes, then?" she replied, a little impatiently.

His mouth opened to agree, but what came out was, "You seriously wanna see me?" and for the second time Jacob Seed had to force himself not to bury his face in his hands at his own shameful ridiculousness. What the fuck was she doing to him?

"Yeah," Rook said, her voice dripping with confusion, completely unaware of Jacob Seed's personal crisis.

Once the embarrassment of his own words had worn off, Jacob found himself grinning at the radio a second time, pleased beyond his own expectations. "I'll be there within the hour, wildcat."

She huffed out a quiet chuckle, almost like a purr. "I'll be waiting."

She'll be waiting. Did that mean she'd already arrived, hoping he'd agree?

He almost tripped over himself once more in his haste to throw himself out of his office and up the steps, mind already zoning in on the fastest route to the cabin as he threw on his plainclothes. He thankfully had the sense to choose sweatpants instead of jeans like the last few times, both so he and Rook wouldn't have to spend too much time wrangling them off but also because he was hard as steel for the second time that day and didn't even want to imagine how chafed he'd be in denim as he jogged through the forest.

Just like last time, he found the lights on in the window and his soulmate waiting for him, curled up at the base of the couch in their still-intact nest of furs, thankfully lacking the angry cougar in her lap this time. He almost dropped his recurve bow in anticipation, barely remembering to do a sweep of the premises before all but kicking the door open.

"Take it off," was Jacob's greeting, an echo of last night, stalking towards her with a barely contained growl.

But Rook, as always, had the upper hand. Her cheek plumped in a smirk, and when she turned to face him he found her bomber jacket was all she was wearing, the swell of her pretty breasts peeking through the open zipper, bare legs curved sideways and glowing gold in the firelight.

No one on Earth could blame him for standing in the doorway and gaping like an idiot at his soulmate semi-nude and posing like one of those pin-up girls from his youth.

"Take what off?" she asked with faux innocence, fingering at the hem.

The jacket slipped down her shoulder.

"Son of a bitch," Jacob cursed, throwing down his gear and then himself down on his knees before her.

A/N: Fun fact: it's canon that the Cook was secretly going against Jacob's orders. There's a note at the place where you and Jess go kill him, in which the Cook admits he disagrees with Jacob's methods and decides to burn the sinners instead of wasting time on them.

Happy Mother's Day!