CHAPTER 4 |

When Jacob woke, it was to the strangest feeling of floating. He felt weightless and warm and soothed, but at the same time he ached – oh how he ached. Something purred behind him, warm and slick and against his back. Jacob stirred; his eyes fluttered but didn't open. Sleep tried to pull him down again, but then there were lips at his shoulder and hands around his ribs; all beckoning him to wake.

"How are we feeling, my dear?" a dark voice croaked into his ear, hands winding around him a little tighter. "Better, I hope. More alive."

Jacob moaned, confused. He laid his head back and sighed when it was met with a shoulder to lean against. Water dripped as a hand raised up to card gently through his hair, leaving a warm, wet trail in its wake. Wet... Jacob frowned and finally opened his eyes.

The room was dark, lacking windows as it was. If not for the candles that flickered gently across various counters and surfaces, he imagined the room would be black as pitch. Instead, he could see dim flickers of his surroundings. He was in a deep, claw-footed tub. The water was warm and came midway up his ribs, and while it did not erase all the pain it did soothe some of it. Jacob groaned as his side cramped painfully, reminding him of his foolishness. God, it was probably still open and –

Jacob shot forward. Memories crashed through his head. The Alhambra. The fire – his eyes darted wildly to the candles all around them, suddenly panicked. The beam in his side. Roth forcing blood down his throat, pulling him from the wreckage. Waking to the wound nearly healed. And a room. A girl crying...

"Ssh, ssh, ssh," Roth said gently, stopping his train of thought. He had followed Jacob upright, his lips soft against his feverish skin. Jacob catch his breath, and he couldn't quite get over the fact that something felt distinctly wrong. Roth captured his hand in the water, entwined their fingers and then guided Jacob down to the wound he knew would be there, but wasn't.

Jacob gasped.

His side was whole. Better than whole, it felt solid and smooth and healthy. He arched to look at it, causing the water to slosh awkwardly around them and splash wetly against the floor as he investigated. He couldn't see well. Focusing made his eyes hurt, but he couldn't see any trace of a wound or a scar – just clean, healthy flesh. Additionally, his pants had been removed - his final article of clothing, lost.

"Roth," Jacob croaked, confused. Afraid.

"I'm here, daring." Roth buried his nose into the damp hair at the back of Jacob's neck and breathed against him. It struck Jacob as odd and he couldn't quite shake the feeling that only just now had Roth relaxed, as though suddenly assured that some great fight was over. "I'm so proud of you."

Jacob frowned. Proud… Why?

A warm wrist, soft flesh, pressed to his nose and mouth. Something warm spread like wet jam across his face. His eyes rolled in his skull. First he swiped his tongue messily across the gash, then sucked onto it. She was hitting him,but he ignored it in favor of the thick flavor flooding his mouth.

And then she died.

Jacob felt his heart stop – or thought he did, only to realize that thatwas what had struck him odd in his panic not moments before; the absence of his frantic, terrified heartbeat. Jacob leaned forward, away from Roth, and curled into his legs - hand splayed across his still chest. A silent sob clung at his throat, but wouldn't come. With trembling hands, he covered first his face then slowly rose to clutch at his hair. He shook like a stale leaf and tried not to vomit when he felt Roth curl that much closer to him, trying to soothe him. And Jacob hated himself when it did in fact soothe him somewhat.

"I'm a murderer," Jacob whispered.

"Oh darling," Roth said, as though realizing the problem was not a septic gut wound but in fact a papercut, "You were always a murderer." He ran one hand through Jacob's hair and pressed his face beside Jacob's, whispering into his ear, "Don't you see that now?"

Jacob jerked away.

With a series of awkward wet squeaks and splashes, he removed himself – albeit clumsily – from Roth's tub. It was then that he realized with some relief that while he had been naked, Roth had remained clothed beneath him. But the way the water influenced the man's clothes left no illusion to the fact that Roth was in fact interested.

Jacob shivered.

'I am not a murderer!'rose up his throat, only to die when the girl flashed through his head once more. An Assassin he had been, yes. Murder was his job but he had never been a Murderer. His blade fell upon the wicked, not the innocent. A hit was not the same as murder. He had been anAssassin. He had toed along the edges of the Creed before, flirted with breaking it, but he had never outright murdered.

Now...

His hands shook. He felt robbed. He had done bad things. He had made mistakes. But Roth had tainted this last good thing about him; ruining him once and for all. His eyes felt hot. Wet. What would Evie say?

"What have you done?!"

Roth leaned back into the tub and smiled.

"I told you. I set you free."

Jacob blinked and a dark realization turned his stomach over. God, he remembered it vividly – he always had – but now it made sense.

Roth stood atop a nearby roof and Jacob couldn't help but feel a little thrill of excitement, knowing his job well done would please the friend that awaited him. He pulled himself up and smiled when he felt familiar hands tug him eagerly to his feet.

"All rigged up," Jacob said, a malicious grin on his face as he looked down upon the factory and envisioned the suffering their plan would surely cause Starrick.

"Perfect! Then let's put our plan into action. Stand back!" He called down to his Blighters. Preoccupied as he was, Roth didn't see it when children suddenly entered the factory – or so Jacob had thought.

"Ready~yyy?"

"Wait!"

Roth spun on him.

"Whatever for?"

"There are children in there!" Jacob said, as though Roth had not noticed.

"Jacob, my dear. Starrick uses child labor to manufacture goods. We must put an end to his production line."

Jacob felt his heart drop, his stomach sour. He waited for the punch line. It never came.

"But not like this," Jacob hissed, his face an outraged snarl. And Roth snarled right back.

"Why not? I can do whatever I damn well please…" he shouted, then calmed suddenly - as though realizing something Jacob could not. "Oh. Oh darling... Soon you will understand what it is to be free, as I am."

"It was then that I realized what you were missing, Jacob. Our outings had been fun and in so many ways, we agreed.More than agreed! We fed off each other. Became greater than ourselves by working together. You made me feel like a young man again. Wild and untamed. You gave me thatedge,inspired me to want to be free again. Free from Starrick. To do as I pleased. I had once… but I had lost it, somewhere along the way. You freed me,Jacob Frye." Roth stared at him from his bath waters, his eyes suddenly centuries old and predatory and terrifying in a way that made Jacob feel small and weak and hunted. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe. He was pinned by the red in those eyes, forced to listen. "And when I realized that you yourself were still chained down by your own shackles, I felt compelled to return the favor. We're two sides of the same coin, Jacob. We deserve to be free together. Imagine what we could do. Free. For eternity."

Jacob hated the way he must've looked in that moment – doe eyed and shocked. He was used to walking with confidence in everything that he did, but now he felt naked more than just in the flesh. He felt more like a babe than a man.

God… was all of this his fault?

He shuddered, then finally vomited. Except it wasn't lunch that came to greet him. Blood splattered thickly across the floor and it only served as a gruesome reminder of what Jacob had done, what he had become. He vomited more. Blood twirled and thinned within the bath water that had escaped the tub during Jacob's thrashings. He watched it weakly and waited for his heartbeat to start again. It didn't.

"This doesn't have to be so hard," Roth said, water sloshing as he too finally exited the tub. "We should be celebrating."

And finally, that woke Jacob up.

"No!" He said, teeth bared as he backed up to the door. He had one hand up, promising violence, and the other behind him searching for the door.

"Now darling," Roth said, his voice suddenly tight. "Don't be this way."

Jacob found the doorknob and felt strength return to his bones. Rebellion surged into him, bringing him comfort in familiarity that he could throw himself in until he was somewhere safe to deal with everything else. He shut down his mind, put everything that had happened til now in a box, and focused on one thing - escape.

"Thank you for such a lovelynight," he sneered through his most charming, roguish smile - hiding beneath the mask of the man who led the Rooks. "But I don't think this is going to work out. It's not you, it's me."

And then he bolted through the door.

Behind him, he could hear Roth roaring and the splatter of wet feet on slick tile. He didn't look back. Instead, he slammed the door closed and quickly shoved a small nearby hall table beneath its knob at an angle, pinning the door in place. Not a second later, the knob began to jiggle wildly. Jacob ran.

He left a trail of water behind him like breadcrumbs. He was distinctly aware of the fact that he was naked, but the thought of 'maybe I could grab my pants on the way' was quickly dismissed when the sound of Roth breaking violently through the door echoed throughout the house. Jacob made a hard right and nearly let out a sob of gratitude when he saw stairs.

His gratitude faded when he reached the top of those stairs and saw the pale, wide-eyed faces of a gaggle of startled Blighters staring up at him.

"C'mon, boys," he said playfully, humor coming easily to him now that he so desperately needed its cover to stop himself from collapsing beneath the weight of what Roth had done to him. "I know it's big, but it's not nice to stare."

And then he had Blighters hot on his tail, too - taking the stairs two at a time. Jacob started running just in time to dodge Roth. The man stumbled, crashing into the railing of the stairs and blocking the Blighter's progress just as Jacob took off for the window at the end of the hall.

"Jacob! Wait!" Roth yelled, sounding far more concerned than angry all of a sudden.

Jacob didn't stop. Footsteps at his back and Jacob realized that he didn't have a lot of choices. God, this was going to hurt.

He let out a yell as he barreled through the window. Glass shattered in an explosion all around him, knicking him in countless places, and then he was falling.

Four stories.

When he landed, he tried to roll cleanly from the balls of his feet to his knees to his back and follow that momentum back into a run, as he had been trained - but the height was too great. Instead, he got a nice crunchfor his efforts and the white hot wrath of physics flaring through his naked body. Distantly, he was shocked the fall hadn't killed him. Around him, people screamed. They shrank from him in fear, breaking like the red sea to reveal his crumpled body on the cobblestones.

He hissed through grit teeth, trying to push down the pain in favor of focus, and looked up at the window. Roth was at the sill of his shattered escape route, looking down at him. The Blighters had already gone back into the house, no doubt running for the stairs to come for him. He didn't have much time.

"Don't do this, Jacob!" Roth called to him, as though he were a small child to be reasoned with. "You don't have much time!"

Jacob didn't linger to think on the man's warning. He forced himself up and prepared to run – and nearly broke his nose when his right ankle proved to be useless. He cursed, then caught sight of a carriage. He hobbled toward it and at the sight of him – wet, naked, mouth bloodied and eyes frenzied – the man tending to the horses ran in fright. Jacob climbed up, whipped the horses with a ferocity bidden by his terror, and was gone just as the Blighters reached the street. He left them behind, a naked man racing through the streets of London. And with dawn beginning to gently pinken the sky, he realized he wouldn't have the cover of darkness for much longer. He lashed the horses again and sped off to where the train should be.

God, how was he going to explain this to Evie?