Assassin--39-s Creed Rogue ⚡

“He always does,” Shay said quietly. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, dented compass. Not the one that pointed north. This one had been modified by Benjamin Franklin—a useless invention that pointed not to magnetic poles, but to the nearest source of Isu energy. It was the compass that had led him to Lisbon. To the earthquake. To his damnation.

He ordered the Morrigan closer. The wreck was a schooner, its mast snapped like a chicken bone, its hull bleeding splinters into the black water. On the forecastle, slumped against a barrel of salted fish, was a young woman in a tattered white hood. She couldn’t have been older than twenty. Her left arm was twisted at a wrong angle, and frost clung to her eyelashes.

“A chance. That compass will lead you to a small temple off the coast of Anticosti. Inside, you’ll find a carving of a man holding a sphere. Touch it. Feel what I felt.”

He stood on the frozen deck of the Morrigan , watching a blizzard erase the world. His new Templar companions, Gist and Monro, trusted him. But trust was a luxury Shay could no longer afford. He had once trusted Achilles Davenport, and that man’s arrogance had killed thousands. Assassin--39-s Creed Rogue

Hope’s lip trembled—not from cold, but from the crack in her conviction. “He said the ends justify the means.”

She had touched the carving. She had felt the tremor. And she had chosen to walk away from the creed, not toward it.

“Aye,” Shay said, gripping the railing. “But now she knows something more important: that I’m not a monster. I’m a man who learned the hard way that the Brotherhood’s freedom is just another word for chaos.” “He always does,” Shay said quietly

He stood, turned his back on her, and walked toward the Morrigan ’s gangplank.

Shay knelt. The blizzard howled between them. “Achilles sent a wounded girl into a winter storm, alone, to chase a rumor?”

“Wait!” she cried. “What if I choose to hunt you instead?” This one had been modified by Benjamin Franklin—a

Shay pressed it into Hope’s good hand.

Shay paused. For the first time in months, a ghost of a smile crossed his face. “Then I’ll see you on the ice, lass. And I won’t miss.”

The blizzard swallowed the wreck. Behind him, Gist called out, “Leaving her alive, captain? The lass knows our course.”

Shay felt the old sting. Assassins. His former family. His new prey.