I reached up and wiped away a tear that had fallen down Jake’s cheek. I didn’t know what to say or do, but I just couldn’t be angry with him.

“Is Jeffrey dead?” I asked.

“No. I went a little crazy on him for a minute, but there’s no way I could kill him. He’s my brother, and even though he’s done some terrible things…what he’s been through is even worse, Abby. You have no idea. I’m not trying to erase the horrible things he’s done to you. But I can’t justify hurting him any more than he already has been,” he said as his voice cracked. I could tell that this was hard for him and I wanted to know more, to understand what was going on between them, but I knew that would have to wait.

“What is this place, Jake? Where are we?”

“It’s the house I grew up in.”

“House? It seems more like a mansion to me. And the place I was in earlier, the old hospital, is that in this house too?” I asked as I moved closer to him, trying to understand the expression on his face. He was still keeping his gaze on the floor but some of the pain and sadness that had darkened his face since the night I left seemed to have lifted a bit, at least temporarily.

“Yes, it’s in the basement. My father was a doctor and he had his own clinic built down there before my brother and I were born. The main floor of this house, the one above the hospital, held his offices and the nurses and servants quarters, and the third and fourth floors are where my family lived. My brother and I shared this floor mostly. This was my bedroom from when I was born until I left to go to college, and I still used it when I came home for vacations, but once I was out on my own I never came back here…until now. My brother and I shared the bathroom between these two rooms and the room with the monitors on the other side is his. I guess he still uses that room as his bedroom.”

“Is this where you’ve been sleeping since I’ve been here? Have you been staying at this house with him?”

He was quiet for a moment and kept his eyes lowered to the floor.

“I…I’ve been sleeping in that room behind the mirror. I just wanted to be near you Abby, and to see you when the light came in through the window in the morning. I wanted so badly to believe that I could stand up to him and get you out of here. Each day when I saw you laying in bed so peacefully I swore it would be the last day he would get his filthy hands on you. I fought with him every day to get him to see how what he was doing was wrong. So incredibly barbaric and sadistic, and so much like our father. But I just didn’t try hard enough to stop him. I’ve been almost paralyzed by my fear of him for a long time and I don’t completely understand why. I know what I did is unforgivable and that I’m a coward. I hate myself for the way I let him treat you. I’ll never be able to forgive myself…and I know you can’t forgive me. I don’t expect you to…but I just didn’t…I couldn’t…”

Jake stopped short and looked up at me in alarm when he heard Jeffrey's bedroom door open. He grabbed my hand and quietly opened the door that led out into the hallway, then pulled me out with him and to the right. We slipped into another room across the hall that looked like an office of some sort. It was lined in bookcases and had a large desk in the middle of the room. There were two chairs in front of the desk and a couch with a coffee table that was covered in magazines off to the side. I glanced down at them and the dates on the magazines were all over ten years old.

“I think I know what rooms he has monitored and I should be able to get around all of the cameras. The only thing we might have a problem with is the elevator. I know that he has a camera in there.”

“Is there any other way down?” I asked, holding Jake’s hand and, for some reason, feeling safe for the first time since I’d gotten to that horrible place.

“Yes, there’s a back staircase that goes all the way down to the basement on the other end of the hallway, but I’m pretty sure he’s got cameras on that too. There is a third way down, but it might be a little riskier. Each one of these rooms on this side of the fourth floor is adjoined by a door. They’re a series of libraries my father had created for us because he expected both of us to follow in his footstept and become doctors, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with him or his work.”

“But Jeffrey did? What kind of doctor is he, Jake?”

“He’s not a doctor. He never went to medical school. There was an…accident when we were twelve and our father died. After that, Jeffrey spent all his time reading every one of our father’s books and journals. He went through all of the notes our father had taken for different laboratory experiments he had executed in the basement and developed some of his own experiments based on them. After our mother died from liver and kidney failure when we were twenty-one, Jeffrey started up the medical practice again. I don’t know how or where his staff or patients came from, and I never questioned him. I’ve just always turned a blind eye to Jeffrey's behavior because of everything he’s been through.” Jake stopped as a visible look of pain spread across his face, then took a deep breath and squeezed my hand.

“What we need to do right now is get you out of here. Beyond this door is a string of libraries. There’s a room in the very center that’s made up of a four-foot landing that wraps around the perimeter of the room and a stairway that goes from it to the third floor. I’m not positive, but I don’t think there are any surveillance cameras in that room, or in any of the libraries. They’re his domain and he usually doesn’t let anyone else in them. We should be able to sneak through and make it to those stairs without him seeing us. Then we just have to get down one more flight and out of the front door.”

Jake still had not made eye contact with me and I knew it was because he was so ashamed of everything that had happened. I still didn’t quite understand the power his brother held over him, but it was obvious that it had been hard for Jake to go against him. He had to be pushed to the brink of murder in order to break free of the hold his brother had over him. I decided I wouldn’t bring anything up though or ask him any questions until we were safely away from this place and from Jeffrey, and even then I figured it was up to Jake. He would tell me if and when he was ready.

“Ok, let’s go,” Jake whispered as he opened a door in front of us. I could tell that he was still very nervous and probably still scared of his brother, and to be honest, I was too. There was no telling what Jeffrey was capable of. We passed through the first library room and it looked much like the one we had just left, only without the huge desk. It had chairs and a couch and every wall was filled with books. The next room was the one that Jake had told me about. Instead of a room with furniture scattered around the center, it had a beautiful, hand carved railing surrounding a gaping hole that allowed the entire room below to be seen from above. We made our way to the other side of the room and just as we approached the staircase that would take us down to the third floor Jeffrey appeared through another door in front of us.