AUTHOR'S NOTE: First things first, I am including a CONTENT WARNING for this story. There is sexual assault and attempted rape as a central theme to the story, as well as two characters picking their way through the aftermath of an emotionally messy situation. Lots of hurt/comfort and lots of darkness, building back toward an eventual HEA.

Secondly, this story is a sequel to my earlier story, Past the Edge of Reason. PTEOR covered the time period of the original Twilight and can stand alone. It involved a very protective Edward going the kidnapping route to protect Bella from James in Twilight. This sequel covers the New Moon and Eclipse time period with a new threat to Bella that Edward can't protect her from so easily, and it does reference events in PTEOR.

Chapter 1

Three words.

Despair. Rage. Vengeance.

They were the sum total of all Victoria cared about since the day James was taken from her. By him.

Edward Cullen. Or Edward Masen, as she now knew his human name to be.

She had learned other things about him, too. Causing him pain had become the sole reason for her existence. And if her mate had taught her one thing, it was that knowing your enemy was the key to defeating him.

She had all of eternity in front of her — an eternity that was supposed to have been spent with James. She could afford to be patient.

That was why she had visited every location she could dig up that the Cullen family had ever lived, seeking out any other vampire who had ever had dealings with them. It was why she was now in Chicago, the city of Edward Masen's human birth. She'd been working backwards.

Some of those vampires, particularly the yellow-eyed ones in Alaska, would undoubtedly contact the Cullens to warn them she was digging around.

Good. Let them. She'd learned enough to know that Edward and the psychic female in his coven would see her coming, regardless. So let the bastard squirm in the meantime, knowing that retribution was coming for his precious Bella.

That was the key to hurting him, of course. Isabella Marie Swan. His mate. The pale, seemingly insignificant human girl who was the focal point of all his attention. Killing her, slowly and painfully, was the fastest way to destroy Edward Cullen.

But she still needed an ally if she was going to get around his coven...an entire coven, all dedicated to protecting one human. The Cullens, with their unnatural yellow eyes and their pacifist lifestyle. Utterly revolting. But surely, even Edward must have an enemy out there somewhere, someone other than her who wanted him to hurt.

If she couldn't find one, she'd create one. She'd create an entire army of them.

But as fate would have it, no sooner than she was out of Chicago and back into the wild, in the seclusion of the closest forest, an ally found her.

"You've been asking around about Edward Cullen."

Victoria hissed, spinning around to look up into blood-red eyes. Evasion was her gift. It wasn't typical for someone to sneak up on her. "Who the hell are you?"

The tall, slender but muscular, dark-haired vampire took a step closer. Victoria took one in the opposite direction. It had been some time since the mere presence of another vampire made her want to bolt. There was an inherent cruelty in this one that had her escape senses tingling. He towered over her.

"You can call me Albert. And to answer your question, I'm the only living being who hates that son of a bitch as much as you do."

Victoria bared her teeth and snapped, surging toward him instead of away. Her instincts were also screaming that aggression was her best defense with this one. "I doubt that. What'd he do to you?"

Albert grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her into a tree. He was strong. Stronger than James. Unquestionably stronger than her. Something curled in her gut, something violent and feral.

"I'm the last human that Edward Cullen killed," Albert told Victoria, grabbing her by the throat with one hand.

She curled her fingers around his throat right back and snarled. "You don't look dead to me."

His eyes turned even colder, if possible, with a slow, burning rage. "Bastard didn't finish the job — somebody got too close. He hid my body and left me for dead. Left behind barely enough of his venom and my blood to start the change. I was in hell for nine days before I woke up as this. By then, he'd returned to his coven."

Victoria violently pushed Albert off her, pushing him back into another tree and stalking toward him. She felt more alive than she'd felt since Edward destroyed James. This was promising.

"I've done my research," she replied, her lips turning up slightly. "Edward Cullen had a type. He only killed rapists, murderers."

Albert's grin was lecherous, evil. "He missed one."

Yes, Victoria smiled, very promising.

"He killed my mate," she purred. "I plan to kill his — a human girl. But his entire coven protects her."

His cruel grin grew, showing his teeth. "Just kill her? Not very inventive, love. I think we can help each other, you and I."

Victoria jutted her chin out. His sadism didn't put her off. It energized her. "What makes you think I need you? What can you do that I can't?"

He grabbed her by the wrists and yanked her toward him. She let him, his violence a natural aphrodisiac to her.

"Oh, I thought you'd never ask."

Before her eyes, his features swam, changing, the red in his cruel eyes transforming to a warm, kind amber.

It was all she could do not to bare her teeth and jerk her wrists back from him. The vampire standing in front of her was now a perfect replica of Edward Cullen. Down to the shift in scent that suddenly assaulted her senses, a fog that was barely visible breathing out from his nostrils.

"Oh," she breathed, fascinated, staring into the face of her enemy. "But how?"

"It's my gift," the perfect image of Edward told her, even the voice a flawless imitation. He now spoke with the old-world elegance of Edward Cullen. "I was a chameleon in life, able to blend in anywhere. In this life, that ability is enhanced — a perfect blending of both physical and mental. What you're seeing is physical, a true change. What you smell and hear are simply because I will it."

He smiled a happy, crooked smile at her. "You say Edward Cullen's found a mate? I'd love to meet her."

A couple thousand miles away, as Edward blindly helped Alice go absurdly overboard for a birthday party Bella was sure to hate, he believed that the most horrifying thing he had to look forward to that evening was Bella's reaction to her 18th birthday. Because no way in the world did that happen without a few more arguments over his timetable for changing her and taking her to his bed.

In his mind, that timetable was graduation, college, wedding, then changing her himself when he could no longer convince either of them to delay it one more day. And then, at some point in the distant future when she was unbreakable, he had every intention of making love to her so often and so thoroughly that she'd forget he ever once left her unsatisfied. He was going to make it all up to her and then some, and he had no doubt it would all be worth the wait.

Bella's timetable, on the other hand, was...well...a little different than his. Mainly in where she thought sex should come in that lineup. And of course, whether college should be in it at all.

Actually, she would most certainly object to "wedding" too, if she'd known yet that it was on his list.

So the probability was high that they would spend the evening of her 18th birthday arguing about her being changed sooner rather than later, unless he could forestall that by getting his hands and lips on her the moment he saw her. Which would, he admitted to himself with a slow-spreading grin, likely be the least difficult mission in recorded history.

That crisis averted, he would then only have to worry about possible arguments over his fast-crumbling misgivings regarding premarital relations — or vampire/human relations, in general.

Either way, arguing was likely going to be involved. That seemed to be a theme lately. And he had a pretty good idea why.

In the past few months since their ordeal with James — and ever since he had verbally claimed Bella as his mate — their relationship had only become more and more physical. He was only just barely managing to keep his hands to himself anymore, to keep his fingers on the outside of her clothes and restricted to respectable areas of her body for him to be touching until he could get a ring on her finger.

Bella had never excelled at that in the first place, which did nothing to improve matters. He now spent a not inconsiderable portion of his time just trying to stay dressed and making sure Bella did the same. He also spent far more time with his tongue deeply buried in her sweet, warm mouth than he really should, at least if he valued his sanity.

He couldn't even remember the last time he'd stopped her attempts to straddle his lap, though he held her very carefully still when she did so...which was often. After all, he was the one who'd started it, the night he all but snapped before abruptly dragging her into his lap to inform her that she was his, his mate — that as far as the vampire in him was concerned, she belonged to him and him alone for the rest of eternity, and that he wasn't inclined to let her go. Ever.

And that had been about thirty seconds before he had her on her back beneath him, with her leg hitched securely up over his hip, intentionally pressing himself against her and asking if she felt what she did to him.

So yeah, he could hardly take the moral high ground on that one anymore. Not to mention that Bella, apparently, really liked feeling exactly what she did to him. If he said he was anything other than thoroughly and somewhat smugly delighted by that fact, he'd be lying. Although if he had any self-preservation instincts whatsoever, he mused, he should probably be at least slightly concerned that the woman he eventually planned to turn into a super-powerful newborn clearly enjoyed torturing him.

But for the time being, nothing else had changed, least of all the fact that he still risked killing her if he went too far. So when he inevitably still had to stop them both, it left Bella more frustrated every time he put the brakes on.

It had made him start thinking toward the future. This was not a sustainable situation. He wasn't so naive as to believe that it was. The threat of her hormones causing her to become bored with him felt very real, the horrifying prospect that her eye could be caught by someone flesh and blood, someone who could satisfy all of her needs.

If it was only about his virtue and his soul, rather than hers as well, he'd have just made his life easier and given in on the sex part a long time ago. Maybe not in exactly the way Bella thought, because that wasn't happening while she was still human, period, no matter how much he might wish otherwise.

But there were certainly other ways he was all too aware of, thank you very much, that he could take the edge off for her in the meantime. Repeatedly.

He'd been to medical school, more than once. He'd spent decades in a house with Emmett, for God's sake. There were safer ways to satisfy her, ones that didn't risk him ripping her in half when she inevitably found a way to push him straight over the edge.

No, knowledge definitely wasn't his problem.

But not dwelling on that knowledge 24/7, now that he'd let himself entertain the idea, however so briefly? Now, that was a different matter entirely. One that became more difficult by the day.

And he knew the very moment when it had started.

Bella's eager reaction to the idea of being his mate — and of him being hers — had set him on fire. The flames of his transition to vampiredom seemed trite by comparison.

He'd initially resisted saying the word to her, no matter how irresistible the burning urge to stake his claim in some way, in any way. Screaming and running were tame compared to what he had expected from her if he tried to explain that side of his nature.

What he hadn't known was that Carlisle had already outed him to Bella about that, without ever bothering to mention that fact to him, mentally or verbally. In fact, he was pretty sure Carlisle had hidden the memory of that conversation from him intentionally.

Thanks for that, Dad, he thought, wryly.

And that had led to Bella blindsiding him with it in her bed one night, a night when he was already dangerously on edge from a week of her not reaching out to touch him even once. If she'd been trying to drive him mad that week, terrified that he was losing her and not having a clue why, she'd very nearly succeeded. He'd been on a hairpin trigger for days, unabashedly prepared to grab her at a moment's notice if she'd tried to bolt.

He'd also spent a fair amount of time that week fusing his mouth to hers with an urgent intensity that should have scared the hell out of her. It had certainly scared the hell out of him, because despite her responsiveness to his touch, at least so long as he was the one to initiate it, she kept pulling away from him first. His control was shot by the first night of that. If she hadn't been the one putting a stop to things, she might have got everything she wanted sooner than she thought.

He would never, not for the remainder of eternity, forget what it did to him — mentally, emotionally, and physically — the moment he figured out what had Bella so upset, that he wasn't losing her after all. That she needed to hear him claim her.

The thought had truly never occurred to him that she would want to be a possessive vampire's mate, that she could accept that side of him so easily. Other than his initial phase of mangling trees in the forest, trying to convince her of what a scary, scary monster he was, he'd been resigned to keeping their relationship just as human as he could manage, denying his other side and all the unspoken desires that went along with it.

But she didn't just accept it. She embraced it, her hands immediately blazing a very dangerous trail down his chest to his stomach and beyond. She'd asked if he belonged to her too.

Cue the flames. If he hadn't forced himself to flip her under him and get her hands under control at that very moment...

In short, Bella greatly underestimated his desire to give her a birthday present he knew she wouldn't turn down.

He was also a little more motivated than usual to get her to accept any kind of gift from him. She certainly hadn't turned down Jacob Black's idiotic dreamcatcher in the school parking lot that morning, his baser side not-so-helpfully reminded him, and his teeth clenched, his venom rising.

And that was the other problem with finally letting himself think of Bella as his mate while she was still human.

The civilized, mostly human part of him — the side he desperately tried to nurture, especially when it came to Bella — had a pretty good grip on things.

People had friends. Bella had friends. One of them was a human-wolf boy with a little crush on her. But she wanted him, not the pup who didn't even know he was a pup yet, so it wasn't really a big deal. He could grit his teeth and be gracious about it, congratulate himself on his decidedly modern, non-monstrous take on things.

The vampire in him, on the other hand — his very real monster — started screaming mine at the top of its lungs anytime another male expressed an interest. It always had, honestly. But now that he regarded Bella as his mate, it was so much worse. The vampire in him, if allowed to go unchecked, saw only two options: rip Jacob Black's fucking head off, or better yet, grab his mate and claim her right there in front of him. Really claim her this time.

Right. So wolf murder it was, then, if it came down to it. Because not even Bella and her raging teenage hormones would likely go along with the latter idea. More the pity.

And he was decorating with his sister at the moment, so he pretty much needed to think about literally anything else.

Bella. Birthday. Gifts. Giving Bella gifts. He wanted to do that.

Expensive ones. Preferably ones involving large diamonds. If those diamonds somehow marked her as belonging to him, that was just fine with him too.

Okay, not helping.

Actually, he suddenly realized and narrowed his eyes suspiciously, Bella knew exactly how much he wanted to give her gifts. In fact, there was a good chance he'd just nailed down Bella's seduction strategy of the evening. It wouldn't be the first of such strategies. He hoped, more than he should, that it wouldn't be the last. Masochistic lion, indeed.

But he really, really didn't want her birthday ruined by a fight. He wanted to disappoint her even less. He needed some idea how to avoid both, all while keeping both of their clothes on.

With a sigh, feeling vaguely like a perv, he scanned his sister's thoughts for at least the umpteenth time in the last hour. If Alice had already seen what would happen between the two of them that night, he had a disturbingly low number of qualms about using his sister's visions as an advance warning system for all things Bella-sexual.

It wasn't like he didn't know just exactly how weird that really was. It was just that knowing ahead of time what was going to happen with Bella was one of the few defenses he had left. Bella didn't know it yet, but she'd all but eradicated the rest of them.

But the vision Alice had next was not one he could have missed, even had he not chosen that very moment to go picking through her head.

It was set in motion by a decision made 2,200 miles away, by a pair of vengeful vampires somewhere outside his birthplace of Chicago. Certainly not by any decision he made. But none of them would realize that until far too late.

Alice had been carrying a ridiculously enormous and ostentatious cake on an even more enormous crystal platter — no, he didn't know what kind of cake, and no, Bella wasn't going to care — when three things happened all at once.

One. Alice gasped in horror and went completely rigid, her eyes going wide and glassy.

Two. The crystal platter shattered all over the floor.

Three. His entire future shattered right along with it.

Because through the lens of Alice's visions, what he had just watched was a violent attack, of the worst kind imaginable, being perpetrated on his intended, his mate, his Bella.

By him.

By him.

Clothes ripping.

A punishing hand impacting her beloved face when she resisted, her disbelieving eyes wide and scared as that hand then grabbed her by the throat.

Those same hands...his hands...restraining her with bruising force as she struggled desperately...futilely.

Tears rolling down her face.

Her begging him, pleading with him to stop.

And he didn't.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Author's Note:

Just throwing this out there for anyone who wants to know, because long descriptions of original characters is something I despise enough to not even attempt it.

When I picture the character of Albert, I'm totally picturing and hearing Hook from Once Upon a Time, black leather jacket and full-on smoldering pirate eyes and all. Although I kinda love that character, so I'm not really sure what he's doing here in my Twilight story as the ultimate bad guy, but hey, here we are.