Author's Note: Sorry this is late, guys. I wanted to make sure that I got this chapter right. Thanks to everyone for the reviews and encouraging words! They really do provide inspiration.

Chapter Ten

Bella's seventeenth and eighteenth birthday presents from Aro far surpassed the dresses and jewels he'd bought her for her past few birthdays. On her seventeenth birthday he gave her closure and on her eighteenth he gave her a purpose.

For the first year that Bella lived with Aro, she never truly felt safe. She knew that she should feel protected, though. Aro's New York City townhouse housed some of the most powerful individuals in the world. James had the ability to track just about anyone, as well as having a minor talent for telepathy. Alec could cause a person to lose control of their senses. His twin, Jane, seemed to be able to cause almost anyone pain with just a glance. None of their powers appeared to work on Bella, much to Aro's delight and Jane's anger.

Living with these powerful individuals didn't give Bella any reason to feel safe—not with the man who had killed her parents and raped her still out there. She would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, never able to remember her nightmare, but knowing it had to do with the missing piece of her memory from that fateful night. Aro would always come rushing in and, over time, she would let him rub her head and say soothing things to her. His touch reminded her of her mother and father's. Aro was beginning to feel like family.

Bella didn't truly accept him as family until the day of her seventeenth birthday. He'd told her he had a special gift for her at breakfast that morning.

"I want you to enter my mind. I have something to show you," he said. It was a request he'd never made before.

"Sure," she responded with a shrug, shoveling a fork full of Aro's homemade chocolate chip pancakes into her mouth. Aro had a cook, but he'd insisted on doing all the food preparation himself for her birthday.

Aro gestured for her to proceed. Bella entered his mind and found herself in what appeared to be a memory. In this memory, Aro was questioning a dreadlocked man. The man spoke in what Bella thought to be rapid French. Aro's thoughts told her that the man was proclaiming his innocence. Aro touched the man and delved into the man's memories. Quickly, Aro found what he was looking for.

He was looking through the dreadlocked man's eyes as he slit Bella's parents throats. Then Bella came in and he grabbed her and—

Bella jumped out of Aro's mind. "Stop," she hoarsely commanded. "Why would you show me this? On my birthday of all days?"

Aro pursed his lips, as if displeased by her reaction. "Don't you see, Isabella? I found him. The man that did it. Don't you want to know what happened to him?"

Bella shook her head. "No. I don't want to see that. Just tell me that he's dead now."

Aro smiled at her. "I killed him myself. He won't hurt anyone anymore, dear. You can rest easier now."

Bella knew that she shouldn't feel relieved about anyone's death, but she did. She wondered what her Batman would have thought of that, but then quickly dismissed the thought. He'd abandoned her long ago. Aro was her family now. He'd spent the past year looking for the man who'd harmed her and her parents. He'd fulfilled his promise.

Bella turned to Aro and managed a smile. "Thank you. I think I might be better able to let go of my grief and fear now. I know I haven't really been training like I said I would, but I want to now. It's time I start letting you teach me. I don't ever want to be defenseless again."

Aro had agreed and they'd spent the next year training. He taught her how to use her anger to bolster her powers. He told her that her shield was perfect, but that her telepathy and telekinesis needed work. Mostly, though, she needed to learn proper mind control. It was something that Batman had always avoided teaching her.

During that year, Aro had discovered her penchant for theft. Bella knew from his thoughts that she'd aroused his suspicions, but he never caught her until she tried stealing a necklace from Jane's room.

She had been trying to float the necklace out into the hallway when Aro's voice interrupted her concentration.

"Ah, I see you've discovered quite the hobby."

The necklace clattered to the floor. Bella turned to Aro, but kept her gaze trained on the ground. "I'm sorry. Sometimes I just can't help myself." She was ashamed. Surely, Aro would kick her out for this.

He surprised her by chuckling. "Oh, dear. You seem to think that I'm displeased with you. That's not the case at all. I'm glad that you're letting your instincts guide you."

Bella stared at him in confusion. "But I was stealing. People aren't just supposed to take things from each other." It was almost an exact echo of her Batman's words. His deeply ingrained lessons were almost impossible to shake.

Aro softly clucked his tongue. "But, why were you stealing from Jane?"

"She tried to use her powers on me today," she told him. "It didn't work, but I thought that she needed to learn her lesson. That, and I really liked the necklace."

Aro rubbed his chin. "That sounds like you were dispensing justice to me. She wronged you and you punished her for it. Justice. And it's okay to benefit from doling it out. Those who don't are fools."

"But—"

"No buts. Let me ask you something: did it make you feel good?"

The corners of Bella's lips curled upwards. "It did. I would have felt even better if I'd completed my heist successfully, though."

Aro nodded. "I think that I may have found your passion. How would you feel about learning to become a cat burglar?" he asked, tone as casual as if he were asking her about the weather.

She scrutinized him. "It would depend on who I'm stealing from."

"It would be from people who make money in the most rotten of ways. Stealing from them would be the first part of a message I would send them about what I think of their actions."

Bella cocked her head. "And what would stealing from them say?"

"That there's nowhere they can hide form me—not even their own home. Also, we'd get to benefit financially."

Bella smirked. "Yes, because God knows that the one thing you need more of is money."

"The money wouldn't be for me, dear. It would be for you. I know how you feel about me giving you money, so I figured that this would be an opportunity for you to feel like you've earned your way."

Aro was right. She hated feeling like his charity case and always took the bare minimum from him. Stealing from bad people, making money off of it—those all sounded like good things to her.

"Okay, I'll do it."

Once she'd agreed, Aro increased the hours that she spent working on fine-tuning her powers. To Aro, the most important aspect of this training was mastering the art of mind control. She took turns training with James, Alec and Jane, all of whom's powers involved mind control in a way.

Each of them had a different style of teaching Bella. Alec did it in a thoughtful, logical manner. He explained what it was like to force yourself into someone else's mind. He walked her through it step by step.

Jane took a far different path than her twin's. She made sure that the experience was painful for Bella. She made Bella watch her as she used her power's on one of the less powerful people working for Aro. She would explain what she was doing with a glee that bordered on psychotic. Meanwhile, her latest victim was left writhing on the floor. After a while, Aro agreed that Bella didn't have to train with Jane anymore.

James was perhaps the best at training her, but his methods made Bella the most uncomfortable. He, like Jane, also used one of Aro's people to work with, but he made Bella use her powers on them instead. It was hard for Bella to do, as she was on friendly terms with most of these people. James would remind her that even if she liked the people that she was stealing from, she would still need to wipe her identity from their memory.

His training exercises were always difficult, but they helped Bella to improve. She would have been completely fine with having James as a teacher if he didn't continuously express a romantic interest in her. He gave her the creeps and she wasn't going to go out with him. His stare made her skin crawl, much like Jane's did.

Finally, on her eighteenth birthday, Aro let her go on her first heist. She was to steal a painting from an investor who was participating in insider trading. It didn't go quite as smoothly as she'd planned it. She'd entered the house without any issues. She'd found the painting she was looking for within minutes. She'd figured out how to get the painting off the wall.

Everything was going right until she saw a comic laying on the floor. It was a Batman comic (of course). Immediately it made her think of her Batman. He'd hardly recognize her now. That thought pleased some deep, dark part of her.

The comic was distraction enough that it had caused her to knock over a lamp. It woke everyone in the house up and it caused her to do the one thing that she didn't want to do: wipe all herself (but not the missing painting) from their memories.

In the end, it was worth it. She'd never felt a thrill like it when she left the house with the painting. Her heart was pounding and a smile crept onto her face. When she returned to Aro and saw how pleased he was, she knew that she'd found her calling.

xXx

When Bella woke up the morning after Edward's revelations, she couldn't help but to think of everything Aro had given to her for seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays. Were they all lies? Had Aro not really killed the man who'd ruined her life? Was he making her steal from people who were helping Edward's family? Never mind all of the terrible things Edward had told her about Aro's past—she couldn't even bring herself to think about that at the moment.

She was torn and didn't know whom to trust. Every part of her ached at the thought of Aro betraying her. She knew he was capable of treating people as if they didn't matter, but he never thought that he'd treat her that way. He'd always acted as if she were family. What if it was just that, though—an act?

She was supposed to meet him at the house he'd bought on the outskirts of Princeton in about an hour. She would bring the jewelry that she'd stolen yesterday with her—along with the million questions that she would make Aro answer.

xXx

Bella breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth when she pulled into the drive of Aro's palatial estate. She found herself pinching her nose in frustration after a moment. It was a move that was very reminiscent of Edward's own mannerisms. Thinking of Edward gave her the courage to get out of her car and make it up the walkway to Aro's door.

She was startled to find that Alec was already opening the door before she could even ring the bell. Aro usually had someone of lower status than Alec answering the door for him. It struck her as odd that today of all days Aro chose to have Alec do it.

"Hello, Bella. Aro's waiting for you in the sitting room." Alec gave her a polite smile. Those were the only kind of smiles that he ever gave her. She'd never questioned it or his intentions, but she was beginning to.

Bella followed him down the long hallway to the sitting room. "Why's Aro having you answer the door today?" She looked around the house and noticed that it wasn't filled with Aro's disciples, as it usually was. "Where is everyone?"

"Aro asked that everyone clear out of the house. He wanted to speak with you alone. I'll be heading out, too, actually. Aro just wanted someone to stick around to play butler." Alec gave her a playful eye roll, but both his expression and words didn't ring true to Bella.

Bella and Alec entered the sitting room to find Aro sitting on an expensive leather sofa, sipping on a cup of tea. He smiled widely at Bella and got up out of his seat.

He reached out to Bella to hug her and she allowed him to, even though her body stiffened at the contact. For the moment, he was no longer someone that she trusted with her body.

Aro released her and frowned. "I can see that Edward has been telling tales about me." He looked over Bella's shoulder. "You can leave now, Alec."

Alec nodded and quietly exited the room.

Aro turned to Bella and gestured towards the couch. "Have a seat, please."

Bella stayed in place. "I think I'd rather stand."

Aro looked annoyed at her disobedience, but then flashed her a smile. "Suit yourself." He sat carefully back down on the couch and resumed drinking his tea.

Bella glared at him. "Don't you have anything to say for yourself? Anything at all?"

"Well, dear, you haven't accused me of anything yet, so I can hardly defend myself."

Bella could feel herself lose her grasp on her telekinesis. Aro's cup of tea flew out of his hands and spilled itself on his Persian rug. Bella didn't bother with apologizing.

"Why don't you start with the fact that you never told me that you were some sort of immortal thing called a Justice Seeker?"

Aro frowned at the stain forming on the expensive rug, but made no move to clean it up. "You already had a hard enough time trusting anyone after your parents death. Would you have ever put your trust in me to help you if you knew what I was?"

"No, I wouldn't have. That was for me to decide. You took my choice away. Had I known what you were—some sort of monster who kills innocent people, then I would have never gone with you the day my parents died."

The only outward sign that Aro gave of his anger was the pursing of his lips. Bella knew his tells, though. If he was letting that much slip, then he was in a rage. "I don't kill innocent people. I'm not sure what Edward told you, but I only kill those who deserve it. It's my job."

"I think that may have once been true, but I think you've skewed the guidelines of who deserves. Can you honestly tell me that you only kill the scum of the earth? The rapists, the murderers, the pedophiles? Or do you kill those that you feel have wronged you—those who have stood in your way?"

Aro crossed his legs and folded his hands over his knees. "Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices in order to ensure the greater good. Sometimes, the ends really do justify the means."

Bella shook her head. "It's not right Aro. It will never be right. Just like what you did with Edward. Taking him from his parents was definitely not right."

Something dark flashed in Aro's eyes. "He is my son. Carlisle and Esme, they were going to raise him to be weak. They see the world through rose-colored glasses. Edward needed to grow up knowing about the evil that exists in this world. He would have never had that growing up with them."

To some extent, Bella agreed with him. The world was a dark place. No one knew that better than her. She still didn't agree with what Edward had done, though.

Bella looked at Aro. It was as if she was truly seeing him for the very first time. Each and every one of his actions now seemed so planned and manipulative. She'd always known him as a man who always knew the right thing to say. She'd just never seen it in this light.

Still, there was one more thing she felt she owed him for. It was the one thing that had always kept her tied to him, that inspired her devotion to him.

She stared him down. "You never found the man who killed my parents and raped me, did you? He's still out there, attacking other girls, taking their memories, isn't he?"

Aro's response was quiet. "I wanted you to hunt him down, someday. It is your right. You weren't ready for it then, but you still needed closure. So I gave it to you. I was planning on telling you when you graduated college this May. Now, you're just finding it out a bit earlier than planned."

Bella felt a pain in her chest that she hadn't felt since her parents died. She could feel her eyes brimming with tears and did nothing to stop them from falling. "What? Did you think I was going to hunt him down and kill him? That I was going to become someone like you? Now, that will never happen."

She whipped out the stolen necklace and threw it onto the couch. "There. This is the last time I steal anything for you. I want you to stay out of my life. I want you to leave Edward alone, too, while you're at it."

Aro made no move to stop her as she exited the house, but she felt his thoughts brush against her mind. He always had to have the last word.

Eventually, my dear Bella, you will see it my way. There are no good guys and bad guys in this world. I will be waiting for you whenever you come back. You are my family and nothing will ever change that.

Bella let him feel her displeasure and shut him out of her mind. Forever.

xXx

Bella drove without a destination, but somehow still found herself parked out in front of Edward's house anyways. She had spent much of the ride over sobbing uncontrollably and couldn't seem to bring herself to stop.

Edward opened the door right as her finger hit the doorbell. She could feel his distress. His thoughts were muddled. "Oh, Bella," he sighed.

In this moment, she could admit to herself that she needed him. In a move that surprised even her, she reached out to hug him. After a moment's shock, he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her back.

It wasn't enough for Bella, though. She wanted more. She needed their mental connection for comfort, so she decided to open it up a bit more than usual.

Both of them gasped in unison. Bella hadn't just opened the bond a little more—she'd opened it all the way. For the very first time, their minds had completely merged.

Oops.