Well...let's just say this chapter got a little bit away from me. Welcome to part one of A.D.'s story, I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for such great feedback on the last chapter - don't forget to keep letting me know what you think!

Chapter 21

"Let's start at the beginning." Alison rotates slowly around, just once, meeting each of our gazes. Then she joins Ezra in the front of the room, presumably so she can see all of us at the same time. "With Charlotte."

"Wait," Hanna blurts out, her face reddening in anger. "This goes all the way back to Charlotte?"

Alison barely glances in her direction. "I've known that Charlotte and I were related since the summer I disappeared," she declares, and though I barely flinch – honestly, I don't think anything can surprise me at this point – gasps echo around the room. The color has drained from Spencer's face. Ali smirks at her. "She didn't know about you or Mary yet, but everything else…she told me all of it."

Aria wraps her hands around the bars of her cage. "You knew that CeCe was Charlotte? The whole time?"

"She was the person I was closest to," Ali replies, and everyone aside from Mona and myself flinches. "Of course she confided in me."

I glance around at the girls trapped around me. They've spent so long defending Alison and learning to trust her again. They all must be just as crushed as Emily. I sneak a peek at Mona, flashing back to my reaction to learning that she was the original A, all those years ago. Finding out that someone you care about has been doing such horrible things has to be the worst feeling in the world. I'm glad that I never fully bought into Ali's "good" act. It makes this whole thing a lot easier to digest.

"She sat me down and told me the whole story right around the time that things with A were getting bad," Ali goes on. She narrows her eyes, crossing the room slowly and running her hand along one of the bars of the cage that Mona is trapped in. "I was scared for my life," she snaps. My sister crosses her arms and averts her eyes, her expression hardening. "And it was starting to become clear that staying in Rosewood wasn't going to help me take A down."

Spencer sets her jaw. Her teeth are clenched tight. Even from a few feet away, I can see her hands shaking. "Labor Day weekend," she practically whispers.

"Ali wasn't planning anything that night," Emily insists, staring confrontationally at Spencer from across the room, as if her girlfriend isn't standing in front of us right now, literally confessing that she's our anonymous tormentor. "She told us all of that in New York."

"Oh, New York," Ali sighs, letting out a low chuckle. "We'll get to New York. But first, Labor Day weekend." She folds her arms and paces casually around the space between our cells. "I'd told Charlotte all about A, and we figured out that the best way for me to get the upper hand was to make A think they couldn't get to me anymore. I needed to make them think I was gone. But to do that, I had to find a body double. And Charlotte told me just where I could find the perfect person…"

…

"What can I do for you?"

Alison stepped confidently up to the nurse's station at Radley, fixing the most winning smile she could muster onto her face. "I'm here to visit my sister. Charlotte DiLaurentis?"

The nurse on duty glanced briefly at the schedule on her computer. "Your name?"

"Alison DiLaurentis."

The woman quickly printed a visitor's badge and handed it to Ali, who pinned it to her shirt. "She's in the day room. Visiting hours end at six."

Alison followed the nurse's pointing finger down the hall and through a set of doors. She made sure they were fully closed behind her before turning and sweeping her gaze across the room. A bone-thin girl sat hunched-over at the piano, tapping at random keys with one finger. Two young women huddled on the faded couch, staring listlessly ahead. Alison wrinkled her nose instinctively, but after a moment her eyes landed on Charlotte, serenely reading a book in a chair near the piano. Ali narrowed her eyes at the image of her sister, wearing no makeup, a simple cardigan, and a ponytail. This was like an entirely different person than the CeCe Drake persona she adopted during both her approved and unapproved outings from Radley.

Ali cleared her throat sharply, and Charlotte glanced up, meeting her gaze. Then she cut her eyes away, tilting her head toward the back of the room, where a girl with long, stringy blond hair was bent over a table, scratching a pencil against a sketchpad.

Alison nodded, shot one last look over her shoulder to make sure the nurse who'd let her in wasn't lurking nearby, then squared her shoulders and stalked across the room. She slid into the seat across from the girl, who didn't even look up from her drawing.

"Bethany?" Ali asked after a long moment, keeping her voice high and light.

Bethany Young's head snapped up. She dropped her pencil onto the table with a jolt of surprise. Then her eyes narrowed, practically into slits, as she said flatly, "Leave me alone. I'm busy."

Ali arched a surprised eyebrow. Charlotte had warned her that Bethany could be combative and sullen, but she still wasn't used to being spoken to with so much disrespect. "I don't think you understand," she said, resisting the urge to snatch the pencil right out of Bethany's hand. "My name's Alison DiLaurentis."

Bethany's hand froze above the paper. Her face whitened, and she lifted her head slowly, meeting Ali's gaze under hooded eyelids. "DiLaurentis?" she repeated, her voice a low whisper.

Ali lifted her chin and nodded. She could practically feel Charlotte's eyes boring into her back.

Bethany closed her eyes. "What. The hell. Are. You. Doing. Here?" she hissed through clenched teeth. Her voice was trembling just slightly.

"I wanted to talk to you," Alison replied, staring calmly at the older girl. "About our parents."

"I have nothing to say to you," Bethany growled, and bent back over her sketchbook.

Ali shifted in her seat, undeterred. She'd known that getting through to Bethany wasn't going to be easy, and she wasn't leaving here until they'd at least established some sort of friendly relationship. She smiled charmingly and leaned forward. "What are you drawing?"

Bethany glanced up and gave her a nasty smile. Then she flipped a few pages back in the book and shoved it across the table at Alison. It was a sketch of Ali's mother. Her eyes were blacked out and the word "liar" was scrawled across her forehead and shirt.

Alison studied the drawing carefully, looking back up at Bethany after a long moment. The girl was watching her eagerly, clearly waiting for a reaction. But after everything she'd learned about her family over the past few months, she couldn't say that the cruel drawing was particularly inaccurate. Although she loved her mother, "liar" pretty much summed up what she'd been doing to Ali for her whole life.

Her lips curved into a smirk almost involuntarily, and Bethany reeled back, clearly caught off-guard. "Liar," Ali scoffed, sliding the sketchbook back across the table. "You don't know the half of it. Look." She laid her arms on the table and leaned forward, as if getting ready to share a secret. "I know all about the little affair our parents are having. And trust me, I'm just as angry about it as you are."

Bethany's face twisted. "Your slut of a mother – "

"Shh." Ali reached out and placed her hand on Bethany's arm. "No need to get ahead of ourselves." She smiled as genuinely as she could. "I have a feeling we have a lot to talk about."

…

"Once I got Bethany talking, she warmed up to me pretty quickly," Alison concludes, examining her nails. "As Labor Day grew closer, I gave her a yellow shirt and a 'friendship bracelet' with my name on it as a gift. I invited her to our sleepover and told her to wear them. She had no idea that what I had in mind didn't involve braiding hair and swapping secrets."

"Wait," Spencer interrupts, looking at Ali crazily. "So that letter Hanna found in your attic was real? You actually did lure Bethany to Rosewood that night?"

"Wow," Alison sighs, glancing back at Ezra and rolling her eyes. He just shakes his head. "If you're struggling to keep up already, Spence, this is going to be a long night."

"Hey, don't talk to her like that," Hanna snaps. Out of all of Ali's (former?) friends, she's seemed to turn on her with the most ease.

Ali tips her head back and laughs. Giving Hanna nothing but a sneer, she goes on, "While I was walking around trying to cross people off my A list, Charlotte was waiting for Bethany. And when she saw the girl in the yellow top heading for my house…she struck." Her face clouds over momentarily. "But she got the wrong girl."

I stare at the ground as she talks, thinking back to everything that Charlotte told the girls, way back in high school, about that night. It's getting difficult to sort out what was true and what she made up. "Charlotte hit me, but Bethany still ended up in the ground," Ali continues, smirking at my sister. "So in a way, I guess I should be thanking you."

Mona rolls her eyes. "I'm honored."

Alison ignores her. "My plan worked. My doppelganger was in my grave, and I was free to leave Rosewood and track down A without any distractions."

"And that's right around the time that I disbanded the N.A.T. Club. Or so I thought," Ezra jumps in, as seamlessly as if they've rehearsed this a thousand times. And now that I think about it, they probably have.

At his words, my mind flashes back to the paper I found wedged under Ezra's mattress. "So you really were in charge of the club?" I ask as he switches places with Alison, standing front and center now for his moment in the spotlight.

"Not initially," he replies, not looking at me. "It started out just like you thought – Jason, Ian, and Garrett's little perverted pastime," he says with absolutely no sense of irony. "By the time I found out about what they were doing, I'd just decided to start writing my book about Alison."

"Even I hadn't realized your fascination with me had gone that far," Ali snorts, but I notice her face brightening with pleasure.

"By the time I commissioned the N.A.T. Club to do some research into Alison DiLaurentis and her four best friends, Jason had already bowed out. And when Alison disappeared, I paid off Ian and Garrett to disband it altogether. There's no way I was going to let anyone find out about the videos I'd had them make."

Something's not adding up here. "But the club didn't end," I pipe up, furrowing my brow in confusion. "That video with Wren was taken months after Ali went missing."

Ezra nods, grimacing. "I found out Alison was alive when she sought me out that winter. I'd broken things off with her the night she disappeared, when I found out she was underage. But when she discovered that she was pregnant, she came to see me." Behind him, Ali folds her arms and nods along. The urge to punch her in her smug little face is suddenly so overwhelming that I have to tear my eyes away.

"My mother and Wren helped us arrange for an abortion," Ezra goes on. "It was settled in matter of weeks. But once all was said and done, I was still furious. So I told Alison I never wanted to see her again."

She walks up behind him and loops an arm around his shoulders. "We've come a long way," she says in a singsong. Across the room, both Emily and Aria look like they're about to throw up. I can't even imagine how both of them must be feeling.

Ezra throws her a smile, then continues, "I thought the N.A.T. Club was gone for good…until Jason paid me a visit a little under a year later. Apparently he found out his buddies had kept making videos long after they'd claimed, and when he confronted Garrett, he handed over his copy. Told Jason that they were working under my orders. Then Jason took the videos home and watched them all."

Spencer scoffs. "I'm sure we can guess which one made him so angry."

"He was enraged," Ezra says matter-of-factly. "He came to my apartment demanding answers."

…

"Ezra! Hey Ezra, open the damn door!"

Ezra sighed, recognizing the deep, slightly scratchy voice. He set down the stack of final essays on To Kill a Mockingbird that he'd been in the middle of grading and opened the door to his apartment with some reluctance.

Jason DiLaurentis shoved his way inside, his face red with fury. "Jason, what's going on?" Ezra asked, a little nervously. He'd only interacted with Alison's brother a few times, when Jason volunteered with Rosewood High's counseling department, but he'd never seen him this emotional.

Jason whirled on him, his hands clenched into fists. "I want an explanation for that recording. And it better be a fucking good one."

Ezra took a step back, his blood running cold. There was only one thing that Jason could be referring to. But that was impossible, wasn't it? There was no way he could know about… "Whoa there." He held out his hands. "I – I don't know what you're talking about."

"Cut the crap, man," Jason practically shouted. Ezra shot a glance toward the door. The walls in this building weren't that thick. "Garrett told me the N.A.T. Club was on your payroll. He sold you out. And he gave me that video of my sister."

Now that the secret was out and he could no longer feign innocence, Ezra felt irritation begin to swell. "You're gonna have to be a little more specific. Those guys were videotaping her for months."

Jason looked sick to his stomach. "Don't play dumb, Ezra. You know which video I'm talking about."

Ezra held his hands out flat, shaking his head. He didn't have to fake confusion this time. "Give me a hint?"

Ali's brother stepped closer to him, his arms shaking from how hard his fists were clenched. "The hospital. The abortion. That wimpy British doctor. Any of this ringing a bell?"

But Ezra had stopped listening after the word abortion. The floor felt like it had opened up beneath him. The N.A.T. Club had disbanded after Alison had disappeared. They'd sworn that they wouldn't film another video. And yet…Alison hadn't gone to see Wren until January, months later.

He cursed under his breath. Ian and Garrett – damn whichever one of them had taken that video. "Oh," he said out loud, unable to process what was happening fast enough to come up with anything else.

Jason looked murderous. "Who was the father?" he demanded, his voice growing dangerously quiet. "Was it you?"

"No!" Ezra blurted without thinking. Ali had been fifteen when she'd terminated the pregnancy. There was no way he could admit to anything about this. It would ruin his life. He took a deep breath to compose himself, and arranged his face into the most innocent, remorseful expression he could muster. "Jason, look. This is a huge misunderstanding."

Jason laughed incredulously, stepping back. "Yeah? You're saying my sister wasn't really pregnant? That video's just a big joke?"

"I can't answer that," Ezra lied, surprising himself at how easy it was. "I've never seen that video. I have no idea if Alison was pregnant or not."

"So then what's the deal?" Jason asked, his eyes shining with anger. "Why were you paying the club to spy on a bunch of teenage girls?"

Ezra forced a sigh, leaning against the arm of the overstuffed couch. "I was writing a book. About your sister." Jason's mouth dropped open, and he continued hastily, "I met her early that summer, at a…bookstore. She told me she was twenty-one, we got to talking, and I found out she lived in Rosewood. We only talked a few times after that, but I was just…fascinated with her. Your sister had a charm and charisma that I'd never seen before."

Jason snorted. "Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Now what the hell do you mean, you were writing a book?"

"I'd never met anyone who could lie as well as her," Ezra went on, the wistfulness in his voice only half-forced. "She was the perfect subject for a book. And I guess I got a little overenthusiastic with my research." He shook his head, lowering his eyes. "Trying to write that thing was the worst mistake of my life. It turned me into someone I never wanted to be."

"What's that, a disgusting creep?" Jason spat, and Ezra flinched. "So now what? Where's all your little research now?"

"I destroyed it. Shredded it, burned it, it's all gone, I swear to you. As soon as you get rid of your copy of those videos, nothing will exist."

Jason looked conflicted, but some of blind rage was gone from his expression, at least. "You better be telling me the truth."

Ezra nodded quickly. "I am. I regret that book more than anything. It's completely out of my life."

Alison's older brother gave him one last appraising look, then turned for the door. His hand on the knob, he looked back. "If I find out you're lying, Fitz…you're a dead man." The walls shook as he slammed the door behind him.

…

"I didn't know whether it was Garrett or Ian who took that video. But I needed to make sure that they couldn't do anything else that would cause me problems."

Aria's staring at him like she's seeing him for the first time. "Wh-what did you do?" she stammers, looking like she'd rather not know.

Ezra and Ali exchange a grin. "I'd been watching Ian for a while. I followed him when he stumbled out of the church the night Alison pushed him from the bell tower. And once we were far enough into the woods…" He trails off and cocks his fingers like a gun.

Aria gasps. Hanna's mouth drops. "You shot Ian?"

"Thanks for the suicide note, by the way." Ezra nods at my sister. "You really made it easy to get away with it."

Alison's grin widens. "Tell them about Garrett."

Ezra shrugs, smiling modestly, like he's talking about scoring the game-winning goal or something. "I paid off Wilden to take care of him on the Halloween ghost train. It didn't take much convincing – he knew Garrett was planning on reporting him for corruption."

"Oh my god." My hand flies to my mouth as my stomach starts to swirl. Ezra isn't just one half of A.D. – he's an actual freaking murderer. Any hope I had that we could possibly all make it out of here alive starts to slip away.

Ezra takes a few steps backward – apparently it's Ali's turn again. She places her hands on her hips, clearly in her element, telling her big story with a captive audience. "After about a year on the run, I figured out that A wasn't coming for me. I was just starting to think about coming home and making up some excuse for my disappearance when I learned that the game had started all over again. I spent the next nine months lurking around Rosewood, keeping track of you four and trying to figure out who'd been torturing me."

Mona cuts her off, her eyes bright. "And yet you never managed to figure it out."

Alison looks directly at her and lets out a harsh laugh. "I figured it out in less than a month," she scoffs, and my sister jolts a little, clearly taken aback. "Making everyone wear black hoodies at your birthday party? It was so obvious, it had to be you."

Suddenly Emily raises her eyes, speaking for the first time since this story has begun. A tear rolls down her cheek, and her voice comes out in a dazed whisper. "You told me you knew who A was. When you pulled me out of the barn."

Ali smirks at her. Any warmth that her eyes used to hold when she looked at Emily is completely gone, I notice. "It's amazing the things you can get away with saying when you're dead," she notes quietly, then shrugs and continues, "The thing was, I figured out pretty early on that I had no interest in stopping A. Watching you four run around like chickens with your heads cut off, frantically trying to find out who killed me…you were wrapped around my finger more tightly than you were when I was alive."

Spencer shakes her head in disbelief. "Seriously? You sat back and watched our torment just for entertainment?"

Alison sighs, staring longingly out at nothing. I shudder. "It was like being the center of attention and watching a play about my life all in one. Being on the run was so worth it. But then Mona got caught and sent to Radley, and it looked like the fun was over…until Charlotte somehow tracked me down that summer." She pauses, chuckling. "She felt so bad for what she'd done to me that night. But she made it up to me by telling me all about her new Radley BFF."

Everyone turns to Mona. I watch sympathetically as she closes her eyes and lets out a slow breath. "She told you about that?"

Ali smiles wickedly. I stick my hands behind my back to keep from trying to break through the bars of my cage to attack her. "She told me everything. And when she decided to start playing the game, she asked for my help. Of course, I had to stay out of Rosewood. But I managed to hook her up with a new friend I'd made."

…

Alison brushed a few strands of her itchy black wig out of her face, sipping delicately at her latte. These little hole-in-the-wall cafes were perfect for runaways – and girls were supposed to be dead – and she'd discovered plenty of them over the past two years.

She checked her watch, growing annoyed. She didn't like to stay in one place for too long, and her companion was running late. But less than a minute later, a girl with long blond hair and a slightly gaunt frame slid into the seat beside her.

"Took you long enough," Alison muttered, lifting one corner of her mouth in a half-smile. She paused, expecting a sarcastic quip in return, but when her friend stayed silent, twisting her hands together nervously, she frowned. "Sara?"

Sara Harvey, another missing girl who'd been running in the same circles as Ali for the last few months, shook her head, her hair falling in her face. "I'm in trouble, Ali," she whispered.

Ali raised her eyebrows, not even bothering to correct her about the name. "What do you mean?"

Sara grabbed a napkin from the holder and began tearing it up. Her hands were shaking. "I'm out of money. Completely. That's why I was late, I was – I was double checking all of my stuff, trying to find anything I'd hidden, but…I'm out."

Ali looked at her evenly. "So what does that mean?"

"I have to go back home, I guess," Sara said miserably, staring listlessly down at the table. "It's not like I can get a job. And I can't survive on nothing."

Ali's frown deepened. Although the two had only known each other for several months, Sara had told her all about her crazy mother, who constantly forced Sara to fake injuries and illnesses just for attention. It made Jessica sound almost saint-like. "But your mom – "

"I know. But what other choice do I have? I have no way to get money." Sara raised an eyebrow, looking suddenly like the queen bee of Cortland that she used to be. "And don't say a word about prostitution."

But Ali was barely listening. She tapped her fingers against the table thoughtfully, an idea taking shape in her mind. "Listen. I think I might be able to help you." She scooted her chair closer to Sara's and leaned in conspiratorially. "I have this friend. She just started playing this…game, with this group of girls in Rosewood. And I think she could use some help."

Sara wrinkled her nose. "What kind of game?"

"That doesn't matter right now," Ali said, waving her hand dismissively. "The important thing is that she could pay you. A lot. I'd do it myself, but, you know. I'm dead."

She glanced at her friend. Sara was peering at her curiously. Some of the color had returned to her face. Finally she took a breath and nodded. "I'm listening."

…

"At first everything was great." Alison leans casually against the side of Hanna's cage. Hanna eyes her distastefully. "But after a while…I got jealous. I'd been closer to Charlotte than anyone for years. Then suddenly it seemed like Sara had taken my place."

"You took that picture," Spencer blurts out suddenly, her eyes growing wide. I gasp, my mind flashing back to that photograph in the hidden section of Radley, but the other girls all look at her questioningly. "Of Sara and Charlotte. Didn't you?"

Ali nods slowly. "Playing the game brought them closer and closer," she says, her mouth twisting. "It was like I'd been replaced. So when I found out that Charlotte was planning to pull some stunt at Thornhill Lodge, I figured out the perfect way to get Sara out of her good graces."

Hanna's shaking her head. "Charlotte told us that she lured us to the lodge so she could find out if you were alive."

I roll my eyes. "I'm starting to think Charlotte might not have been the most honest person in the world."

Alison ignores both of us. "I don't know what she had planned for that night. But I did know that she asked Sara to show up in the red coat. I had one of my own lying around, so I put it on, snuck out there, and threw a wrench in her plans."

Mona stares at her. "You set the fire, not Shana."

"Of course I did," Ali replies matter-of-factly. Across the room, Emily moans as if in pain, her skin practically turning green. "Charlotte had no idea I was anywhere near the lodge. So when she saw a girl in a red coat throw the match, she blamed Sara. Stripped her of her A duties and threw her down in this bunker in the woods she'd discovered as punishment."

"You knew Sara Harvey," Aria mutters in disbelief.

"So if you were loving the A game so much, why'd you come back in the first place?" Hanna snaps.

Behind Alison, Ezra grins. "I love this part of the story," he declares, looking like a kid on Christmas morning. I feel my stomach sink. That can't mean anything good.

Ali's smile brightens. "Watching the game from afar was fun," she admits. "But after a while I got sick of staying on the sidelines, watching 'CeCe' mess with you guys directly while I couldn't participate. So when you four came to Ravenswood to look for me, I decided it was time to come home. And I suppose that brings us to New York."