Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise, I just use their creations to have my wicked way with them. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story would be nothing without my amazing beta-team, Jadsmama and Ladysharkey1.

Persuasion: noun 1. liability or exposure to harm or injury; risk; peril. 2. an instance or cause of peril; menace. 3. Obsolete . power; jurisdiction; domain.

Danger

By the time I made it to work the next day, I was still no closer to sorting out the foggy mess of emotions than I had been when Edward left my house late yesterday evening. I really wanted to believe every word he said and forget about the way I found out about his history. My heart hurt for him and everything he had gone through when he was younger. After learning about his past, I kind of got where he was coming from; where all the anger and resentment came from, and even why he chose not to tell me.

Still, he should have told me before I had to find out the way I did. Even though I realized I barely had any kind of claim on him as it was, I had a feeling that whatever feelings were blooming between us, honesty and trust were going to need to be a huge part of it.

And that had been tarnished. Well…at least in part.

Deep down inside, I knew this whole mess wasn't so much about what Edward had done (or better yet: hadn't said) but about the whole 'Edward being in my life' thing. A part of me was so excited to finally figure out something about normal human relationships. It was the part that couldn't believe a guy like Edward would ever be interested in mousy, broken girl. The other piece, though? I was scared out of my wits of ending up hurt and broken yet again.

Just like before, only now I'd entered into it with both eyes open.

"Ugh!" I growled, pounding up the granite steps to the front entrance, wishing more than ever for a button that could just flash-forward to whatever moment in time when all of this trouble had been resolved and I could just go back to being blissfully alone in my own little bubble. Going out into the world and making real friends was starting to really screw with my mind.

Waving at the security guards whom I'd started getting to know personally over my days here at Volturi, I quickly made my way upstairs. I knew from a brief discussion with Jasper that a lot of stuff had come in from the van Leyden house the day before and I couldn't wait to get my hands on whatever little treasures were in the protective boxes I'd come to know so well throughout my research in archives.

It was like Tom Hanks had described it in Forrest Gump. Though instead of chocolates, we archivists dealt with papers and books stuffed in generic tan boxes made of special, acid free cardboard to protect the valuable items inside. Opening one of those boxes was like biting into one of Forrest Gump's chocolates: you never knew what was inside. It was what made it all the more exciting to actually lift the lid, breath in the musky smell of ancient paper and rifle your gloved hands through the contents, trying to take in as much as you could in as little time as possible to give you an idea of what you were up against before really diving in.

I lived for those moments, the adrenaline coursing through your frame as you took out the first portfolio and started drinking in words someone had written down ages ago and hadn't been seen by other eyes in God only knew how many years. Sometimes the words would be written in a neat, elegant script, other times in chicken scrawl that made it look like the whole document was written in Arabic instead of Latin alphabet and you'd spend hours deciphering their meaning.

A lot of people didn't get it but to me….it was what I lived for.

Besides, I could do with the distraction of losing myself in the history of others, even though the mystery surrounding Johannes van Leyden now seemed to be tangled up in my own mess of a personal life.

I smiled, my hand tentatively folding around the bottom of my little knapsack, the heaviness of Lady Amelia Cullen's diary carrying over into my heart as I remembered her words. I'd stayed up most of the night reading about her life and feeling sorry for the plight of that young woman. From the first pages of the diary I knew she'd lived a happy life in Scotland, though the money problems and the resentment it had caused between her mother and uncle were always lingering in the background.

It was such an easy life, or at least it sounded like it when I read about the long, sunny walks she took in the park surrounding Cullen House or the tea and dinner parties she and her mother attended. It might have become boring at one point, but it also seemed a whole lot less complicated than life in modern times could be.

She was cared for, and even though it went at the cost of her own personal feelings, I couldn't help but be envious of the ease with which her life had drifted on until her mother had come up to her room one day and dropped a bomb right on top of everything Amelia had taken for granted. Yeah, I could definitely do without being pretty much sold off to the highest bidder!

My heart had broken somewhere deep into my sleepless night, when I read about how much she tried to adapt to her new situation and willed herself to become at peace with her new circumstances, even when her heart was pining for another man; someone she knew she could never have.

It made me feel like such an idiot for losing sleep over my own puny problems when I knew that history was littered with many women like Amelia; girls who would have loved to have been in my position since it meant their hearts were actually free to fall in love with the men they wanted, instead of the ones their families had handpicked for them.

"Bella?" Jasper's voice sounded from behind a huge tan box. "Is that you?"

I chuckled, heading over to our twin desks that had been almost empty and organized a few days ago. Now, they looked like an archive had just exploded all over the place. "Looks like you need me."

"They brought this in about an hour ago." Finally managing to make eye-contact around all of the stacks, I could see Jasper was about one paper cut away from a complete nervous breakdown, his hair a wild mess around his head and his glasses perched on the tip of his nose as he went over shipping lists like they held the answer to all of life's questions. "Turns out the asshole wants to have all of Johannes' stuff out of the house today rather than tomorrow so he had a removal company come in and dump all of the boxes we were preparing for transport on our doorstep early this morning."

I gasped, knowing from the horror stories I'd read that this could only spell disaster. "No, he didn't!"

Jasper merely snorted derisively. "It was a good thing Esme decided to head over early or they would have just left all of this on the front steps," he cried. "I swear I caught the tail end of it all when I arrived and they were just shoving these boxes around like there was nothing but rags inside! If Esme hadn't been around I would have committed a felony…I swear." With that Jasper raised his hands to the heavens as if to beg for some sort of divine intervention.

"It's all here now, though," I tried calming him down, "and by the looks of it, those idiots didn't manage to do much harm to the docs." Most of the boxes looked okay, maybe a bit battered and bruised, but not so much so that we had to fear for the contents.

"Don't count your blessings yet," Jasper groaned. "Because they just pretty much dumped these boxes into the moving truck, everything's out of order. Hell, some of the boxes hadn't even been labeled yet!"

I sucked in a breath, knowing what this meant. In the archival world, inventory was everything. It was our only way to keep track of the millions of documents we were guarding and be able to find them in case we or someone else needed them. If the system failed, it would mean that hundreds of little treasures became lost.

Or at the very least it meant a whole lot of work; redoing all of our previous tasks.

"Besides," Jasper fumed on, "he wants all of Johannes' things out of the house by the end of this week, so we're going to have our work cut out even getting everything organized and ready to go before we can even think about righting this mess."

"This week?" I gasped. "But I thought you were weeks away from finishing inventory?"

"It's take it or leave it at this point," Jasper shrugged, smirking as his eyes flashed towards the boxes, lined against the wall. "And believe me, I can totally see that idiot just shoving all of his great-grandfather's possessions in a dumpster if they're not out of the study by Friday evening."

I cringed knowing from what he'd told me about James van Leyden, that Jasper was probably right. "So you said something about how 'we' had to go over there?" I could already feel the panic starting to rise. Remembering what both Jasper and Edward had told me about James van Leyden, his house was the last place I wanted to be, even if the great Johannes had lived there.

"I need you on site to help me or I'll never get this done in time." Jasper sighed, rubbing his face. "Apart from Bree, who had to take a personal day today, you're the only one who knows how I like the files to be organized."

"It's no problem," I lied, safely storing my purse in the designated desk drawer as I set to work. "What time do you want to go?"

We left just after noon, my lunch break filled with an awkward conversation over the phone with Rosalie, during which she pretty much strong-armed me into coming out to the bar near the community center with them. It turned out Mike and Tyler planned to be there as well. It was the one thing that swayed me to actually say yes, even when the prospect couldn't have been less appealing.

It had been so long since I'd seen Mike. Apart from a phone call the day after I'd arrived and a few random texts here and there, we hadn't really been in touch but I guessed that was probably because he was as busy with his own life as I was with mine.

"Do you and Alice want to tag along?" I asked Jasper as I filled him in on my plans. "I know it's short notice, but…"

"I'll see if she wants to go," Jasper beamed, still blushing profusely every time anyone so much as hinted to his newly blossoming relationship with Alice. "It sure beats watching television with my mom." His brow raised as he shot a sideways glance at me. "Is Edward coming too?"

Now it was my turn to blush. "I don't think so." After last night, I'd decided to give it a few days before I called him. I wasn't kidding when I told him I needed some time to clear my head and besides, I had a feeling that putting him in the same room with Rose would not bode well.

And come to think of it…as much as I liked Rose, I hated that she and Edward had been out on a date that one time. Even knowing what I did about the disastrous ending they'd had, it was still weird knowing she once thought about Edward like that.

"We're here," Jasper announced, pulling up in front of a building much like the one we'd visited yesterday; the same wealth and severity speaking from the tall façade as we walked up to the front door.

Except for the exterior, though, the contrast to yesterday's meeting with Carlisle Cullen couldn't have been any more different. Unlike then, the door was actually opened by the lady of the house herself; her haughty demeanor and sharp features immediately setting my body on high alarm as I reluctantly stepped foot inside the house.

"Don't worry," Jasper whispered as he guided the way, obviously much more at home in the van Leyden brownstone than I was, "she usually only hangs around for a minute or two before she gets bored."

"James told you we're in quite a rush to empty the room, right?" the woman interrupted us, her shrill voice sending shivers down my spine. "The contractors will be in there by next week so if the room's not empty…" Her eyes narrowed as she hovered in the doorway of what I assumed had been Johannes' study. "I'm expecting my husband home within the hour, so I'd advise you to make yourself available to answer his questions."

With that parting remark–spoken like she thought of us like her minions–she left us to solve the huge mess we encountered upon entering the room on our own.

"Fucking hell!" Jasper gasped, his eyes widening as he took in the disastrous state of the room. "They completely wrecked everything I've been working on." His face looked hopeless as he, like me, probably concluded that we weren't going to be anywhere near done on Friday. "What the hell am I supposed to do?"

"Maybe we should salvage what can be saved and pack all of this up as carefully as possible," I suggested, even though it went against every single thing I'd been taught. "We can just do the inventory back at our office."

"I don't know…" Jasper sighed, probably running through the list of risks attached to such a scheme in his mind, just like I did. "But I guess the risks outweigh having those people…" His mouth was pursed in a disdainful line as he nudged towards the open door "…dump Johannes' legacy in the trash."

"To work then?" I suggested, my eyes once again traveling the room, this time with a more professional look as I tried to discern where Jasper was in the process of cataloguing and packing the items inside.

I could see he was just about done with the bookcases; a few books still dotting the otherwise empty shelves as the main chaos seemed to be converging through the double doors that separated the library from the study.

"They sold the piano, did you know that?" Jasper whispered, pointing at the huge open spot near the sliding doors. He continued as I shook my head. "Aro was furious when he found out since the agreement they made with the van Leydens stipulated that everything inside the study and the library was to be left as it was so that we could create an exact replica of the room."

I sighed, sensing the loss of the crown piece–the piano behind which every note of The Land of Shadows had sprung to life. "What did he do?"

"What can he do?" Jasper shrugged, picking up a few documents that had fallen to the floor in the violence of that morning's removal company stunt. "James and Victoria know how much we want all of this so they know we're not about to walk away from preserving everything just because they've come up with a scheme to make even more money out of their famous ancestor's legacy."

I sighed, hating the money grabbing twerps even more than I already did. Being born into such a legacy…it was an honor I could only dream of. But if the state of the hallway and the few rooms that were visible as I walked in was anything to go on, they saw it more as a burden…or a potential cash cow. Apart from the study and the library which had been left as they were when Johannes had left it to fight in the name of his adopted country, every trace of the building's history had been stripped or plastered over in a way that felt almost iconoclastic.

Knowing we were up against the clock, though, I pushed my sleeves up, eager to get to work. "Do you want me to finish packing these books?" I asked while pointing at the final dozen or so books left behind.

"Huh?" Jasper looked up from the papers he'd been assembling as I ran my hand over a few of the spines, stopping on what looked like an old, leather-bound family bible. "No, they are the ones the van Leyden's want to keep so you can just band them together and set them aside for James to pick up when he gets here. Apparently some of them post such a huge emotional value to him that he cannot bear to part with them–meaning he just wants to see if he can squeeze more money out of us before he hands them over."

I nodded, quickly pulling on some white gloves as I set to work, following directions from Jasper as we tried to pack as many documents as we could, preserving them in their special containers to protect them during transport and storing them in moving boxes with as much organization as we could manage in the timeframe we were working in.

It was only after Jasper had stepped outside to take a call that I allowed myself to take a breather, brushing a few strands of hair out of my face as I sat back and looked around at all the hard work we'd put in. It was at that exact moment that I could feel that prickling sensation in the back of my head that you always get when you're being watched, the teasing remark about Jasper slacking off on the boss' time dying on my lips when I found not him but an unfamiliar face watching me from the doorway.

"Well, hello."

I gasped, my hand clutching my chest as I tensed up. How two friendly words could ever hold such a threatening undertone I would never know but in that moment, everything about this man and his creepy smile screamed 'danger' to me. A very familiar kind of danger…

"I-I'm sorry," I stammered without quite knowing what it was that I was apologizing for. "I didn't…"

"And who might you be?" he interrupted me; his cold, predator gaze zooming in on me as I wished like hell I'd picked out clothes that morning that would have made me blend in with the background a little bit more. Oh, to be invisible!

"I'm with Jasper," I managed to breathe, my body trembling with fear as he kept staring at me, his eyes commanding and petrifying as if they belonged to the Medusa. "I'm here to collect a few more boxes for the Institute…"

A faint smile crept onto his lips as he pushed away from the doorframe and started moving towards me. His smile was peculiar and the creepiest thing about him, I concluded as I stumbled backwards until I hit the solid oak of the cabinet. Rather than rendering him more appealing and likeable, there was something very sinister in it.

"Take whatever you like," he shrugged, taking another few steps towards me. "I'm not interested in any of this old shit."

"O-okay," I muttered. My body was rigid and locked with dread as I watched him approach me. The way he moved like a predator sneaking up on its prey, unnerved me and took me back to that time over three years ago when professor Banner had done the same.

I had to get out of there.

Now.

"I do, however want to get one thing straight," James continued, smiling once more as he took in my frightened state. It almost appeared as if he took pleasure in watching me squirm, my eyes flittering to the only exit, which was blocked by his towering frame. Please, Jasper, come back quick!

"I…don't…I," I shivered, pushing myself back against the bookcase as I tried to fight my tears.

"Shh," James cooed, a boney finger making contact with my cheek and slowly dragging over my skin as he continued to stare me down. "I have no intention of hurting you….at least, not if you promise to be a good girl and keep me updated on anything interesting you may come across while sorting through the old man's junk. Are we clear on that?"

Our bodies were so close that I could feel his exhale on my skin every time he took a breath, his eyes commanding me to speak while his finger continued its downward path to my breast. "Are. We. Clear?"

"Y-yes," I managed to stammer, trying with all my might not to faint or throw up.

"What's going on in here?" I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Jasper's angered voice spoke from the doorway; my body finally relaxing as I started to believe that history would not repeat itself–at least…not today. "Bella?"

James scowled at me as he took a small step back; his disappointment at being interrupted was plastered clearly on his face. "I was just getting an update from your colleague here," he answered in a coaxing voice. "No harm done."

With another menacing glare he finally stepped away, leaving me to pick up the pieces as I almost fell to the floor, my body boneless after having been so rigid with fear. "I'm sure you'll let me know, if I can be of any help," he added before finally leaving the room, the emphasis on his statement was not lost on me.

"Of course," Jasper answered in a half-growl before turning his attention to me. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," I spoke, though as he watched while I went through the motions of one of the breathing and calming exercises my Dutch therapist had shown me, I had a feeling he wasn't actually believing me. "I…I think it may be better if I left…this place." I breathed. "It's almost time anyway and…"

"Of course," Jasper nodded, giving me a wide berth as I scrambled to collect my things and wrap up what I'd been doing before James happened upon me. "Hey…do you want me to excuse you from joining Rose and the others tonight? I'd get it if you don't feel up to going out now."

I didn't but at the same time, something was telling me that it might be the best thing for me if I did. After all, what had years of hiding done for me so far? "No need…I'll see you tonight?"

He nodded, his mouth in a tight line as he walked me to the door and away from danger, though it wasn't until I'd reached the safety of home that I finally allowed myself to draw in a shaky breath as my shoulders released some of their tension.

Being able to study Johannes' life in the place where he'd actually spent his last years–his most creative years–had been a dream coming true for me. It was only now, though, that I found out how high the cost of it would truly be.

Thoughts?