Grayson sawed between her legs, and he came, his back arching convulsively, another orgasm shuddering his body like an electrocution. Panting, the last microns of his frustrations and anger burning out, he rolled onto the bed beside Alexia and let the sweat cool on his skin.
"You haven't fucked me like that in a while," Alexia purred. She stretched, cat-like, then rolled onto her side, trailing kisses along his shoulder and neck, her hands roaming over his pectorals and down, fingers brushing his flaccid prick.
The sounds of distant traffic wafted through their bedroom. The lights of the city filtered through the window, bathing the room in ambient light. But Grayson didn't need the light; he could see just fine in the dark.
"Are you still angry with me?"
"Yes? No? I don't know," Grayson said, and frowned, staring at the tiles in the coffered ceiling.
"Grayson."
"You wanted to experiment on our goddamn kid," he said. "And Sherry, too. A normal person would've left with the kids after hearing that."
"I was never going to harm them," Alexia said, exploring the topography of his muscles with her hands. "Nothing invasive or cruel. Veronica's my flesh and blood, and the future of the Ashford family. Sherry's…" She trailed off, thoughtful, as if she were hunting for the right words. Then Alexia finally found those words, and said, "Sherry's been through enough, I suppose. Besides, the G-Virus isn't useful to me. I've lost interest in William's work."
"What changed?"
"Reading his documentation of the virus," Alexia said, and she propped her head in her hand, mussed her hair with her fingertips. The strands fell limply back into place. "The idea behind it was to expedite human evolution by making them into, essentially, a new species capable of breeding. I'm not interested in creating a new species. I simply want to improve on ours."
"Sounds like Origin," he said.
"Not exactly, at least outside of principle," Alexia said, looking at him. "Origin doesn't change your species, dear. You don't go from human to super-ape. It mutates your genes. Edits them. Makes it so those beneficial mutations can be passed down to offspring, and then onto theirs, and so on. The goal of Project Darwin was to introduce and disseminate these edited genes among the human population, starting with us. Think of us like a teabag steeping in water."
Grayson nodded. "Got it." Something, a feeling, kept needling the back of his mind, and it took him a few moments to identify that it was irritation. He was irritated. "Why doesn't it bug you?" he asked.
"What doesn't bug me?"
"Being a goddamn eugenics experiment," Grayson said, and he sat up against the headboard and the bevy of expensive pillows, and looked at Alexia. "It should bother you."
"I was angry when I'd initially found out about Code Veronica and Project Darwin, yes," she said, and sat up, absently brushed her fingers over her breasts. They looked fuller, the nipples a dark pink. "But I've learnt that dwelling on those things isn't going to change anything," she continued, and looked at him, her eyes the precise color of blue glacial ice. "I am what I am. A clone of Veronica Ashford, the Mitochondrial Eve of Umbrella's ridiculous vision for humankind. I'm all for selective breeding, dear, but even I recognize a pipe-dream, and that's precisely what Spencer's vision is. A pipe-dream." Alexia paused, then she said, "Though I suppose I can't lay it all at that mummy's feet. My grandfather was the one who had initially funded Project Darwin."
"And my dad helped him," Grayson said, and sighed. "I just wish I knew more about Origin, about this stupid project. Dad won't talk about it, and we lost his research notes in Antarctica." He glanced at his hands, the sapphire on his wedding ring catching the light. The ring had belonged to Alfred, and Grayson wished he were here. "Maybe Alfred knew something. He talked to dad a lot."
"Alfred's dead, Grayson. There's no asking him anything anymore," Alexia said, with a degree of callousness that no longer surprised him; Alexia didn't get sad, she only got emotionally inconvenienced, and never for long. She looked at the ring. "It suits you, you know."
"Don't know if Alfred would have agreed."
"Had Alfred survived, I would have still commissioned a family proof for you," Alexia told him. "Serendibite, I think, would have done nicely."
"Is that even allowed?" he asked, looking at her. "I wasn't born an Ashford."
"Neither was I, technically. I was made. A clone of Veronica, remember?" she said, and chuckled. Grayson still couldn't understand how Alexia, how anyone, could be so blasé about being someone's clone, even finding a grim sort of humor in it. Then again, he thought, maybe that was how: gallows humor. "From what I'd gleaned from his notes, Alexander never introduced any of his genetic material to myself or my brother, so we're technically not his biological children. But it doesn't matter. I'm the head of the family, and if I say you get a family proof, you get a family proof. You're my husband, Grayson. An Ashford, even if your surname says Harman. It's only right you have proof of your legitimacy."
"I've never heard someone say I'm their property in such a beautiful way before," he joked.
"You belong to the Ashfords now, Grayson, whether you like it or not. But it's not so bad, right? I treat you well, and I love you. I've given you a daughter, and, who knows, at the rate we're going, I'll possibly give you another, or two." She grinned.
Grayson chuckled. "What about a son?"
"Unfortunately," Alexia said, and she sucked her teeth, "I can only produce daughters, I think."
"I was just kidding, Alexia," Grayson said, and he found himself smiling. He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled; it felt like it had been an eternity ago. "I'm good on kids. We've got Veronica and Sherry."
"Relax. I was teasing too, Grayson. Veronica's a handful as it is, and she's still a baby. We have plenty of time to mull over whether or not we want to give her sisters. Or brothers. I was already wrong about being sterile, so perhaps I can have boys, too?" She shrugged.
"Veronica's birth was traumatic enough. I can't imagine going through that again. T-Veronica's not a problem now, but I know you. You won't let it drop."
"I'm going to improve the T-Veronica," Alexia said, that obsessive glint in her eye again, the one he'd seen before she'd faked her death. "But I need Scott to tell me more about Origin. I need samples. I need to understand how the Origin Virus works."
"I don't know if that's a good idea, Alexia."
"Grayson."
"No," he said, automatically.
"I only need some blood and tissue samples."
"No," he repeated. Grayson rolled onto his side, his back toward her, and put a pillow over his head. Alexia slipped her arm around his waist, pushed her breasts up against the space between his shoulders. "Not gonna work," he said.
"You have questions about Origin. You said so yourself," Alexia said, her warm breath on his neck. She kissed the space behind the lobe of his ear, nibbled the cartilage. "Perhaps I can provide some answers," she continued, and she trailed kisses down his nape, between his shoulders. She knew precisely how to work him, and Grayson let himself be worked, and he liked it, even craved it. "I'm only asking for a little peek, Grayson. You know I wouldn't hurt you or Scott."
Grayson rolled onto his back, and Alexia took the pillow off his head and smiled at him. She straddled him in one smooth motion, her fingertips grazing down along his sides, then up, over his pectorals, and down, raking over the grid of his abs. Her inner-thighs were slick and warm.
"Jesus Christ, do you have an 'off' button?" he joked.
"No," Alexia said, and she leaned down, kissed him with tongue, with feeling. He hardened against her thigh. "And neither do you, apparently," she said, between kisses.
The kissing became more feverish, hungrier, and before Grayson knew it, they were making love again, Alexia riding him in sinuous waves, slick and hot around him, her fingers digging into his shoulders until they were practically gouging his skin. And she moaned, low and long, and rolled against him, impaling herself, again and again, with rough animal need.
They climaxed, and his orgasm blew his mind into a void, and he lay warm and useless on the bed, luxuriating in the post-coital afterglow like a sunbather. Alexia slid off him, and she kissed him with her soft lips.
The security system rang its alarm, and Alexia, startled, stood up and quickly slipped into her silk night-robe. Grayson pulled his boxers on. "Probably nothing," he said. "But just in case, I'll handle it. You check on Veronica and Sherry."
Alexia took her gun from its safe, loaded it. "I hate using these things. Guns were Alfred's bloody thing," she said. "If I still had—"
"But you don't have T-Veronica right now," Grayson said.
"No," she agreed, "I don't."
Grayson went downstairs, while Alexia went to check on the girls in their rooms. Someone had opened the front door, which Grayson closed. He checked the living-room, found nothing. Then he checked the others rooms, and found nothing, and, finally, he checked the kitchen. His dad was filling a glass of water at the sink.
"I thought you were sleeping," Grayson said.
"Can't sleep," his dad said. He still looked frail, tired, and he peered at Grayson with sunken eyes. His hair, usually very well-kept, stuck up at odd, stiff angles. "Needed some fresh air," he continued, and sipped his water. "Don't worry, I called the security people and told them everything was fine, it was my mistake."
"Dad, you need to get back to bed," Grayson said. "You're in no shape right now."
"Hope I didn't scare you," his dad said.
"I'm fine, Alexia's fine. We're all fine. Alexia's checking on Veronica and Sherry right now. Now get some sleep, dad, and I'll tell her everything's okay."
His dad stared at him for a long moment, something strange in his eyes that made Grayson deeply uncomfortable. Then he smiled and put his empty glass on the counter-top. "Yeah, probably a good idea," he agreed, and he shambled off toward his room.
Alexia was waiting for him upstairs. "The alarm stopped," she said.
"Dad accidentally triggered it. He went outside for some fresh air," he explained. "How are the girls?"
"They're fine. Sleeping now." They walked back into their bedroom, and Alexia unloaded her gun and put it back in the safe. "I'm going to shower," she told him. "Care to join me?"
"Sure," Grayson said, and he did join her, and they made love against the wall, this time from behind, and then, finally, lay in their bed to sleep. Grayson couldn't sleep, however; he kept thinking about his dad, how sick and peculiar he'd looked, standing there in front of the sink. "You asleep yet, Lex?" he asked. Alexia lay curled on her side, the sweep of her back toward him.
"I was getting there," Alexia murmured, and she yawned softly and rolled onto her side, their eyes meeting. He found himself smiling. No matter how many times Grayson saw her, Alexia was still the most beautiful woman in the world to him, and he could no longer imagine himself with anyone else, not even Annette. "Is something wrong?" she asked. "You're staring."
"Just admiring how gorgeous you are, and thinking I'm a pretty lucky guy. But that's not what I wanted to talk about, even though I'm sure you'd love to hear me talk about it." He raised himself onto his elbow. "Dad, he was acting pretty weird."
"He's on the mend, Grayson. Probably a little loopy from the medication."
"Yeah, maybe," Grayson said, and lay back down, letting the distant noises of the city wash over him, feeling a sudden pang of nostalgic longing for his apartment in Raccoon City, for the nights he'd listened to the cars and the people passing under his window.
Alexia slipped her arms around him, and threw her leg across his, hugging his side, her nipples brushing against his ribs. She kissed his shoulder, and said, "You need to stop thinking so much."
"Funny coming from you. You're always thinking," he said, and he wound his arm around her. He thought about his childhood in Antarctica, then, of the nights he'd spent in Alexia's room; they had been harmless nights, of course, the sort of sleepovers kids had with their friends, except sometimes they had kissed or hugged or held hands in the shy way kids did with their first loves, and on several occasions they had slept next to each other in their pajamas, sometimes on the floor or on Alexia's giant bed, when his dad and Alfred weren't hovering.
"That's precisely why I'm telling you to stop. I know the pain," Alexia said, and she squeezed him, gently, as if he were a stuffed toy. "It's irritating, always thinking about things. Scott's going to be fine. He was just having a difficult time sleeping. It happens."
Grayson hugged Alexia close, because the weight of her in his arms comforted him, reminded him that she was actually there, alive, and not in a tank pretending to be dead. And they slept, and Grayson dreamed, but the only thing he could remember from that dream was a woman who was neither Alexia or Annette, and she made him deeply uncomfortable.
The next morning, Alexia waylaid him at the bottom of the stairs. "Someone went into my laboratory," she said. She was wearing her silk robe, and a silk slip underneath it. She still hadn't done her make-up, or her hair, but she was one of those people who never really needed to do any of that to look good.
Grayson was wearing his boxers, and his robe. And though it looked stupid, and he knew it looked stupid, he wore his sunglasses, too; the morning light was too harsh for his eyes. "Maybe Sherry went down there?" he suggested, and, barefooted, padded past her toward the kitchen, where he could smell breakfast: bacon and eggs and sausage, and fresh coffee. "She's always been curious about your lab."
"Just come with me a moment," Alexia said, and she grabbed his arm and dragged him down into her laboratory.
Her laboratory looked the same as it had the last time he'd been there. Half Victorian study, and on the other side of the Plexiglass partition, a state-of-the-art laboratory that was all stainless steel and medical tile. Veronica Ashford stared haughtily at him from her portrait behind Alexia's desk. The painting had come from England, and it was the original work, not the glorified reprints that had hung in the Antarctica mansion, and in Alfred's house on Rockfort. He had never noticed it before, but there was a small indentation on Veronica's collarbone, and he wondered if it was a dent, damage from its long journey over the Atlantic.
"I hate that picture," he told Alexia. "It's like she's judging me, and arriving at the conclusion I'm a piece of Colonial dog-shit." Grayson walked the room, found nothing out of the ordinary. "You forgot to turn this off," Grayson remarked, and he turned the knob on Alexia's antique oil lamp, the one that sat on her desk next to the top-hatted, monocled dippy-bird he'd bought her as a joke, and the light sputtered in the glass and went out.
"I didn't put that lamp on, for one," Alexia said, and she started pointing out other things she didn't do: "That drawer was opened. Some of my books in the bookcase are in the wrong order. Someone opened my filing cabinet and rifled through it, and didn't bother to alphabetize them again. One of my Montblancs were taken out of its pen rest and left on the desk, and I only ever use my Montblancs to do important paperwork—never casual paperwork like bills or whatever. That's what the bloody BICs are for. And in my laboratory," and Alexia pulled him into the annex, where the bigger tanks of ants and sand were, "I found a finger-smudge on the glass," and she indicated the smudge, though it looked like nothing to him. "I don't touch my tanks, Grayson. It scares the ants."
"You sound completely insane right now," Grayson remarked dryly. Then he knitted his eyebrows, his mind doubling-back to something Alexia had said, and he said, "Wait, you have a system of which pens you use for what?"
"Why would I waste a Montblanc on something unimportant, Grayson?" she asked, as if his question had been an exceptionally stupid one. "Some of the pens I own cost as much as a minimum wage worker makes in a bloody year."
"Who pays that much for a stupid pen? You can buy a bag of them for like two dollars. Or just steal one from the bank, like everyone else does."
"Someone was in my laboratory," Alexia asserted.
Grayson shook his head, then said, "You know what I think? We were fighting, and then we weren't, and you were in a hurry to get nailed. Then you did get nailed, repeatedly, and forgot you'd left your stuff out." He grinned a cocky grin, and Alexia looked as if she wanted to smack him across the face; but she didn't. "What you need to do," Grayson continued, putting his arm around her and sweeping her upstairs, "is go have some breakfast."
"Look at you, all puffed up," Alexia said coolly.
"Lemme have this, okay?" he said, and smiled.
She sighed in resignation. "Okay, you can have it," she said. Then, "But I still maintain that someone was in my laboratory."
"Lex?"
"Yes?"
"Never said it properly, but I'm sorry," he said, and meant it.
"You'd made valid points, Grayson. I am immature for my age. But I'm working on it. Still, apology accepted." Her face betrayed nothing, a perfect white mask.
"Love you," he said.
"I love you, too," she said.
In the kitchen, his father was cooking, dressed in his butler blacks. He looked healthier, but there was still a certain uncharacteristic sluggishness about him that put, in Grayson's mind, the image of a man moving through molasses. "I was going to make cornetto and coffee like mom used to make, but figured something a little more filling was in order. And Sherry wanted eggs and bacon. 'Canadian bacon', she calls it." His father laughed.
"Canadian bacon?" Alexia said, as if she had been insulted. "We simply call it bacon in England. What you Yanks eat is what we English call streaky bacon, and it's detestable stuff."
"You know what's detestable?" Grayson said. "Beans on toast. Watercress. Mushy peas. Marmite. Licorice allsorts. Jellied eels."
"Nobody but the Cockneys eat jellied eels, and that's barely even a thing anymore, Grayson."
Sherry was listening to them, sitting at the small table in the corner of the kitchen, in her school uniform: a white long-sleeved blouse, blue tie, blue sweater-vest, and a blue plaid skirt. Veronica was sitting in Sherry's lap, babbling happily, and Sherry was feeding her tiny pieces of scrambled egg.
"Cornetto's like a croissant, right?" Sherry asked Scott. "I think I had it at a restaurant once. My mom took me out for breakfast at this little cafe in Raccoon City. It was good."
"Yes," his dad said, and smiled. "My mom was right off the boat from Naples, and made it every morning with coffee. Biscotti too, but that was for Sundays before church."
"What about your dad?" Sherry asked, genuinely interested.
"Dad was German. Came over from Dresden with his folks in 1925. Lucky him. When the Second World War hit, the place got bombed to hell. His sister—my aunt—died in the bombing, and his brother—" his dad cut himself off and shook his head, scrambling the eggs in the pan. "We don't talk about him. He died at the Bulge."
"Oh…" Sherry trailed off, sheepish.
"Not proud of it," his dad said, and he dropped the scrambled eggs onto a plate and said nothing else of his uncle.
Several plates were, gradually, introduced to the kitchen table: scrambled eggs, eggs Benedict, poached eggs, slices of thick toast, bacon ("Just bacon," Alexia said to Sherry, who insisted on calling it Canadian bacon, and when Grayson said it looked more like pork roll, both Alexia and Sherry looked confused), sausages, wedges of grapefruit, coffee, freshly-squeezed juice.
"Looks good, dad. Thanks. But you should really take it easy," Grayson said, and sat down at the kitchen table and poured himself a coffee. It steamed, and smelled good, and he drank it black. He piled sausages, bacon, and poached eggs onto his plate, and Alexia made it a point to say if he wasn't careful, it was all going to go to his gut, and wouldn't that be a tragedy, he was in such fine shape.
"Might've gone a bit overboard, but it's nice to be back to work," his dad said, and, as always, he waited until everyone else had been served before he made his plate and started toward the door to the adjacent dining room.
"You can eat in here with us, Scott," Alexia said, helping herself to a wedge of grapefruit, some eggs Benedict, and a coffee, which she added way too much cream and sugar to.
"I don't know, princess."
Alexia pulled out a seat for him and pointed to it, insistent. "Sit," she instructed.
His father sat down, reluctantly. He looked uncomfortable, like he had just sat on a large nail and did not want to make a show of it, for fear of embarrassing himself and ruining breakfast. "Thank you," he said to Alexia.
"We're far past the point of formality, Scott. You're what Alexander should have been to me."
"Scott used to eat in a separate room?" Sherry said.
"It's what servants did," his dad explained. "We usually took our meals separate from the family."
"The Ashfords had other servants? And who's Alexander?"
"Alexander was Alexia's father. And yes, Sherry, they had many servants in England. I was in charge of the domestic staff at the Ashford estate," his dad said, proudly. "And then Grayson finished school and we left England, and it was just us."
"In Antarctica?"
"Oh," his dad said, and looked at him. "You told her about that."
"It's gone now. No point in keeping it a secret," Grayson said, and shrugged, shoveling sausages and eggs into his mouth; he was hungrier than he'd realized.
"Manners, Grayson. You weren't raised in a barn," his dad chided, wagging his finger. "What example are you setting for Veronica, stuffing your face like that?"
Veronica made grabby hands for the eggs, and Sherry told her to settle down, and when she did, Sherry fed her another teensy piece, which Veronica happily devoured. "I'd say a pretty good example," Grayson replied, smiling. "Her appetite takes after mine."
"She certainly does share your bottomless stomach," Alexia agreed, and sipped her milky-sweet coffee. "My breasts can attest to that."
"Alexia, please, I don't want to hear about your breasts," his dad said. "Sherry's right there."
"I'm a girl, too," Sherry said, helpfully. Veronica stretched her hands toward Alexia as if to say: up. "She wants you, Dr. Ashford."
Alexia sighed. She put her coffee down, took the baby, and let her nurse. "I can't wait until she's completely on cups and solids," she said.
"She's your clone," Scott said, and Grayson couldn't tell if his father had meant that in the figurative sense, in the way every child was, in some way, a clone of their parents, or if he had actually meant it. But, Grayson thought, Veronica had his dark hair, his disposition. Certainly she had some of his genes? He wasn't sure how all of that worked, the genetics; Alexia had once tried teaching him with M and Ms, but she was a terrible teacher because she had no patience, and he was a slow learner, especially in subjects he had no interest in. Besides, did the usual rules of genetics even apply to mutants? Grayson didn't know, and he didn't ask. "She's smart as a whip," his dad continued. "She'll be weaned in no time at all, and then some. You were walking when you were just a couple months old, Alexia, and talking coherently by the time you were two. By five, you were speaking in complex sentences and already a formidable academic."
"I guess my genes are what's slowing her down," Grayson joked.
"You were a smart kid, too, but I suspect that was your mother's side," and his dad froze as if he had just said something he regretted, and he sipped his coffee in silence.
"You never talk about mom," Grayson said.
"Nothing to talk about," his dad said, clearing his plate and his coffee and carrying them to the sink, as if he had just suddenly lost his appetite. Water hissed from the faucet, and the garbage disposal grumbled. The dishwasher was ignored. "She's gone. End of story."
Sherry finished her breakfast, announced, "I'm off to school. This is getting uncomfortable," and she slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked off. "Thanks for breakfast, Scott. It was delicious," she called from the hallway.
Grayson got up, tailed Sherry to the front door. "Let me get dressed, and I'll drive you to school."
"It's okay. I'll just take the subway—"
The doorbell rang. Sherry hid, and Grayson closed his robe and knotted the sash, and he opened the door. The girl he'd seen Sherry with in Raccoon Memorial Park was standing on their doorstep, and she was smiling. She was dressed in her school uniform.
"Hi! Is Sherry home?" The girl held up a laminated emergency contact card with Sherry's personal information written on it, including her address. Grayson remembered filling it out; he had not wanted to fill it out, but Chapman wouldn't let Sherry go on the books without it, due to liability concerns. "She dropped this at the park, and I thought I'd bring it back to her since it's on my way. These things are a pain to replace. School has to go through their records, contact the people listed in those records, make a new copy. I lost mine once, and it sucked. Anyway, I just wanted to give it back to her."
Sherry put her head around the doorway of the living-room. "Eva?" She walked over and nudged Grayson to the side, and she studied the card as if she were trying to decide whether or not it was legitimate. "I could have sworn I put it on the coffee-table, because mom needed to sign it," Sherry said, and she plucked it from the girl's hands and pinched it, gingerly, between her thumb and forefinger as if she expected it to combust.
Eva shrugged. "Maybe you thought you did."
"Maybe," Sherry said, uncertain.
"I'll take it," Grayson said, and he plucked it from Sherry's hands and looked at Eva. "So it doesn't get lost again. Thanks for bringing it back."
"Eva. My name's Eva Popescu," Eva said, helpfully.
"Popescu. Romanian, right?" Grayson hazarded.
"Yep!" Eva beamed. "That's where my great-grandparents came from, on my dad's side. Anyway, Sherry, since I'm here, you wanna walk together to school?"
Sherry smiled, and said, "Okay, sure. Is that okay with you, dad?"
"I don't see why not," Grayson said. "Just be careful. Both of you."
"I will deliver her in one piece, and bring her back just the same," Eva said, and she saluted him like a soldier saluting their superior, then walked off with Sherry, the two of them chattering and giggling as they made their way down the paved walkway, banked on either side by flower-beds. "Your dad's really good-looking," Grayson heard Eva say, and then the girls were through the gate on the other side of the garden, obscured by the hydrangea bushes and the huge wrought-iron fence, and gone.
When he turned around, Alexia was right there, and Grayson wondered how long she'd been standing behind him, and how he hadn't noticed her sooner. "I don't like that girl," Alexia said. Veronica busied herself with Alexia's hair, twining it around her little fingers and pealing with laughter. Alexia's face remained, as ever, inexpressive, like a bored robot. "Something about her seems off."
"So she's a little weird. You're weird, too," Grayson said. "You should be happy Sherry's made a friend. She's been really down lately."
Alexia gently pushed Veronica's hand away and told her stop pulling mummy's hair, it wasn't nice, or very becoming of an Ashford. Veronica was undeterred, and very unconcerned with what was or wasn't becoming of an Ashford. She gummed slobbery fistfuls of Alexia's hair, pulled it. "Who is this girl anyway?" she asked as Veronica pushed her face into Alexia's silk robe, drooling on the fabric. "Do you know anything about her, Grayson?"
"Are you… actually concerned about Sherry? You? Concerned about William Birkin's kid?"
"I hated William. Sherry isn't William. Sherry doesn't draw me with buck-teeth and devil horns on the research team photographs, and write 'I'm stupid' in little speech bubbles."
"Even so, I'm surprised," he said.
"She reminds me of myself," Alexia said, staring at the door. "And she's been quite a dear with Veronica, don't you think?" Her gaze slid to him, her eyes, in the daylight, the exact shade of sun shining through thin ice. Sunlight burned her hair into a platinum aureole. "It's nice, seeing them play together. Veronica adores Sherry."
"So you like Sherry?"
"Why would I dislike her? Because of William? Annette? They're dead, Grayson. They no longer have any bearing on Sherry's life, nor any hand in her shaping."
"She's not a lump of clay, Alexia, for you to mold like Alfred."
"I have no intention of turning Sherry into Alfred, Grayson. I simply recognize the girl's potential."
A car pulled up to their house, and Grayson recognized it. It was the same car Jill had driven the day she'd waylaid him outside the Italian market. The door thunked shut, then another, and Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine pushed through the gate, made their way over. Jill was holding a sheaf of papers. Sunlight flowed across her mirrored sunglasses.
"Dr. Ashford, you're being subpoenaed for a senate hearing. They tried inviting you, but you said no," Jill said, serving the papers to Alexia. "The Committee on Bioterrorism Prevention wants to speak with you, gain some perspective."
Alexia glanced over the papers, expressionless. But Grayson could sense her unease.
"The NSA Derek C. Simmons will be there to testify," Chris said, smiling like an asshole. "Morgan Landsdale, an advisor for the Federation of Pharmaceutical Companies, will too. Morgan's been spearheading a campaign to create the Federal Bioterrorism Commission, so we can stick it to you Umbrella assholes." He stared at Alexia, his eyes like blue stones. Then, casually, as if he were saying hello to an old friend, "I wish you'd fucking died in Antarctica."
"Wouldn't you be so lucky," Alexia said icily. "Your sister killed my brother, Chris. Or might as well have. She didn't stop Burnside."
"Why the hell would she do that?" Jill said. "Your brother was a fucking fruit-loop." She looked at Grayson, and he stared at his reflection in her sunglasses. "She's gonna drag you down with her, Grayson, or make you her patsy," she said. "Just watch."
"You're making a mistake, Harman, clinging to Ashford," Chris said. His face had hardened since Grayson had last seen him, the seen-some-shit look in his eyes, like a soldier who had returned from some long, horrific war. "What happened to the cop we knew? You were a good guy once, man. A good cop. Marvin saw something in you. My sister saw something in you."
"He's gone," Grayson said simply. "That Grayson Harman died in Raccoon."
"More like he died in Antarctica," Jill said, and though Grayson couldn't see her eyes underneath the sunglasses, he knew she was looking at Alexia.
Grayson said nothing.
"Clancy and Marvin died for this?" Chris said. "For you to shack up with Dr. Strangelove and play house? They died because of Umbrella. Annette died because of Umbrella. Sherry lost her home and her parents because of Umbrella, and she might have been taken by Umbrella, too. Forrest, Joseph, the rest of S.T.A.R.S? Murdered by Umbrella." As Chris spoke, the muscle in his jaw twitched, and his face turned red. "Jill," he continued, almost hissing the words through his teeth, "nearly died because of Umbrella. My sister almost died because of Umbrella. Because of Ashford."
Veronica looked between the strangers, unusually still and quiet. Her little forehead creased.
"And you drag a kid into this shit with you and Ashford," Jill said, and shook her head. "Anyway, we've served you the papers. Expect a call with further details. They were going to mail you, but we volunteered to bring the papers to you in person." She smiled, but there was no warmth in it at all, and she and Chris turned around, walked through the gate, got into their car, and drove away.
"Simmons is on this Committee," Alexia said.
"Coincidence, I think not," he said. "And I've heard of Morgan Landsdale. He's been pushing for new counter-bioterrorism measures on the federal level, his biggest campaign being this shit with the Bioterrorism Commission. US government's using Raccoon as an excuse to give themselves even more reasons to meddle in other countries, all in the name of 'bioterrorism prevention'. It's like the new oil."
Alexia looked at the papers. "Spencer's really throwing me into the fire," she remarked, and she walked back inside, and Grayson followed. "I'm going to have to speak with Umbrella's lawyers, as well as mine. This is a right mess."
"What do you think they know?" he asked. "You think it's anything concrete?"
"If it was concrete, I would have been hauled off to some undisclosed location by the federals by now," Alexia said. "I just need a good script to work with, and the legal team at Umbrella is top-notch, and the company's pockets are deep. And so are mine. They're just going to ask questions. This isn't a trial. It's like how the PMRC jostled the Senate to ask Dee Snider about rock and roll, except, in this case, the PMRC is the Federation, and they're jostling the Senate to ask about bioweapons, not rock. And you know what? All that came out of that business was a parental advisory sticker."
"Guess that's one way to look at it," he said, and shrugged. "You're not worried, then?"
"No. If anything, Simmons, Landsdale, and their overlords in the Federation are just using this hearing as an excuse to push legislation that works to their benefit," Alexia said. "I'll go, answer their silly questions, and come back home."
"Just don't be gone long," he said.
"How did you survive without me for fifteen years?" She sounded both amused and flattered.
"By drinking," he said. "But I still thought about you. Every day." Grayson looked at her and smiled. Then, "I'll make sure I tune in to watch the hearing. Be nice to see you eviscerating a bunch of stiffs. Dad will want to see it, too."