Grayson knocked on Alexia's door, despite her telling him it wasn't necessary ("We've had sex, Grayson," she'd reminded him, as if he'd already forgotten. "I don't think there's much privacy left between us"), and waited. Alexia told him to come in, and he did. She was wearing a robe, and nothing underneath it.

"Do you have an off switch?" he joked.

"Oh, poor man," she pouted, sauntering toward him. "Having to suffer intimacy with a tall, gorgeous blonde—one with, as you've so eloquently put it, a sexy accent."

"You'd think I wouldn't notice the accent anymore," he said, smiling.

"If it's one thing you Yanks always notice," said Alexia, brushing an invisible piece of lint from his lapel, "it's an accent." She grabbed him by the tie and pulled him toward the bed, unknotting her robe with her free hand, the corners of her lips turning up into a wolfish grin. "Now get on the bed, and stop making me wait."

Grayson did, and once she'd practically torn him out of his suit, Alexia rode him to an explosive climax, her nails gouging his pectorals, strong, wet thighs clamping tightly around his hips. She arched her back convulsively, wracked by an orgasm that looked almost painful in its pleasure, the slick heat of her sucking him deeper and holding him there until his groin burned.

When it was over, and they were both too spent to even entertain the idea of another go, they rolled down onto the bed, panting and sweating. Grayson felt like liquid, as if he were slowly seeping into the mattress. "I hope," he said, "Alfred heard everything."

Alexia giggled, and said, "He probably did. I certainly wasn't making it a point to be quiet." She raised herself on her elbow and fussed with her sex-tousled hair, but gave up when she couldn't get it to behave the way she wanted it to. She seemed distracted. "That little exertion in the drawing room reopened his bullet-wound," Alexia told him, tracing patterns on his chest. "He was in quite a bit of pain. Hobbled back to his room to redress the wound and change his trousers. I told him he shouldn't wear white."

"You okay?" he asked, and stroked her cheek. Compared to his mild tan, which was pretty pale as tans went, Alexia's skin was the color of sun-bleached bone. "You seem outta it."

"I'm fine."

"Alexia," he said, and propped himself on his elbow to meet her eyes, "I know you didn't invite me over to your room for just sex." He planted a hand on the curve of her hip, pulling her closer. "You know I'm not gonna drop it," said Grayson, with a defiant grin. "I know how to press your buttons."

"Especially one in particular," she teased, her eyes glinting mischievously.

"Don't deflect. But thank you. Had to practice on a lot of cherry stems."

"And by cherry stems, do you mean Annette?"

"Stop deflecting," he repeated.

Alexia sighed and sat up against the headboard, and the bevy of pillows shored up against it. "I spoke with Alfred, and we both agreed that you should know." She looked at him, as if she were searching his face for some kind of clue. "Alexander didn't die in a lab accident like my grandfather."

Grayson knew what Alexia was going to say next, so he said, "You killed him."

If Alexia was surprised, she didn't show it. Her face was a cold, white mask. "Yes," she said. "Alexander suffered from severe anxiety, no doubt because of his failures and my grandfather's growing animosity toward him. He was prescribed Lorazepam. I invited him down to my laboratory for a cuppa—he was always so eager to dote on me, and wanted to see what I was working on—and I slipped twice the dosage into his tea." Alexia spoke of killing her dad as casually as Alfred spoke of killing prisoners on Rockfort, and she almost sounded proud of it, as if murdering Alexander had been a highlight in her life. "Unbeknownst to him," said Alexia, after a long, conspiratorial pause, " he was the project I was working on."

Grayson sat up beside her, leaned back against the headboard and the pillows. Any rational person would have been scared by this revelation, and they would have been perfectly justified in calling Alexia crazy and running for the hills. But crazies had become routine for him—as unremarkable as the coffee he liked to drink every morning—and he'd never been a very rational man anyway. "And you infected him with the T-Veronica," he said.

"Yes," said Alexia, staring at him. She seemed to be bracing herself for something, waiting for some particular reaction. When he didn't give her that reaction, Alexia visibly relaxed. "He mutated into a monster," she continued. "I'd confined Alexander in a specimen cell, one specifically made for tyrants, in the BOW labs. And left him there to rot."

"And then you shuttered the BOW labs."

Alexia nodded, then said, "But someone got in there and released him."

Neither of them said anything for a while. Then Grayson asked, "Why didn't you tell me all of this before?"

"I suppose," said Alexia, "I was afraid you'd leave."

He looked at her.

"Wouldn't most people?" she asked, tipping her head to one side.

"Most people aren't me."

She smiled. "No," she agreed, "most people aren't." Alexia slid into his lap, hugging him around the middle and pressing her cheek against the bulge of his pectoral. "God," she lamented, theatrically, "it should be illegal for how bloody well fit you are. So much bloody muscle…"

"Definitely helped pay my way in Raccoon City," he said, grinning. "Got tips out the wazoo. And lots of phone numbers I never bothered calling."

Alexia straddled him in one smooth motion, and leered.

"God," he said, barely containing a laugh, "you're worse than me."

"You've had fifteen years to enjoy and grow bored of sex," she reminded him. "But I just woke up."

Wesker woke to the clack of computer keys, and sat up with a wince. He was in some sort of steel coffin, submerged in a shallow pool of icy liquid. His clothes were gone.

Across the room, which appeared to be some makeshift command center, a huge man was tapping something out on a toughbook, his back turned to Wesker. He wore tattered Umbrella coveralls splattered with rorschach blots of blood. "Dinnae freak out, Wesker. That auld BOW capsule saved your life," said the man, in a thick Scottish burr. His captor turned to face him. His face looked drawn and haggard, cheeks sunken under an untidy reddish-gray beard. He handed him his gear. "Gets absorbed through the skin," he explained, helpfully. "Had to strip off your gear."

"What the fuck is this?" demanded Wesker, stepping out of the crate. The liquid inside the crate smelled vaguely medicinal.

"BOW crate, or was. Are you nae listening?" asked the man. "It saved your life. Modified P-Epsilon. I cracked the formula." He grinned, but there was something unsettlingly Cheshire about his grin, and the Scotsman looked as if he'd gone days without sleep. "Ashford found a way to convert it from a gas to a liquid. Modified the bloody thing to induce metabolic torpor. Suppressed your metabolism just enough to keep the poison from killing you, long enough to let your virus repair the damage."

"What poison?"

"Nosferatu. Got you with one of its appendages. Carries a nasty, nasty toxin."

Albert studied the man for a moment, then glanced at the toughbook. On the monitor, a program was sequencing and analyzing some sort of chemical compound. That, Wesker knew, wasn't software readily available to just anyone, and he understood, then, who the man was. "Donald McNally," said Wesker. "I have my men looking for you."

"Aye, and they're dead," said Donald. "The antmen got them. Gamma, was it? Got some of Alpha, too." He held up Wesker's radio. "I've been monitoring the channels."

"Give that back."

Donald shrugged, tossed him the radio.

Wesker snatched the radio out of the air and clipped it to the shoulder of his Kevlar vest. "What is this thing you put me in? I realize you said it was a BOW crate. But you've modified it."

"A hibernaculum," said Donald. "Bloody botch job of a proof-of-concept, but it worked in a pinch. Just have to iron the particulars out." Behind him were several CRT monitors, obviously racked together in haste like the rest of the Scotsman's setup and wired to a portable generator. Grainy, monochrome feeds of the facility played on the honeycomb of screens, displaying a silent pantomime of zombies, and the few survivors who, very shortly, would not be survivors any longer.

"Nosferatu?"

"It's our nickname for it," said Donald. "A real shite nickname, I know. I'm compiling data on it."

Now it all makes sense. "You're a Monitor."

"Speaking of, how's Zinoviev doing? Haven't talked to that auld Soviet in yonks."

"Nobody can decide if Nikolai is dead or alive," said Wesker. "I, however, am inclined to believe the latter. He was always the resourceful type." He glanced at the toughbook, then at Donald. "What's stopping me from killing you and simply taking the data you'd promised my employer?"

"Simple," replied Donald, with a shrug. "I'm the only reason Spencer hasn't leveled this bloody place yet."

"So Spencer knows about the data. That voids our contract, McNally."

"Spencer only knows what he has to know," said Donald. "I've been feeding him a steady drip of shite data via the satlink. Just enough to whet the auld bastard's appetite and keep this place from falling down 'round our ears."

"What sort of shite data?"

Donald lit a cigarette. He offered him one, but Wesker declined. "Mostly," said the Scotsman, blowing a cloud of smoke and peering at him through the blue haze, his eyes glinting like steel buttons, "'bout Nosferatu. Auld fuck practically creamed himself when I told him the bloody thing took out a USS unit." He paused, smiled that Cheshire smile again. "Dinnae mention it was your men got killed."

"Good," said Wesker.

"You're my ride out of here," said Donald. "Got no bloody interest in sinking our deal, dinnae worry 'bout that." The Scotsman took a long drag off his cigarette, the bright cherry-glow catching in his eyes. "Umbrella's on its last legs. I bloody want out before the whole thing goes to shite." Then he grinned around the cigarette filter, and said, "If it's one thing I learned from Nikolai, it's jumping ship as soon as you know it's sinkin', and to never turn down the opportunity to make more money. And right now, the H.C.F.'s paying a whole fuck better than Umbrella."