Bella opened her eyes as the bright light cast shadows over her tired face. She hadn't slept a good sleep in god knows how long. The ground was cold underneath her. She didn't want to sleep in the bed, knowing that was his only way of showing "affection" to her, she wanted every ounce of power that she could get.

Her mind scrambled over the memories as they washed over her cold muscles, blanketing her in an endless, torturous reminder of her own stupidity. She had come running, leaving behind the arms of the man she didn't realize that she had loved until it was too late. She didn't want the death of Edward to be on her hands, she didn't want any death to be on her hands. Somehow she felt responsible, he was sure to remind her that this was all of her fault. Those things happened because of her carelessness. She had been trying to feel alive searching for the one hint of something that was trapping her in the sweet clutches of death that she somehow always wound up back in. She turned, her hazy eyes catching sight of the figure across the room staring at her with cold, hard eyes. Everything about him was cold and calculated. He knew that she was falling into the arms of Jacob, and he couldn't stand that she was moving on with somebody else. He wanted her all to himself, and his recent actions had proved that.

In the months following Bella running recklessly across the cobblestones in Italy, she was entranced with the idea of having Edward back in her life. She had already grown accustomed to the warmth of human life that she desperately missed out on, that she never realized just how cold it had been with Edward there. It had all been a ploy, she had found that out later though. Edward didn't take her back to Forks, no matter how much she pleaded with him. She was a figurative prisoner until it became a reality. He had cut all contact from everybody, taken away the little crumbs of her life bit by bit and so agonizingly fast she didn't even have time to take a breath to steady herself. He had taken her phone, sending cryptic messages to Charlie, and whomever else messaged-besides Jacob. He left every single message unread, and she wasn't sure what hurt worse-when he stopped talking altogether or that he thought that she was the one who gave up first. Something had changed between them, some kind of electricity zapped in the air, every touch of human skin against his sent currents of electricity through her and she realized that she was craving him more than the image of Edward that had been haunting her every decision.

Slowly, the control became more and more apparent as she heard the whispered truth come from Alice's lips through the floorboards. They didn't realize that she could hear when she was silent down here, they assumed that their careless whispers above the room-the prison-that he had created for her was strong enough to drown out the noise. It had been a year and a half since she had been with him. An entire year and more since she had seen her fathers eyes, or Jacobs' kind smile. She felt hopeless. Life was starting to drift out of her, and she realized softly that this cold floor was all that she would ever know. She had denied Edward's proposal, and that had just been the start. She was there to make sure that he was alive, but Edward had never had any real intention of exposing himself, and he had never asked the Volturi to kill him. He just knew that she would come running, and like the idiot that she felt she was, she did. Alice's words echoed in her ears, "Your plan worked, now what? Are you going to keep her here forever? Sooner or later, she isn't going to be around anymore Edward, you have to figure out what you're going to do." They weren't around Carlisle, Esme, Emmet or Rosalie. Alice, Edward and Jasper had broken off from their "family", Edward knew that Carlisle would never have been okay with the decisions that his "son" was making now. In the end it didn't matter, she knew she wouldn't be around to watch the fallout anyways when the realization set in.

Her eyes flashed towards the white ceilings, deep mahogany woods set like planks across the tops, as they spread across the vast area, deep blue-green walls connecting the room reminding her that she was indeed drowning at sea. He had tried to furnish the room in expensive taste, not that it mattered to Bella. She refused to use the vast white and mahogany canopy bed that took up the middle of the room. She laid her head against the plush white carpet and turned away from his gaze. His eyes were not the ones that she was desperately searching for in the dark corners of the room as she drifted off to the sweet embrace of sleep every night. How she longed to not wake up again to this nightmare. She heard the soft twinkling of an achingly familiar song start to play, and she knew what he was going to try to do. It was a routine, one that she thought he felt like would make her cold heart suddenly beat for him again, but she was just as much stone as he was these days and nothing could change that.

She felt his cold hand skate across her arm and she cringed away from it, which resulted in a disgusted hiss from her captors lips. He pulled her up, grabbing her arms so tightly that she knew they would be bruised later, he didn't seem to care if he hurt her anymore. Maybe he liked the fact that it seemed to be the only mark he could leave on her anymore. He pulled her limp body into his cold arms and she shivered. His hands skated down her back as he forced her to dance with him. She used to fight, kick and scream, now she knew that she didn't have the energy to kick against the cold stone that stood before her encased in his arms, she knew there was no point. The windows were too tall for her to reach, and there were no stools except for the one that had recently been added to the white and cream vanity to her room. She realized that it must have been because he thought that she wouldn't try to escape anymore. She had grown to realize that it was no use, the useless whisper of the scraping on cement ground had sent him down the bolted door and steep stairs in seconds. She remembered the way that his eyes looked, crazed as he realized that she had been trying to escape. She didn't try it again after the bruises had healed.

He was so cold, detached, and deadly-she wondered how she had been so blind and stupid to not have seen it in the first place. He pressed cold lips to her neck and she shuttered. "Why don't you just give in already, Bella?" His cold voice sent goosebumps down her spine. She couldn't fight anymore, the only thing that she had left to grasp was the fact that she could make sure he knew that she didn't want him. She didn't respond, and she wasn't sure if her voice would make her be able to anyways. He grumbled and shoved away from her in her silence. His dead gaze focused on hers. "Damnit Bella!" He threw his arms out in exasperation and she sunk down to her knees on the soft carpet again. He stared at her coldly, eyes of a killer staring back at her. She wasn't afraid anymore, in fact she had never craved anything more than she craved to sleep forever. "I have given you everything" -he throws his hands up until they return to his sides. "And yet, you're still here, being ungrateful." He crossed the space between them in one long stride as he clasped her chin up to face his cold eyes.

She stared deadpan back. He released her forcefully, shoving her backwards and she fell against the concrete, head hitting hard enough for her head to crack slightly against the force of the concrete. She was weak, her already frail figure thinner with the resistance of food. His eyes seemed unconcerned for a moment until he smelled the sweet tang of blood. His eyes widened and he grabbed her head in his hands. "Shit!" The word hissed through his teeth and he ran his hands through his hair for a moment. "ALICE." He bellowed over her and her mind was hoping that this was finally her peaceful escape.

She would never be so lucky.

.

.

.

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Jacob's eyes sprang open, the smell of another leech tingling his nose. He had been hunting, throwing himself into whatever death snare that he could to forget about her, but the strings of the imprint were woven too much into his soul. He didn't even get to tell her, not that it would have changed anything-still, he wished that she would have known. Instead, she left without even a single goodbye or a glance over her shoulder. He hadn't seen any of them, smelled their stench, not since she left. He had always wished that they would leave, he just never knew that they would take her with them. He had hoped that she would stay here. The pack was silent as his thoughts reared their ugly head. They tried to only communicate with him if they were reporting or there was an emergency. He was Alpha after all.

Sam had stepped down after Jacob challenged him, partly because the Wolf in him seemed to be winning more and more every day. He knew he had only won because Sam wanted to step down anyway due to Emily's growing belly, besides Jacob had Ephraim blood flowing through his veins and they all knew that it was his rightful place. Nobody challenged him. None of them knew what to do with his imprint situation-none of them had been away from their imprints longer than a day. Jacob could feel it rotting at his core, stretching through his veins like liquid fire the longer that he was away from her.

He was pissed, Charlie's features engraved into his head at the realization that she doesn't even talk to him as much anymore, the worry has aged him ten years. It slightly comforted him to know that he wasn't the only one that she had abandoned with ease, but then he realized that it didn't comfort him at all. The leaves crunched under his paws as the pain rippled through him. There was something off about today, something that he could feel brewing thick with tension in the air. He wasn't sure what it was, part of him didn't care as long as it gave him something to sink his teeth into.

His heavy paws pounded against the ground, fur furrowing this way and that in the scattered winds. He could feel the earth, and every one of his senses was alert to the sounds around him. The ripple of water in the stream about 500 yards to his right, the birds as they squawked and crooned in the deep depths of the trees about him. He could lose himself here, trapped in the sounds of the forest with nothing to worry about except the way that the dirt felt beneath his paws, and the warmth of the sun on his fur. He preferred this form more than the alternate, he felt less in this one, the animal instincts more natural. It was strange to be in the human skin that stared back at him remembering the burn of rejection that filtered through his eyes.

"Jacob".

Sam's voice jolted him from his thoughts as he snarled a reply back to the voice entering his peaceful moments as close to bliss as he could get.

"Charlie just called, he said he needs to talk to you as soon as possible."

…

"It's about Bella, Jacob."

For a moment he pondered whether to actually turn around, but the memory of Charlie's haunted eyes hoping for any sense of hope burned into his brain. Her name sent angry shivers down his spine. He didn't want to do this, but he knew that it must have been something important if it meant that Charlie had reached out to him, Sue and him mostly kept to himself except for Council meetings anymore. He turned his stride around and bounded in the direction of Bella's childhood home, painful memories tugging against his consciousness like a needle trying to close a wound. It never closed, only scarred and then ripped back open over and over again.

He stopped abruptly at the forest's edge where a pair of shorts were laid out on a rock just before the treeline. Charlie was learning as hard as it was for him to swallow what Jacob and the others were. His muscles contracted as he changed into the form that he had learned to hate so much. Slipping the shorts on, he padded his way towards the side of the lawn of Charlie's house, listening to the faint sound of wood under heavy boots on the porch. He hitched his breath in and moved closer to the house, Bella's scent was long gone, except for the lingering traces woven into her personal items untouched from her room. He couldn't bring himself to enter, this was hard enough.

"Jacob." Charlie rose abruptly off the porch, a duffel bag on his feet beside him. His eyes were alive with anger, sparked from a fire of rage he kept specifically for the Cullen's.

"Charlie." He paused then, his hands slightly shaking as he furrowed his brows in confusion.

His heart lurched at the words that he spoke next, completely caught off guard he tumbled back a few steps and then his mind went reeling.

"She's in the hospital, Jake. We got to go."