A/N: Twilight belongs to Stephanie Meyer. I'm just playing with her characters. The ideas of Jasper as the God of War and Peter just knowing shit belong to Idreamofeddy.

Hey, guys! I'm back and so much sooner than usual, lol! This is the second scene from week 5 of Jasper's absence. I know it's taking longer to get Jasper home than hoped for, so I hope you can forgive me. As I said in the last chapter, week 5 was just getting so long and I didn't want to make you guys wait for all of it together even if that is typically my preference.

I can't thank Kayozm and Juliangelus enough for being my pre-readers. They are so patient with me and my need to feed my perfectionism, lol. Longing wouldn't be the same without them, and I just love them both to pieces.

I haven't done this in an author's note in a while, but I just want to wholeheartedly thank everyone that takes the time to read my story. Everyone that reads, follows, favorites, and reviews has my deepest gratitude.

Trigger Warning: This chapter contains a brief torture scene. In my opinion, it's not explicit, but in case that bothers you, skip the flashback.

Now, here is a scene from Peter's POV. I hope you enjoy it!

oOo

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2081

PPOV

The forest in these parts had long since gone quiet and empty, as it had been for almost the entire four weeks we'd spent out here with Savannah. She was bound by the thickest titanium cable chain and shackles Charlotte and I could find, wrapped around the trunk of an enormous red cedar tree. Between Savannah's inferior vampire strength and the fact that she had only fed intermittently over those weeks, she was handily contained.

Now, in actuality, I wasn't a fan of torture, not committing it nor being on the receiving end. I didn't believe it was necessary and it certainly wasn't humane—our time in the Southern Wars beyond emphasized that—and I would gladly keep that bit of my humanity intact, thank you very fuckin' much. However, this was a special circumstance. Savannah was different.

Even then, if not for her return into our lives, I never would have even considered hurting her like this. I would have been content to let it all lie if I had never seen her face again. It had been easier to acknowledge that we were all Maria's victims, even if that fact didn't affect just how intensely I hated her, before she'd shown up in Forks and abused Jasper all on her own, no matter how good her reasons for doing it supposedly were; Maria wasn't here to frighten her into committing atrocities this time.

I had thought making Savannah pay would feel different. I had been baying for her venom since she emerged from the trees that fateful day weeks ago now, absolutely foaming at the mouth for it like a rabid dog, and I expected a payoff that was as powerful as my hatred for her; but that's not how it went. I thought it would feel good, bring me joy. I thought it would be vindication for her many crimes against both Jasper and myself, and God knows it shouldn't have been hard. It had certainly started out that way, but it had soon lost its luster, and I found myself considering the philosophical side of this. It made me think about the kind of man I had striven to be over the last century and the man I wanted to be now. Torturing someone, especially since I personally knew the pain, misery, and trauma of it, didn't fall in line with those ideals, even if it was Savannah. I knew Jasper well enough to know that he wouldn't fault me for trying to hang on to as much of my humanity as possible, at least in this—I was a vampire, after all, some loss of humanity was to be expected and that didn't bother me, not the way this did; I didn't want to come even the slightest bit close to being like Maria and Savannah.

**Flashback**

It was an overcast Texas day, a storm brewing not quite close enough for thunder and lightning to overtake the gloomy sky, but the conditions of the weather were the last thing on my mind.

We had recently fought the most current incompetent army. It had been an easy, if impromptu, battle to win, despite being outnumbered three to one. Jasper and I did most of the work, there not having been enough time beforehand to properly train the most recent batch of newborns and teach them to focus just enough to be useful. Maria hadn't cared just how new they had been, and thus not yet capable of becoming a cohesive unit of soldiers, so she had Jasper kill them after the battle was done. She did it as a punishment, aware that feeling the emotions of the newborns he culled had become difficult and painful for him as the years passed.

Now only the four of us remained—Maria, Jasper, Savannah, and I, and Maria had decided it was time for one of her always sadistic experiments. There was no stopping her when she got an idea in her head. There was no stopping her at all. Actually, that wasn't quite true. Occasionally, Jasper could distract her with sex but that only ever put off the inevitable for a little while. The extra time Jasper's efforts allowed only gave her the opportunity to refine her plans and make them that much more depraved.

I was on my knees at Maria's side, a tiny hand gripping my hair, fingernails dug deep into my skull, wrenching my head back mercilessly; the pain in my scalp a steady sharpness that didn't quite capture all of my attention, which was stupid—it was always a mistake to ignore Maria whenever she decided to sink her claws in you. Nothing could wholly distract me from the sight of Jasper though, also on his knees with Savannah at his side, a half-foot of distance between them. Savannah wasn't touching him, knowing from previous experience what a bad idea that was, but her hand was stretched toward him as if she wanted to. I would soon see that contact wasn't necessary for what was to come. I wasn't entirely sure what was about to happen; I only knew from past experience that it was nothing good and that knowledge brought on an acute sense of terror and dread.

I resisted Maria's grip at first but soon yielded to her. My body remained tense as a coiled spring but continuing to challenge the contact was folly. That knowledge wasn't enough to keep my mouth shut.

"Don't," I pleaded, my words nearly silent but still heard by all. "Don't do this."

She wouldn't listen, of course, and I was pressing my luck in speaking at all. I knew I would pay for it later, but that was later.

Maria tsked in warning at my minor rebellion and I quieted easily enough. Words didn't matter. Maria couldn't be reasoned with and she reacted about as well to pseudo-orders as a hurricane listened to the pleas of its victims to spare them.

I stared at the scene before me—Jasper's unnaturally still body just sitting there, waiting without complaint or struggle—for as long as I could before I averted my eyes. I hadn't yet learned never to look away from his suffering.

Maria wouldn't have it. She yanked at my hair again, hard enough and with enough force for my head to start to part ways with my neck. I could feel the fine cracks crawling over my skin, spreading by the second as she continued to apply the force necessary to keep me from healing.

"Look at me," she demanded, her voice a dangerous hiss. To my complete and utter shame, my eyes snapped up to hers in an instant. "It seems you must be reminded of your place," Maria said, jerking my head back even farther so that my throat opened up as though she had taken a knife to it and slashed it open, venom pouring from the wound and running down, down, and down my bare chest, soaking my loose shorts until it reached my knees and pooled in the dirt. "So you will sit at my feet like a dog and watch what must be done. Your care for him will sear his suffering into your memory, and it will flay you open so that you suffer along with him. You will feel it in your heart, your soul, your bones, muscle, and sinew. Your pain will become his pain and it will expand and multiply and we will do it over and over until he becomes what he is meant to be."

I didn't know what that meant, but I couldn't think with her gaze boring into mine, cold but bright, daring me to respond. I wasn't dumb enough to heed her dare, and besides, I couldn't. The wound in my neck tore apart my vocal cords, making me incapable of speech. The rest of me was perfectly fine, my head clear and senses alert. There was no way I could check out and pretend that I wasn't powerless to stop whatever agony she was about to inflict on my sire.

"If you are good and do as I say, I will not tear you apart and light a match."

Maria eased her grip on my hair, giving my throat enough slack to begin to heal, but only just. It was an acute ache but I had endured worse pain. I wanted to sink into it as a distraction from what would soon be the sight of Jasper's torment.

"Watch," she ordered, her commanding tone not to be denied. It didn't even occur to me to disobey.

I watched.

"Begin," Maria barked at Savannah. I didn't know what it was that Savannah was supposed to do, but Jasper's inhuman motionlessness gave way to fine trembling, though he hadn't moved from his kneeling position at Savannah's side. His eyes had been clouded with confusion at first but they very quickly went panicked at whatever was happening to him. He began to project then, concentrated and aimed straight at me. I knew somehow that Maria and Savannah were protected from the onslaught and that it was Savannah's doing, and I briefly let the bitterness overwhelm me...until every miserable emotion Jasper was feeling hit me like a ton of bricks.

The misery and utter despair that gripped me was so intense I would have fallen if Maria wasn't holding me up by my hair. Knowing the feeling came from outside of myself, from Jasper, didn't reduce the impact. In fact it multiplied it as my own despair joined his, and with it my guilt, knowing my pain only added to his.

I couldn't tell the emotions apart, or even separate the physical from the mental at first. It started as a tightening in my chest—what I would later realize was the start of a panic attack—the feeling flowing through my torso and limbs like an excruciating full-body cramp, tensing up and tensing up until it gave and exploded into pain so intense my vision briefly went black and sound ceased to reach my ears, fire licking at each and every one of my nerve endings, almost like another vampire's venom rubbed in to open wounds. It took me several seconds to realize that Maria hadn't done anything more to me than continue to fist my hair in her hand; this pain wasn't from any kind of physical torture...it was all Jasper's emotions: endless hopelessness, gut-wrenching despair, exhausting helplessness, paralyzing fear, intense confusion at what was happening, complete and utter shame and humiliation, mind-scrambling panic...and that wasn't all; those were just the emotions I could parse.

It was so much, too much, and I might have been screaming despite my torn throat but I couldn't tell over the now pulsing roar in my ears.

It was hard to focus but I needed a tether—my eyes homed in on Jasper again as they all too often did, and my vision narrowed down until he was all I could see. His torso was contorted, spine bowed so far back it was shaped nearly like a half-circle and tensed so much that his still-breakable bones could very well shatter. Even at the extreme angle, I could still see that his teeth were bared but clenched tight enough to crack, his chest heaving violently so that every unneeded yet emotionally necessary breath sent a fine spray of venom erupting past his lips. His hands were curled into rigid fists at his sides, nails gouging into his palms so deeply venom dripped from between his fingers.

As for me, the sight of him and the pain we shared sent me crumpling in on myself. I would have collapsed to the ground and folded into the fetal position to protect my not quite soft underbelly if not for the hand in my hair. Instead, I hung, limp, from Maria's grasp for a bit until the retching started, the motion making my body jerk like I was having some sort of seizure. Throwing up was an unnatural occurrence for vampires, it happened rarely and mostly only by intentional force—I gagged until my throat burned and a mixture of venom and the blood I'd last drank came up and went dribbling down my chin, lukewarm and sweet-tangy-copper-wrong. When that finally stopped I damn near bit my tongue in half trying to regain control of myself and focus. There was a world beyond this agony, a world beyond Jasper, but I couldn't find it.

Our combined cocktail of anguish bounced back and forth between us like some kind of twisted feedback loop, continuing until my physical and mental suffering were great enough that I was ready to beg Maria to kill me.

Then, abruptly, it stopped...for me. It was clear to me that it had not ended for Jasper, only now he wasn't projecting. All of that emotion and pain was locked inside him, building and building, ravaging him from the inside out, and he knelt there, frozen. He did not scream. He didn't make a sound.

"Good boy," Maria praised me, finally allowing the edges of the wounds on my throat to meet and knit themselves back together. She petted my hair gently, and crooned, "That was absolutely beautiful. You did so well. I will not kill you after all."

**End Flashback**

Maria didn't always use me in her quest to create the God of War, testing out different ways to go about it until she perfected the process, but it happened enough to speed things along.

I had become extremely adept at pushing those experiences down over the years—my part in his pain—so that I could focus on all the times I had not been used for that purpose and instead on those instances where I did nothing to stop any of it from happening. It was easier to feel guilty for my inaction than it was to dwell on my own experiences with torture and how that had been used to simultaneously mold and punish my sire. So that's what I did. I pretended the torture didn't happen. I pretended I didn't help to make the God of War, but I still held both Maria and Savannah responsible for all of it. I was aware that that might have made me a hypocrite but I was beyond any ability to care about it.

With all that in mind, I refused to sully myself any more than I already had for the sake of either of them, and Jasper had said that he didn't care what I did to Savannah as long as she was gone by the time he came home. I didn't have to hurt her.

Needless to say, after about a week and a half, I was just about done with making her suffer. That didn't mean I didn't have other ways of making her miserable.

Savannah didn't heal as well or as fast as a normal vampire, so while I had stopped rubbing my venom into the wounds I had inflicted on her, I didn't give her a proper chance to heal; meaning that I wasn't particularly careful when reattaching limbs or cleaning my venom from her wounds and I didn't offer her enough blood, which was necessary for the reknitting of the wounds and after-sickness to heal, to help the process along. It took a lot of blood, especially if one was using only animal blood as their diet, for a vampire's body to return to normal after such physical trauma. She received one squirrel to feed on every other day, no more, no less.

During all this time, neither Charlotte nor I spoke a word to her whenever one of us brought her her meal. In addition to that, we stayed just beyond her range of perception, playing on her weaker vampire senses, but not beyond ours. She knew we were there, just not where exactly, and she never knew when we would bring her food or if/when I would hurt her again. It was a mind game, on the precipice of torture, perhaps, but not quite. It really got to her.

We also took great care not to smell like Bella whenever we were in Savannah's presence. There was no way in hell we would ever give the fact that we knew Bella away. We didn't know if her secondary bond to Bella could have survived the breaking of Savannah's bond with Jasper, but we'd never risk it even if she would never get a chance to go after Bella if she did find out—she wouldn't be leaving here alive.

At the start of week four, we finally allowed her enough blood to finish up the healing process. It had been three days since then.

Now it was time to see if the method to our madness had paid off.

I stood several feet away from Savannah's restrained form with my arms crossed over my chest—much as I had during Savannah's and my first conversation, three days after her arrival—Charlotte a silent sentinel by my side, watching. Savannah fidgeted under my scrutiny and her face was stony as she directed a hateful glare our way, biting her tongue to keep from breaking the silence first.

I had no intention of drawing this out any longer though.

"Why did you come here?" I asked, voice hard.

Savannah snorted unattractively and sneered. "I'm not tellin' you a damn thing! You tortured me!"

"Yes, I did," I agreed. "Not my finest hour," I admitted, though I would never tell her I was sorry for it. "But you still owe me."

"I owe you nothing," she responded coldly.

I stared at her incredulously before I decided that arguing over it was futile.

"All right, fine. We'll pretend that's true for now," I said. "We'll pretend that you didn't help torture me for a decade. So yeah, maybe you don't owe me anything… but you do owe Jasper. You owe him everything."

Savannah flinched, averting her eyes, but remained silent.

"No objections there, huh?" I mocked.

"I didn't have a choice," she argued the way she always did.

"I don't care," I told her coldly but she already knew that. It was probably unfair but I didn't give a fuckin' rat's ass about whether or not it was fair.

After several moments of silence, she finally spoke again. "It wouldn't have mattered what I did or didn't do—Maria would have tortured him anyway," she said quietly, "and you know it."

"Yes, she would have, but she couldn't have created the fuckin' God of War without you and your goddamn gift," I said. "You helped to hurt him so much you created an entirely new personality that he didn't want and has no control over. You didn't even try to resist Maria's demands for your help. You never fought at all. You chose that."

I expected her to argue again but she didn't. Maybe she was too exhausted by everything to bother. I didn't know and I still didn't care—she should be exhausted by it all. She deserved it.

"Why did you come here?" I asked again.

"Bring Jasper to me and I'll tell him anything you want," she replied stubbornly, her expression morphing into one of defiance.

"I never thought you were crazy before, not once," I responded, unable to contain my utter disbelief. "But you must be out of your fuckin' mind if you think Jasper ever wants to see you again, and anyway, he's gone. He wants you dead and he asked me to do it himself."

Savannah stiffened at this news, her expression absolutely devastated for just a second before she managed to compose herself. When she finally reacted, it was as though I hadn't said that last line. She somehow managed to make a shrug condescending, features contorting to match with the addition of genuine smugness—I wanted to tear her head off. "I guess you're out of luck then because Jasper is the only one I'll talk to. The rest of you can rot," she enunciated venomously, practically oozing scorn from every pore.

"We're a little beyond that now, don't you think?" I said.

Her face was twisted in rage but she didn't reply, so I studied her for several moments, trying to understand the change in her. She'd gone from this somber, penitent woman when she'd first arrived in Forks to this deceitful, malicious, enraged creature. The transformation was nothing short of astonishing. I'd always hated her, what she was capable of and how she'd used that to hurt my brother and me—regardless of whether or not she had a choice in the matter—but this was not who she had been during the Wars. Then she'd been a quiet, reticent, subservient little mouse, too afraid to set even a toe out of line for fear of punishment. It was true that she'd shown a backbone since she'd been in Forks, but it hadn't been this. There had to have been a catalyst for the transition, and I couldn't help but wonder what that catalyst was and if it would shed some light on where to go from here. I had to make peace with the fact that I would probably never know.

"What happened to you?" I asked, baffled. There were so many things that question could have dealt with, but she seemed to know what I was referring to, and she didn't make me work for an answer.

"I got sick of bein' sorry," Savannah revealed, her expression still defiant. "I got sick of bein' denied."

"Then you stop apologizing and leave it at that!" I snapped. "You don't decide to shell out more pain to everyone else!"

"I've decided I can do whatever the hell I want," she informed me. "I can have whatever I want, even if I have to take it."

"That include bringin' the God of War out to play?" I drawled. "'Cause that didn't work out so well for you."

Savannah scowled and looked away. "That wasn't supposed to happen," she admitted lowly, more as if she was trying to puzzle it out to herself instead of confessing it to Charlotte and me.

"What was supposed to happen?" I demanded.

Savannah seemed to realize what she'd said and I could see her visibly trying to decide who to be—the deferential, remorseful waif or the stubborn, willful woman she'd been playing for the last few minutes. The latter won. She clamped her mouth shut mutinously and caught me in a withering glare that did not affect me the way she probably hoped it would.

I was quickly losing my patience but yet, I held myself back. Whatever lay in the direction of this conversation, I knew I wouldn't like where it led. That didn't change the fact that I needed to walk down this path anyway. It brought me no comfort.

"Savannah!" I bellowed, my whole body taut, no longer willing to let her keep her own counsel. "What was supposed to happen?"

She jumped at the volume of my shouting, looking lost and confused just for a second. Once she got ahold of herself, she merely looked at me impassively instead of regaining her attitude. It was thoroughly disheartening. Considering her attitude, I hadn't been under the impression that she would make this easy, but the proof was hard to stomach. How she had brought out the God of War had been a mystery that, up until now, I was content to leave alone, not for her sake but for Jasper's. This changed that.

"What did you do?" I demanded as calmly as I could manage which really wasn't that calm at all, knowing I wouldn't like her answer—I needed to know anyway.

Savannah's dispassionate expression morphed into something baleful and obstinate and something inside me just snapped. I grabbed her by the shoulders, got in her face, and shook her as hard as I could.

"What. did. you. do?" I growled, my eyes flashing.

Her chest started heaving in upset, her whole body trembling in my grip, as she glared up at me, her emotions building and building until they burst out of her in a maelstrom of words.

"I took care of him just the way I always did after you left!" she cried. "And I did it better than you ever did!"

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I demanded furiously. I couldn't help but be offended by her declaration—I had done my best by my sire, and no one could have done it better because no one cared the way I did. Then again, my caring had done a lot of damage.

"I did the one thing you never could. I took his pain away. I gave him peace."

"Peace?" I scoffed. "You really think peace is something that could ever have been found in that hell hole? You're deluding yourself, makin' yourself feel more important than you ever were. There was no peace! There was always pain! There was no escapin' either!"

Savannah smiled at me, features twisting pityingly. It was absolutely infuriating.

"And yet, I did both," she insisted.

"I don't believe you," I told her flatly.

"I don't care," she returned just as flatly. "The only thing that matters is that I succeeded where you failed, and you can't stand it."

"Please, do enlighten me," I invited her, sarcastic and surly.

"I was kind to him..." she said.

"I was kind to him," I snapped, interrupting her. "You were just there, in the background, ignoring the aftermath, when you were done holding him down so Maria could torture him."

"After you left," she snapped back, ignoring that last part, "I was kind to him...in a way Maria never was. I took care of him," she repeated. "He didn't hurt when I was with him. Quite the opposite. I made him feel good. I gave him respite."

"Made him feel good?" I muttered, at a loss for what she was trying to say. "What does that mean? Did you use his gift to make him feel better?"

Savannah paused for a moment. "In a way."

"What the fuck does that mean?" I demanded, reaching a whole new level of frustration.

Jasper's words in the woods after he came out of the haze of becoming the God of War echoed in my head—she bound me to her on top of the bond she made between Maria and me. She got really good at it. It was always just strong enough to earn my compliance without breakin' my bond with Maria. After Savannah was done, she restrengthened my bond with Maria so much so that it overrode the bond between her and me like it was never there, and she did this over and over again. Maria knew, of course. She allowed it. It was one of her games, lettin' Savannah manipulate me like that. Lettin' someone else use me as long as I still ultimately belonged to her. She let Savannah do whatever she wanted.

"He told me you used his gift to bond yourself to him," I reasoned aloud, "but that wouldn't have made him feel better. Even if you bombarded him with nothin' but positive emotions, he still would have figured out what you did after the fact and he would have hated it—it would have only made things worse. But you said you made him feel good...you said you were kind to him in a way Maria never was…you wouldn't have tortured him by yourself, you don't have the stomach for it even if you helped someone else do it..." I stopped to really think about that and what it could mean. After a few moments, I came to a horrible but almost logical conclusion, "Are you talking about sex?"

There was no smugness in Savannah's expression now; she just stared at me evenly. Something in her lack of expression still managed to confirm my suspicion.

Jasper didn't talk about the years before I'd been turned or the years after I left. When he had said that Maria let Savannah do whatever she wanted with him I had never truly considered the idea that he meant they had ended up sleeping together for the simple reason that Maria was so goddamn possessive of him. His and Maria's relationship was complicated, sex included—sometimes because he wanted it and sometimes because he didn't. Their dynamic was an odd mix of dominant and submissive, Maria being the dominant party while Jasper was the submissive, or dominant versus dominant, Jasper and she butting heads violently and fighting each other until one or the other of them had no choice but to submit; the aftermath of those particular sexcapades was messy, and it didn't matter to Maria who won the battle. She was proud either way—proud that she had created such a magnificent warrior and proud that she could still best him when she did win, which got to be less and less to the point of nonexistent as the years went on, even after Savannah created the fake mating bond. She wanted it, she wanted him to fight back, encouraged it even, because she knew that with a well-placed word or touch he would still back down and be hers again.

Maria had claimed Jasper as hers way back when he was still human and that claim only got stronger as the years went by. It was because of that that I knew for certain she would never let Savannah touch him. Oh, Maria knew Savannah wanted him—had from the beginning—and she enjoyed her pain and hopelessness over the fact that she would never have him. Savannah had never been brave enough to try because Maria knew absolutely everything that went on in her base of operations. Nothing escaped her notice and if she disapproved of something or was just looking for entertainment she didn't hesitate in making anyone in her camp suffer, though Jasper was and always would have been her favorite target. For the most part, Jasper was utterly loyal to Maria no matter what she did to him. Jasper never gave Savannah even a sideways glance because of that. Half the time he looked through her as though she didn't even exist except for when she and Maria went about making the God of War or using her gift to forge a fake mating bond between him and Maria, so having sex with her would never even have crossed his mind.

Maybe that was the point. If Savannah had taken over my role of taking care of Jasper after Maria got into one of her "moods", maybe she'd gotten brave; brave enough to try something she never would have when there was no one else to pick up the pieces. If she had, Maria would have known—Jasper had said as much. Maria allowed it, which meant it had been just another twisted way she cooked up in that psychotic head of hers to make Jasper suffer. Savannah had played right into her hands while naively thinking she was getting away with something without the woman she was so terribly frightened of figuring it out, telling herself she was doing it in the name of love.

And Jasper was always more "Jasper", his most human self, after being tortured by Maria. The Major was always there to protect him as much as he could while it was happening—he didn't beg, he didn't weep, he bore it with as much dignity as was possible—but even the Major had his limits. By the end, he was spent; no energy left to stick around, leaving Jasper vulnerable in the aftermath, which was why he needed me so much. Without me, that left him open to a different kind of attack. Even though he was a vampire, it took time for him to recover from the extreme physical trauma. He would have been conscious but confused. He would have barely been able to talk or understand what was going on around him at first. Clarity came slowly even with our superior healing—that was how savagely Maria tore him apart both physically and mentally. If Savannah tried anything, Jasper wouldn't have been able to understand what was happening. He wouldn't have been able to say no.

I abruptly felt so sick I could have vomited, and I was so furious I couldn't speak. Charlotte rushed to my side, taking my hand and squeezing it in a grounding gesture. It gave me enough strength to carry on.

"Did you force yourself on him, Savannah?" I questioned, my voice low and surprisingly emotionless. If I let my emotions rule me right now, I still wouldn't be able to speak. I would be miles away already, dry heaving until venom and old blood spilled from my throat, shaking, screaming.

Savannah's features hardened at my inquiry, and she said nothing.

"Did—did you rape him?" I forced myself to say that ugly, tragic word. "Is that how you 'took care of him' in the Wars? Is that what you did before he lost it this time?"

Her eyes went wide and enraged, and she lunged toward me. The chains that held her went taut, rattling as she pulled furiously, but held. "Don't!" she exclaimed sharply. "Don't you do that! Do not do that! Do not take something beautiful and twist it into something ugly!"

I started trembling, words dying in my throat, so Charlotte took over.

"Did you ask him? Was he in any shape to tell you whether or not he wanted it? Could he consent at all? Could he even talk?" Her words came fast but they were still said with careful clarity.

"It doesn't matter!" Savannah argued, frustrated and angry at the fact that we didn't understand her. "I couldn't set him free, but I could give him that! I gave him that!"

"You really believe that, don't you? That what you did wasn't wrong," Charlotte uttered in absolute disbelief. "You can sit there and say that and then call it beautiful and actually mean it."

"This is just another one of your attempts to make me the villain of the piece instead of a victim like the rest of you," she spat.

"How much we hate you and whether or not you're a victim isn't what's up for debate right now. Right now what we're trying to do is get you to see that what you did to Jasper is wrong," Charlotte said. "You raped him, Savannah."

"You can say that to yourself, repeat it over and over, but that won't ever make it true," Savannah proclaimed.

Something in me broke at her words and my entire body was consumed by sheer stone-cold fury, absolutely incandescent with rage, and all-encompassing disgust. I stalked toward Savannah with deadly purpose, my vicious snarling reverberating throughout the forest.

Savannah kept talking, denying, and what I needed more than anything in that moment was for her to shut up!

Not quite knowing what I was going to do until my fingers closed around her throat, my fingernails sinking into the muscles of her neck and drawing venom, I wrenched my hand back, taking her throat with me and tossing it aside like trash. The wound was gaping, a jagged hole where her trachea and larynx had been, venom gushing and her mouth still working as she tried to talk—to continue denying—and couldn't. Her eyes were wide and panicked and she yanked at her chains, wanting to scrabble at the wound I was sure.

I watched this with a numb sort of satisfaction, brain working out how to proceed next in the background. I wanted to hurt her again, I wanted to slash, rip, gouge, and burn, to make her scream for what she had done so very many years ago, for what she may have done again only weeks ago. I wanted her to pay, and for a second, I did not give a fuck what that said about me or about what kind of man I was.

My vision narrowed down to her, nothing but red around the edges, and I didn't think I had ever been overwhelmed with so much thirst for vengeance.

I took another step forward, but Charlotte gripped me roughly and firmly by the arms and pulled hard, my feet actually lifting off the ground, ripping me away from Savannah and dragging me until we were yet again out of her field of perception.

I broke out of my mate's hold and spun around.

"You can't kill her, Peter," she said calmly, though her eyes were a raging storm of emotion that mirrored my own. "Not yet."

"The hell I can't!" I disagreed, glaring.

"Not yet," Charlotte repeated. "You promised Bella."

Goddamn it!

"I think she would forgive me for breaking that promise," I argued, "and I'm willing to risk it regardless."

"Peter," she said, a little sharply. "She's Jasper's mate. Give her this."

"Fine," I capitulated sourly. "But it's time. After Bella gets whatever it is she's after, Savannah has to die. She's made it clear she won't tell us why she came here and I'm done worryin' over it. Lives could be on the line but we can handle whatever it is. Jasper will be home soon, so it's time to quit fuckin' around."

oOo

Savannah's POV

I was so tired of being the villain, and the events of that little interrogation had done nothing but add to that exhaustion as well as absolutely inflame my rage. It made me even more confident in my decision to keep quiet about why I'd come here.

I had been reminded so very violently that Jasper did not need anyone. Times had changed since the Southern Vampire Wars—he was different, more difficult to manipulate, and now that he didn't have Maria hounding him mercilessly, he was no longer in a situation that required him to be submissive for any length of time in any capacity; the very opposite, in fact. His presence was bold now, dominant and unyielding all the time, even off the battlefield, especially off the battlefield, and even under the influence of the fake mating bond. He was beyond what I had come here to tell him, and what I had felt he needed to know so badly was irrelevant now. I hoped Peter hadn't been lying, not that he had asked him to kill me—that was hardly surprising even though it hurt like nothing else ever could—but that he was gone, in fact, because if what I had come to warn him about actually came to pass, then my death would be worth it because the world could do without the likes of Peter fucking Whitlock. Peter was nothing without Jasper there to watch his back and the Cullens coming to his and Charlotte's aid effectively was positively laughable.

Peter would die, they all would, and I could rest in peace knowing the person I hated most had suffered the same fate I had. I hated him even more than Maria—for blaming me, for hating me even though I was a victim too, for torturing me and laughing at my pain. Even a tiny, shameful part of me hated him for stealing Jasper away when he and Charlotte came back, even though otherwise Jasper would have been stuck in Maria's clutches for that much longer, and for not even considering taking me with them. Oh yes, I would die happy knowing Peter would be dead too.

oOo

A/N: Up next is the scene between Bella and Savannah.