A little over a week passed. With the shock of the gym incident receding, Wesker used the time to re-evaluate how to handle his charge.

The blood draws resumed every few days, albeit on a smaller scale; vials only. Ashford herself had admitted that the vials were difficult to manage one-handed at the best of times. Given how she tensed whenever Wesker came within a few feet of her, these were…hardly the best of times.

That little admission had come back to bite her, it seemed.

Wesker had started to find more reasons to dip into that bubble of space she had constructed for herself. A touch to the arm when drawing blood. A hand to the elbow, or to the small of her back, when escorting her to the lab.

It seemed that she had decided, thus far, not to run.

Any actual operations were moved offsite, out of range. He and Birkin had gone over exposure vectors she might have used years ago. Spencer had been particularly concerned about testing for a rare mycelium colony in her bloodstream, and had been horrified when she hadn't shown signs of infection, oddly enough. Miss Ashford, or Placidia (Birkin always seemed more comfortable not using her true name), might have lived a cloistered life for the most part, but from all reports, she was hardly an actual nun.

"I'm already getting far more input than before. The external viral vector is enough to pile on the rest of it."

The virus changed the equation; she had been quite correct on that point. It was...a workable change. Some of his own physiological responses he had experienced in close proximity to her had been somewhat more than he had anticipated, but they could be factored in.

The virus responded to her. The video feed of the tyrant guards letting her slip past had been one (glorious, schadenfreude-infused) instance, but it was an entirely different thing to experience it in person.

The incident in the gym had shown him just how much power she had available, kept tightly tamped down. Had she understood, he rather thought every creature in the mansion would have quietly returned to their enclosures. If Doctor Clemens had been deep enough in his infection at the time, he might have even been subconsciously induced to release her.

Miss Ashford seemed to respond viscerally to the presence of the virus in turn. The memory of her encounter with the mutated Marcus seemed to leave a lasting impression in her nightmares, for all his efforts to look human, and young. Wesker had found himself waking abruptly for several nights in a row before putting that particular problem together. The woman had been passively radiating distress each time, with the virus in his own veins attuning itself to the pheromone signals she emitted, contact or no contact.

And then that little incident in the gym had occurred…

Well. For now, they were in a holding pattern. Birkin was still working to extract himself and his research from Umbrella. For now, the best thing to do was to hold and consider how to handle the new information.

For Marigold's part, the incident seemed to shift the tone of her confinement from asset to...something else. While she hadn't dared to let go again as she had in the gym, she still was escorted to use the equipment for the sake of mitigating her cabin fever.

And he kept touching her. The contact was small, almost perfunctory, but it was distracting. This man seemed to be an expert at throwing her off her balance. '

Ii was making it harder to shut down that hungry part of herself.

In all of the excitement, she had forgotten something from her day in Raccoon City. During a blood draw and examination, she forced herself to ask. "What's under the police station?"

He eyed her, speculative. "Did someone mention something to you?"

"You know well enough that no one would have." He hmmmed in response, non-committal.

Marigold glared, then relented. "I spent a few hours down the street from it, until I couldn't stand it anymore. Something is down there. It's...sharper than the feeling from the mansion. I don't have the lexicon for 'here there be monsters' developed quite yet."

Something about that statement seemed to amuse him, from the briefest twitch of his eyes and mouth. He finished the draw, pressing light above the puncture point as he removed the needle from her arm, then stepped back to take a seat across from her. She was almost getting used to it. He settled into his seat, taking a moment to presumably collect his thoughts.

"You were woken briefly before going into long-term storage. Spencer had wanted to speak to you directly, and a telephone call was arranged during the brief window it was deemed safe to wake you. You may not have been entirely lucid. Do you recall? It's...related."

Passive voice, clinical. He might have been describing one of the infected rats, with the amount of distance pumped into that statement. "Not clearly? I remember...Spencer making assumptions. Again. I think I made him angry?" She thought back. "There was a woman nearby, maybe in the next room. She kept crying for her mother."

"She wasn't."

Marigold's face narrowed. "It was distracting enough to comment upon, evidently."

"Lisa Trevor hadn't spoken since early 1968. Given the purpose of the space, I doubt Spencer felt comfortable having the mansion's architect, or his next-of-kin, out in the world after it was completed. He never was one to suffer loose ends. Prototype - what you like to call Sonnetroppe, although the active form is the T-virus - was already being tested on the family back then."

Marigold stared openly. She had heard the rumors back then. After a month or so, it had made the papers in New York and resurfaced every few years as an unsolved mystery. George Trevor, his wife, and fourteen-year-old daughter - the papers had redrawn age-progression sketches each time to show what the girl might look like as time passed - gone, into thin air.

Spencer had always been a monster, then. Smiling at her family, reaching out to seat her within the company once her father was gone. Alexander was effectively exiled and left to his own devices.

Neutralized.

She forced herself to draw in a breath, then another. Her moods and the pheromones were always linked. She was well trained in minding that particular fact, suppressing hard. It was more difficult now. A rather large part of her wanted the lash out at Wesker with all her strength. She'd taken savage joy in doing so to Marcus back in the day, and she had still needed to be so, so careful.

But that wouldn't get her any closer to answers, and they both knew it. Were it not for the massive improvements in her…network capabilities…she would have demanded her suppressants on the spot. She had functioned so long and well while on them that their absence that she had forgotten what it was to go without.

Wesker continued after a moment. "The Paris lab developed something to supplement lost cerebral function from the virus. Birkin was able to requisition a sample. It…worked. Too well. Miss Trevor mutated more than anticipated, but she started asking for her mother again." His mouth pressed in a firm line. "Several female staff members were killed before the-Miss Trevor could be contained. But Birkin was able to extract to first strains of the G-virus - Golgotha - from that event. That's what you could sense under the police station."

Marigold slumped down in her chair. "So it has always been this way." She said, quietly. Her trip to Romania back in had alerted her to the potential for danger, but she'd lacked the imagination for its scale. It would have been comparatively easy to burn the whole thing to the ground back then.

"If I might ask," Wesker pressed after a moment. "How on earth were you exposed? Spencer mentioned Marcus and 'failed mischief', but refused to say anything more. There are - were - reams of information on Miss Trevor. Not so, here."

Well, at least one thing managed to effectively burn to the ground - Wesker had clearly managed to get no further than the destroyed house, and possibly the back lot"No one said? It seems obvious." Wesker said nothing, only waited. So Spencer had kept it to himself, then. Anyone who might have backed up the story was dead or in the wind. Telling him wouldn't give anything but closure. "I tagged along with my brother when they went to Africa, once the site was secured." It was close enough to the truth. Alexander had later admitted that Spencer and her father were looking for ways to tie Marcus closer to their venture, and Spencer had been salivating at taking a more…traditional approach to it, when Marigold had run into trouble earlier that year.

However, no one had thought to tell Marcus anything of the sort- Spencer had planned to put it to Marcus once the more delicate part of their work had wrapped up. Marcus' little tantrum had wiped that plan so thoroughly away that it had been deemed best to never speak of it again by all parties involved.

She suppressed another shudder at the thought of that disaster ever going through - her current situation was likely an improvement, truth be told. "Marcus seemed irritated that my family showed up at his project. Apparently, it seemed entirely appropriate to attempt to kill the least valuable one despite being invited - especially as I'd blown up my standing in London a few months earlier. No, I won't get into that." Wesker raised an eyebrow at the unprompted aside but said nothing. Marigold continued. "We had to take malaria medication. I imagine it couldn't have been difficult to spike any one dose. I didn't wake up for days. We were lucky that Alexander caught on fast enough to make it look like I'd forgotten to take my medication and got unlucky." She smiled suddenly, sharp. "He probably knew we were lying, but if anyone saw me spit in Marcus' coffee at the funeral, they kept it to themselves."

She looked up sharply. "Birkin didn't like me. I know it was a matter of association, but it was still personal. What kept him from doing the same to me? As with…" she trailed off, hesitant to give voice to what had happened to that poor girl in the bowels of the mansion, the very same year she herself had fallen ill, and arisen as something else.

Wesker's mask was as closed as ever, but she got a distinct feeling that the question pleased him. "Because that would have been a waste."