t.h.e. l.a.d.y.

A sea of red pooled at her feet, yards and yards of lustrous silk flaming and darkening in the candlelight as the lady twisted around to better view herself. Bella had brushed the silk lightly as she helped Lady Rosalie dress, her fingers lingering, jealous, covetous, on the luxury that would never be hers. Silks. Ruby chokers in velvet boxes. Joy. Things that would never be hers.

"My eyes were blue," Lady Rosalie said pensively. She flicked a glance upwards at Bella, standing dutifully at her side holding the jewelry box open. "Nothing like yours. Yours are only brown." They were red now, of course, like clotted blood. "I never wear blue now. It's too painful."

Her ladyship pursed her lips together and reached for a bronze tube of lipstick on her dresser table. The color was a creamy burgundy, like preserved rose-petals. "But then," she said meditatively. "Life is painful. This life and the half-life before it. Most of all, the turning between them of course." She patted Bella's arm, her fingernails gently scraping against the skin. "Be glad you won't ever experience it."

Some humans are still turned, Bella thought. Of course the numbers were strictly controlled and there were certain criteria to be met. A high council met once a year to decide on the list of humans proposed to them. But still, it was unlikely that she would ever be turned, being only a bedwarmer with no special skills of her own that might warrant a consideration of extending her life.

"Carlisle turned me," Lady Rosalie said. "He pitied me." She capped her lipstick, her eyes giving away no sign of what she felt about his pity. Scorn? Gratitude? Resentment? It could have been any of them. "That and my beauty, I suppose. I was so beautiful, even then." She smiled angelically at Bella. "Do you ever wonder what it is like to be beautiful, child? Oh don't be fooled by my Edward. He didn't choose you for your looks. He picked you out of a lineup like a dog picks a piece of rotting meat - because the stench is so strong. Now, we were lovers before you were born."

That's not true at all, Bella thought. Celia, the housekeeper, had told her that Lord Edward had only taken up with Lady Rosalie for two years - and more thanks to the lady's persistent badgering than through any inclination of his own, if Celia was to be believed. And absurdly, the fact that Lady Rosalie felt insecure enough to parade such a bold-faced lie in front of a lowly slave made Bella feel a little better.

Last of all, Lady Rosalie slipped on her silk gloves, teasing them over her cool white arms until they fit like a second skin, without a wrinkle. They were blood red, like her gown and her slippers and her scornfully curled lips. She gave her tumbling golden curls one last spray from a crystal perfume bottle and then tugged on Bella's leash.

"It's time to meet our guests, sweet," she said. "I'm so excited I can hardly wait."

Bella was not. Her gown was a pale pink, in contrast to Rosalie's rich red, but nowhere near as demure as the gentle color might indicate. It was slashed all the way down the front, exposing her breasts and legs and everything in between. Lacy white stockings came up to her upper thighs and were held firmly in place by braided silver girdles. A black velvet choker around her neck, hooked to the leash in Lady Rosalie's hands, completed her humiliation.

Lady Rosalie pinched her cheeks, a playful smile on her face. "A pretty girl like you should be smiling at a party," she said. "Aren't you glad I took you out of Lord Edward's kitchens and out to my ballroom? Smile now. You don't want to disappoint me, do you?"

And so Bella smiled.

She followed Lady Rosalie's skirts, her feet cold on the patterned marble tiles, the back of her neck prickling from nerves. Just one night, she thought wearily as Lady Rosalie jerked particularly hard on the leash and she stumbled. He promised.

Lady Rosalie had "borrowed" her for the night - ostentatiously to help her dress for her ball. "She just wants to stick a knife in your eye," Celia had told Bella sagely, before she left. "None of this would have happened if you'd managed to shimmy into his lordship's bed by now. Then he'd never have loaned you to her but I don't think he cares enough what becomes of you now to mind what she does to you."

He never sent for me, Bella thought sullenly, listening to Celia's no doubt well-meant but still disheartening advice. And anyway, he might have tired of me after one night and given me to Lady Rosalie anyway. There was little that Lord Edward wouldn't do for his mistress, if she nagged hard enough, it seemed to Bella.

Lady Rosalie stood at the top of a flight of marble stairs, to greet her guests. The smell of roses was so thick and cloying that Bella almost gagged - they were everywhere it seemed, luscious, thick, scarlet blooms in vases, scattered over the marble steps, tucked behind the ears of statues and twisted in garlands around the glittering chandeliers. Lady Rosalie clearly did not believe in restraint.

"I almost forgot," Lady Rosalie murmured, before the great double doors were thrown open to admit the first visitors to her evening's soiree. She nodded to a manservant standing discreetly to the side and he came forward with a silver salver on which were arranged a red rose, two tiny glasses filled with a clear liquid and a black velvet blindfold.

Lady Rosalie tied the blindfold around Bella's eyes herself, brushing the rose teasingly against her collarbones. She put one of the glasses in Bella's hand and clinked the other against hers. "Sweet dreams, my little darling," she murmured and lifted the glass and pressed it against Bella's lips. Bella hesitated, but only for as long as it took the other woman to drawl, "Now darling, do you really want to play it that way?" She drank. If she was lucky, it would kill her on the spot.

It burned against the back of her throat like frozen fire and she gagged on it but implacably, Lady Rosalie held it against her mouth, her own hand on the back of Bella's head, until it all went down. She laughed when Bella had drank it all down. "Not so bad now, was it? And since you were such a good girl, you may have a kiss."

Her lips tasted of the foul drink that had been forced down Bella's throat, but they were soft and Bella leaned into them instinctively. Her tongue, when she thrust it past Bella's lips, was rough and demanding, twisting its way down Bella's mouth until she thought she might gag on it too. Her teeth nipped on her lower lip, hard enough to make Bella winch and pull back but not hard enough to draw blood.

Lady Rosalie laughed mockingly. "I like to play rough with my pets." I'm not one of your pets. She said nothing but her face must have given her feelings away for Lady Rosalie only said, "Oh but you are. Everything that is Edward's is mine. We are soulmates." And then the great double doors were thrown open.

Bella remembered the first few visitors well enough - Lady Rosalie laughing, kissing, teasing and introducing darling Edward's pretty little new pet to everyone and then... it all began to fade. She lost her footing and would have sprawled and fallen if Lady Rosalie had not tugged hard on her chain to keep her on her feet. The sounds began to blur together into a soft grey noise in the back of her head and she could sense but hardly feel the hands on her exposed body, covetous hands that lingered and liked to pinch and twist. She began to smile without knowing quite why. Lady Rosalie was here. She would be taken care of.

Lady Rosalie giggled and put her head close to Bella's, whispering to her as though they were conspirators sharing some delicious secret, or sisters whispering by candlelight before bedtime. "I knew you'd have a good time. I always make sure all my guests have a good time."

Colors flashed behind her eyes, their intensity cold and dazzling and more beautiful than any silks or jewels. She had something Lady Rosalie would never have. She threw back her head, feeling the weight of her hair falling over her shoulders, and laughed shrilly. And somewhere, far away, someone else laughed as well.

"You're very beautiful."

She tilted her head to smile at whoever had said so, but Lady Rosalie slapped her face viciously. "She isn't."

"Oh Rose, for pity's sake."

Implacably, "And won't be once I'm done with her."

She knew that she walked, bumbling blindly after Lady Rosalie's softly whispering skirts. She knew that someone helped her out of her gown and the sudden gust of cold air that washed over her bare body and made her curl up closer around herself. She knew that when she finally fell to her knees, Lady Rosalie let her stay down there, on her knees at her ladyship's feet like a pet dog. And then she forgot everything.

And then, with a hard, throbbing start, she woke. She was on her knees on the cobblestones, naked and freezing outside in the cold garden because that was where Lady Rosalie had dragged her. Her frail lacy stockings were shredding, her palms and knees and feet were throbbing with a hundred small cuts. Someone must have pulled off her blindfold at some point because she could see the dark bodies arranged around her and her ladyship, in a circle looking up to the stars.

She moaned, bile rising in her throat and Lady Rosalie turned and smiled at her. "Oh good, you're finally awake," she murmured. "We were just waiting for the fireworks. I wanted you to see them."

Right there and then she vomited, pale yellow and sticky on the cobblestones that must have been polished earlier that evening by slaves. Even as sick as she was, she was careful to turn her head away so it did not splatter any of the guests or Lady Rosalie's rich red skirts. She vomited until she thought she would see her own organs splatter out on the cobblestones, sticky ropes of intestines and bloody flesh along with the regurgitated food.

"Filthy creatures," she heard a woman say distinctly. "More trouble than they're worth the keeping." A man laughed scornfully.

Vomit streaked her fingers and the tips of her long hair and she rolled over and curled up on the ground in a fetal position. Lady Rosalie did not seem to notice, her fingers loose on Bella's leash. She was looking up at the sky, a dreamy expression on her face, where the fireworks blazed like lurid nighttime flowers. Green and gold, silver and violet. How beautiful.

After they were over, Lady Rosalie turned brightly to her guests. "Dessert anyone?" she said. Stepping daintily over Bella's prone body and the puddle of vomit around her, she dropped the leash on the ground and turned to the house. Her guests followed behind her and Bella was left alone, frozen and stinking and naked in the garden.

She poisoned me, Bella thought weakly. She must have. A slow-acting poison to make it all the more humiliating for me. She would die here, slowly, by inches so she could feel it. Would it be agonizing pain or would it be a long-drawn numbing? In the morning, dead or half-way there, they would sweep her body away, throw it on some trash-pile before it was carted off to the incinerators, wash away the sticky stains she had left behind and then forget all about her. Would Lord Edward even ask Lady Rosalie about her, over tea or in bed?

For the first time since she had been snatched away, she wanted to cry. She could feel the cold seeping into her toes. I thought it would be with blood in my mouth, she thought weakly. Kicking, screaming, fighting. Not this quiet, whimpering surrender like a broken animal kicked into a corner. She pushed herself up on her elbows and grimly wormed her way closer to the pool of her vomit. Not like this.

She dipped her finger into the sticky, disgusting mess and wrote. Bella. She had a name and it was Bella Swan. Swan.

"So you have a voice. Even if its only in your fingers." He must have been watching her, even though she had not known he was there. Why? For this?

She turned her head and bared her teeth at Lord Edward. It wasn't a smile.

By the glow of the candles in the colored lanterns, floating above the dark bushes, he was icily beautiful, his skin as white as a statue's. Had he been so beautiful as a human? Cold and inscrutable, he looked down at her with pity or scorn she could not tell. You should be hoping for pity, she thought. It sounded like her father's voice in her head, wise and measured and ever practical. But she didn't want pity, that was for the weak, the injured, the dying. She wanted his hate.

"Can you talk as well?"

The edge of his boot was an inch from her fingers, he could crush them if he moved it. The pain would blaze white-hot across the edge of her awareness, she knew what it felt like to have fingers, bones broken. Glass scratching against skin, the red-hot fireburst of skin ripped from muscle. If she was wise, she would have opened her mouth and sang for him like a bird. Celia would have. Lady Rosalie, when she was human, would have.

Instead, she only gave him a blank look.

He sighed and crouched down to her level, not even twisting his nose at the smell. He loosened the scarf draped carelessly around his neck and wrapped it around her, like he would around a delicate and expensive piece of china that he did not wish to break. It was thick and woolly and her body spasmed at the unexpected warmth. With a gentleness she would not have expected of him, he cradled her under her knees and behind her shoulders and picked her up.

"Rose will be furious," he said, with a certain amount of relish in his voice. "She hates it when her guests leave early and worse when she isn't informed in advance."

She'll blame me, Bella thought but found that she was unable to care about it at all. She turned her face so that she could bury it in the warmth of Lord Edward's shirtfront and breathed in. He smelt of Lady Rosalie's roses. She had marked him with her scent as she did everything she owned.

But not me, Bella thought grimly, her hair and her fingers stained with her own vomit. I smell of myself.