A/N Stephenie Meyer owns all. I just own a wasps' nest outside my window whose inhabitants keep invading my room to make friends. How lucky am I?

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CHAPTER TEN

Previously (EPOV)

She glared over at me, but must have seen something in my face because her expression softened. I kept my gaze on the road, not wanting to look at those depthless doe eyes that saw too much.

"Maybe you do know something about that," she murmured.

I didn't answer. I just kept driving.

~ * ~

BPOV

Edward ignored me, and I did my best to ignore him.

It was difficult though, almost impossible. Even when I closed my eyes and turned towards the window, feigning sleep, his presence was like a prickling cloud of energy and restless sexual tension to my left. He was an enigma, a puzzle - a mesh of strength and vulnerability and confusion.

Of course, it didn't help that he was so compelling to look at. Aesthetic perfection coated in a hardened and cynical glaze - his hair, his eyes, his cheekbones, all carved in masculine beauty. The glower he habitually wore could not take away from it, in fact the edge only caused to push his attraction into something edgy and tantalisingly dangerous.

I barely knew him, yet I burned for him.

My pretense at sleep had eventually become a reality and I slumbered deeply. I was confused when I awoke to darkness and realised the sun had set while I dreamed of being chased down dark streets and the bone-jarring thud of car crashes.

How long had we been driving?

The disorientation of my headache and the long sleep left me unsure, but it must have been well more than a full day since Edward plucked me from those dark streets and tucked me beneath his shattered wing.

Edward's behaviour towards me from the moment he'd saved me in Phoenix was puzzling and contradictory. One moment he would glare at me, each remark dripping sarcasm and scorn, making me flinch as he sought to pierce my armour. Then he would rip the ground away and display concern and a grudging respect, his mossy green eyes regarding me like something precious and treasured.

The latter was always done so briefly and instantly replaced with a scowl that I sometimes wondered if I was imagining the whole thing. A delayed side-effect of the concussion, perhaps? Hmm.

It had long been clear to me that Edward already pre-judged me as an opportunistic and morally-inhibited gold-digger, a coward who ran only because she realised she was in over her head. A part of me could not blame him for this. His only impression of me must have come from a black and white case file and, at first glance, my tale appeared to be beyond reasonable excuse. Beyond redemption.

I scoffed silently, mocking my own moral ambivalence. Who was I kidding? Not even myself. I could plead naivete and loneliness and childish ignorance, but my past will always be beyond reasonable excuse.

My only saving grace is that I fled before I married Demetri. That, and the fact that I took with me enough Volturi secrets to bring their dark organisation down to burning ruins. Admittedly my main motivation when stealing their records and destroying their files had been insurance, the instinct to protect myself in case Demetri came after me and wouldn't let me go. I wish my motivations had been more noble, but I could never deny that self-preservation had always been the devil on my shoulder that silently devoured my resolve.

Yet I could have just turned the files and my testimony over to the authorities and fled. Hearsay was more tentative, true, but even so in light of the evidence it wouldn't be ignored. None of it mattered though, for ethical debate was rendered speechless when I found out the horrifying truth behind the family I'd nearly joined. I knew I had to do everything I could to end it and my testimony would be the lynchpin that would dismantle their insidious and far-reaching hold.

Even if doing so ended me. It was a small price to pay, all things considered.

My shadowy musings were interrupted as a dry cough tore through me, bringing my attention back to my burning throat and the realisation that I hadn't drunk anything all day. Each cough made my head spin sickly and thud mercilessly.

Edward glanced at me, jade cat eyes fierce and piercing, and reached across my lap to pop the glove compartment. The long, lean muscles in his forearm flexed in a bewitching pattern as he moved and pulled a water bottle out before handing it to me, casting side-glances as I gulped the liquid down.

Yet he didn't ask if I was okay and his face betrayed no concern, even if his actions did.

I wanted him to care. For as dark and caustic as he sometimes was, I craved his protection, his comfort. His touch. I had nothing else to cling to and I cursed Edward silently for my dependancy.

I couldn't make Edward Cullen out.

It infuriated me and thrilled me simultaneously.

At times Edward seemed to understand me, to be closer to me than anyone before him...closer even than Demetri. For as much as I hated my former fiance I could not deny that he knew me better than I knew myself. After all, that was his favourite tactic when it came to controlling me. To subduing me, and pushing aside my trepidations to make me scream and plead for him.

And I had screamed and surrendered to him; the memory made me shift uncomfortably and coloured my cheeks with shame. How to explain that to my hard-eyed bronze-haired protector, how to make him understand?

Impossible.

After all, the story I had told Edward was but a diluted reflection of reality.

Demetri lit a flame within me that burned and consumed without mercy or compassion, left me bereft and crawling towards the comfort he offered. I can sit and simper and blush, claim that he preyed on my isolation, my innocence - but the truth is I craved it. I craved his attention.

I longed to be consumed and desired and possessed. My self-worth was but a flicker of a shadow and I wanted solar brightness to take me and remake me, to remove my options and show me a new way.

It was only in retrospect I realised how neatly the Volturi cut me off from my family, from my peers, from everything - leaving me nothing else to cling to but them. And yet even that knowledge is tainted for it was discovered early on, and I still stayed there.

Stayed in Demetri's bedroom, stayed as his plaything.

I played the part of the child-mistress until my overwhelming self-preservation and fear forced me to flee into the night, convinced that any moment I'd see the blazing eyes of my fiance over the barrel of a gun. Nothing I could ever do would change the fact that I had catered to his fantasies, surrendered myself to his twisted desires. Even though in later months I would hate myself each time I went to him, part of me reveled in his touch and I longed for the moment my joy would explode into curdling screams that echoed in the night.

If I had not been scared for my life, would I have stayed? Became one of them?

Probably not, but...perhaps. The possibility gnawed at me relentlessly.

How did I fall for it?

Think of it no more.

The dry desert heat baked us and I unwound the window, gulping at the tepid air that poured through. Tears burned in the corners of my eyes but I turned myself to the window and stubbornly refused to let them fall, refused to let them be seen by him. Edward Cullen, of the self-righteousness and physical perfection. I would not stand to see him judge me.

His snide comments, his cavalier attitude and disregard of my fear and pain when he dragged he through the back alleys of Phoenix. Calling me 'princess' as if I was some spoiled creature who favoured material worth - which could not be further from the truth! How dare he.

He knew nothing about me.

As my mind ran through the events of the past twenty-four hours - of the past two years - self-pity and shame started to give way to anger. I sat there and seethed, a hot-bed of anger of frustrated fury. He questioned me over my past but refused to give the slightest hint of his own life - for fuck's sake, how damaging could it be to his future spyboy-rep to tell me which fucking Harry Potter film he liked?

Ha! Not that he's even seen Harry Potter - he probably just spends his spare times brooding in a dark room and practising knife tricks.

Conclusion? He's an asshole.

I fumed silently, bristling in the passenger seat with crossed arms and furrowed brow as I deliberately uncurled and relaxed each one of my stressed fingers and toes.

Then, abruptly as it had arrived, my anger dissipated as I remembered the look in Edward's eyes when I'd callously exclaimed that he could never understand what it meant to live a life of deceit, to have to lie to everyone to survive. He had been a lost boy in that moment, his strength consumed by the acute pain my words sparked.

He knew. Edward knew what is was to be lost, to always be a liar. To never be honest. To slide between the confines of society and to leech human contact like a vampire without ever returning oneself.

The memory of his face echoed through me, a shock to my senses. I'd asked him - challenged him - to know what it was like to sneak through life as a spook, unable to share truth with anyone.

Why was Edward so isolated? I wanted to enfold him in my arms and ask him, but I knew he would never allow it.

~ * ~

EPOV

The silence was deafening.

Ever since I'd channeled my inner asshole and shot down Bella's innocent attempt to make conversation she'd not said a word. The desert scenery passed in a blaze of sun and sand and cacti, the heated air invading the car despite the air con. But the scents of the world outside did nothing to compare to the delicate flowery smell of Bella, suggesting a hint of strawberry, youth and innocence.

Even the pungent consequences of our absence from hygiene couldn't take away from that. I wanted to pull the car over in a screech of rubber and fire, to nestle into the crook of her neck and lick her collarbone. To bury myself into the hollow of her ivory throat and delicate perfume until she clenched and moaned my name. Her scent would be more concentrated there...

For the fifty-eighth time this journey I tightened my knuckles on the steering wheel until they almost glowed white. My restraint was hanging on a knife's edge and I was honestly lost, clinging desperately to the notion that she was a client and no good would come of any emotional entanglements. It could only ever cause pain, to us both.

Bella was curled into a ball on the passenger seat, hands tucked under her chin and tangled mahogany curls falling over her shoulders and knees in a glistening spill. Soft, pink lips pouted in sleep, occasionally murmuring random words and incoherencies which made me smile.

I'd almost forgot how she whispered her thoughts while she slept. The raw beauty of her exposed desires, inclinations and memories.

Most of her ramblings were incoherent or meaningless, but now and again Bella's brow would wrinkle and she'd whisper 'no' and 'Demetri' in tortured tones, sometimes adding other unfamiliar names that I had no wish to discern.

The only time in the drive towards Nevada that my muscles relaxed was when Bella whispered my name, 'Edward'. A siren's throaty breath of longing and desire, thick with promise and confusion and the hint of revealed blushing innocence. It took every inch of resolve to resist pulling onto the side of the freeway and lifting her fragile slender body into my lap and drowning myself in the sensation of her flesh, her touch.

Fuck!

Bella slept for an eternity. Eventually she awoke with a gasping start, as abruptly as a woman thrust into ice water, shocked and shaking. She never once met my gaze and instead unwound the window, half-pouring out of it as she inhaled dry heat and wind.

I bit back the comment about the air con and instead watched her out of the corner of my eye. I burned to know what Bella had been dreaming of, but I knew that she'd turn her kittenish fury upon me if I dared to ask.

I wanted to see her face desperately, but the thick tangled cloud of brown curls obscured her completely. The quiet choke of her breath made me wonder if she was crying. I felt ill at the thought and wanted once more to hold her, to comfort her.

I glanced at her as I drove, one hand carelessly on the steering wheel while I effortlessly navigated the poorly-lit freeway. At one point she coughed, dry and tortured, and I reached to pass her a water. As my arm passed her Bella's body heat scorched me more thoroughly than anything the desert sun could offer.

Purge me. Save me.

Eventually Bella spoke, her voice a little husky and dry as raw whisky over ice. All I could feel was cool velvet water breaking over sun-scorched skin.

"What time is it?" she whispered.

I glanced at my wrist. "Just after nine."

Her eyebrows lifted a little in surprise. I assumed she was shocked as to how long she'd slept. "How far are we from the border?"

I glanced at the speedometer and the passing road signs, making the calculations quickly. "Maybe an hour. A little less if we keep over the speed limit."

Bella frowned in disapproval at that, and I barely restrained my laughter. After all she'd been through - after all we'd been through - she was still bothered by the thought of speeding. Her voice was hesitant as she asked, "You're not worried about the car? I mean, it is stolen and it's pretty flashy. Surely the cops will notice it."

I shrugged, uncomfortably reminded of my slight misjudgment with the canary yellow 911 Turbo. "You're not wrong, but the Porsche is fast and that is our main priority right now. We need to get to safety, get as far away from Phoenix as possible before the Volturi realise they went the wrong way. As for the cops..." I shrugged, unconcerned. "The Group has a lot of connections, one of which resulted in a variety of IDs I carry around with me. It will be more than enough to get the state police off our backs if we are pulled over."

None of the IDs I carried would live up to long-term scrutiny, but they were all convincing enough to allow a short-term relief. Carlisle had ensured that his contacts were widespread enough that if he did have to flee we wouldn't be too far from a safe harbour. Well, a safeish harbour at least.

"Who's meeting us at the border?"

"I don't know," I answered honestly. "I'm guessing Paul or Jarred - they're our usual contacts in this area. They'll have food and fresh clothing for us too."

At the mention of the last Bella blushed as her stomach let out a particularly loud gurgle, shockingly loud in the confines of the car. I couldn't help but laugh at her expression of mortification.

Bella clutched her abdomen and shot me an annoyed look. "Well, what do you expect, Edward? I've barely eaten in twenty-four hours - I need some goddamn food!"

I snorted again. "Look in the glove compartment, there's some food in there. It's not much I'm afraid, just what the motel vending machine had to offer." She nodded and dove in, making me instantly feel bad for not offering it earlier. For not offering better. I should have known she'd need nutrition by now.

She peeled the plastic from the granola bar and munched contentedly, the soft moan of gratification from her lips shooting straight down my spine and curling my toes. Fuck. The white knuckles on her steering wheel made an instant reappearance.

My mouth pre-empted my brain and blurted out, "Can I ask you something?"

Bella took another bite of the Hershey bar she'd just unwrapped, and eyed me suspiciously. I thought she'd tell me to go to hell. But instead she just said, "Okay."

I swallowed. This was so inappropriate, there was no way I could ask - no way it was any of my business. In fact, it was way beyond inappropriate - Emmett and Jasper would both kick my ass for even thinking the question, let alone asking it. It was none of my goddamn business. I wasn't a misogynist, I didn't judge this way, but...for some reason I just had to ask.

I had to know.

My voice was raw and ragged, hot sand over my throat. "When you met Demetri, that first time in Rome...?"

I trailed off. Bella's soft voice brought me back as she murmured, "Yes?"

"Were you a virgin?"

I waited for the slap, for her melodic voice to tell me to go to hell.

But instead, almost a whisper, I heard her.

"Yes. Demetri was my first, my only. He made me what I am." She swallowed, softly, a wet flex of muscle against flesh. "I was a virgin."

~ * ~

So...thoughts, ideas? Reviewers get to be carried around by Edward and fed grapes. Seriously. Would I lie?

Question - who from the Cullen Group do you think should meet Bella and Edward at the Nevada border?

Please review - I'm worried this chapter is too introspective and maybe a little boring, so let me know. If you find it's getting dull don't be afraid to chime in and I'll up the action ante next time.