A/N: Yes, yes, I know. I suck. Love me anyway? Thanks as always to changedbyEdward for the beta-on-the-fly. Oh, and you know which of this is mine and which belongs to the magnanimous SM, right?

Oh, and I was featured today at jaspersdarlins dot blogspot dot com. I wrote a review for Second Chances by aeriella1. Check it out!

Quick Recap: Bella, Edward, and Jasper have infiltrated the Romanian camp, hidden somewhere in Siberia, in the hopes of stopping their plans to destroy the Volturi and bring the vampire world out of hiding in a bid for world domination. Francesco, a member of the Italian mafia before Demetri bit him, was waiting for them on the inside. He's madly in love with Bella, to the point of hanging pornographic drawings of her on his wall, and is quickly getting on Jasper and Edward's bad side.

Jasper's POV

Did this jackoff really think I gave a rat's ass about his dignity? What about Bella's dignity? He certainly wasn't thinking about that when he let other people check out his pornographic sketches of Bella. The minute Francesco's usefulness runs out, he's a dead man.

Edward chuckled next to me and I was glad we were on the same page.

"Hey Francesco, they're looking for..." a dark skinned vampire paused in the doorway, staring luridly at Bella. Fucking aye, I'm just going to have to massacre this entire freaking town, aren't I? "You're Bella; you're the girl from the..."

"Yes," Bella cut him off from finishing that sentence. I watched as he glanced over the couch and could sense his disappointment that the picture was gone. "I'm Bella," she said, sounding as though she were having a hard time keeping calm herself. The vampire's attention turned back to her. "And you are?"

He appeared a step in front of her and took her hand into his, kissing her knuckles and smirking at her. "I'm Rafael, and let me just say that if you ever give up on Francesco, I would be happy to help you forget all about him."

Bella turned on the charm. "Oh, it's a little late for that," she said sweetly. "Francesco is my ex. I just couldn't deal with his God-awful sketches anymore." Rafael laughed heartily and I could feel it as he became enchanted. He was in love. Another Gold Card member. I turned to Bella, wondering if that was her intention. From the look on her face as he reached up and cupped her cheek, it was not.

Bella took a large step backwards away from him, placing her securely between Edward and I and taking us both by the hand. "Let me introduce you to my husband, Edward, and my best friend, Jasper." Rafael looked back and forth between us, no doubt sizing up the competition. He wisely decided to back down.

"Very nice to meet you," he said as he extended his hand first to Edward, and then to me. "Bella, if you and your...companions...need anything while you are here, please don't hesitate to ask. Francesco spoke highly of you, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We can use all the help we can get, and we're thankful you're on our side. Oh, Francesco, I just remembered what I came here for. Dr. Hart was looking for you. They got a new shipment in a couple hours ago and he needs some help getting them subdued and in their kennels." Thankfully, both Edward and Bella were able to hide their reactions.

"Actually, Rafael," I said, putting a false smile on my face. "Francesco was just going to show us around. Seeing as he's going to be busy for a while, would you do us the honors?"

Francesco's disappointment and Rafael's simultaneous enthusiasm made me chuckle. Bella looked at me curiously, but I just shook my head minutely. Later.

"Love to. Follow me." Francesco followed us out of the building, but then turned the opposite direction and disappeared. "So what do you want to see first? The lab? The mess hall? The library?"

Bella, of course, chose the only option of the three not ensured to involve bloodshed. To the library, we went. It was much more than a library. It was part library, part museum, and all propaganda. Every book was geared to incite hatred towards humans and to create a sense of superiority over them. They played on the difficulties of hiding what we are in human society, the cruelties and injustices our kind has suffered, or allegedly suffered, throughout history at the hands of humans. There were articles citing scientific studies that showed that, while vampires and humans share a large percentage of the same DNA, we are as vastly different from humans as they are to chimpanzees, on both an intellectual and a physical scale. They even went so far as to suggest that humans were not, in fact, sentient beings, but mindless animals who cannot feel love or pain the way that we do. My particular favorite was the one that suggested that because the humans lacked the intellectual skill necessary to think things through, they were destroying the planet with their mindless, wasteful ways to the point where they had become a blight on the Earth that must be exterminated 'in the wild.' It suggested that we could better protect them in a zoo-like environment, and that once the population was 'under control,' farms could be introduced to properly raise and 'milk' them, with strict breeding guidelines to be established to create the most diverse and biologically favorable gene pool.

I'd never seen Bella in such a hurry to escape a library.

The next few days flew by quickly. We learned our way around the compound and each secured positions within the compound; Bella, much to her chagrin, at the library, myself at the watchtower, and Edward in an administrative office. We were granted an apartment of our own, for which we were all extremely grateful, and had started getting down to the real work of making friends and influencing people. Surprisingly, it wasn't as abhorrent as we had expected it to be. The vast majority of the people we met seemed genuinely good, if extremely naive and misled, like Rafael. They honestly thought they were doing the right thing, participating in a righteous movement to save not just the vampire race but the world. We were very careful to only have Bella enchant one or two people every several days, and luckily, with the exception of Rafael, none of them had been struck by Cupid's arrow.

We hadn't been granted access to the lab yet, nor were we in a position to meet the ones in charge, but there was time for that, and we needed to be patient. Bella was having the hardest time with it, and it was all I could do to keep her emotions under control after she got off her shift each afternoon.

Today was no different. I was sitting in the shabby mustard yellow chair looking out the dirty window, strategizing our next few steps. I felt her pain before she ever made it inside the building and gritted my teeth against the powerful emotions lest they take me under with her. I couldn't let that happen. She needed me.

Bella burst through the door and was in my lap in an instant, her head buried in my neck as she tried to smother her sobs, which if we needed air would have been bordering on hyperventilating. She wrapped her arms almost painfully around my waist and held on for dear life.

"Bella? What's wrong, darlin'?" I whispered, not wanting our voices to carry through the paper thin walls.

"It's just...awful! There were two...researchers...hmph...from the lab there today. They were flipping through medical journals and talking about their 'progress.' Apparently, they consider an experiment a success if five humans out of a hundred survive. Five!" she whisper-shouted into the crook of my neck. "They didn't even bother to change out of their blood-stained lab coats. They were so freaking nonchalant about the whole thing, you'd have thought they were talking about the weather. They don't even know their names, they just give them numbers."

I wrapped my arms around her, ran my hands up and down her back repeatedly and kissed the top of her head. "I know, baby. It's awful. But that's why we're here. That's why what we are doing is so important. The most important thing we've ever done. Try and focus on that. Did you talk to them at all?" She knew what I was asking.

"No. I was too repulsed. It didn't even cross my mind to try. I was just focused on keeping my mouth shut and hiding my emotions the way you taught me."

"It's alright. There will be other opportunities. You've already accomplished more than I thought you would in such a short time. It'll happen." I tucked my knuckle under her chin and tilted her head up to look at me, raising an eyebrow at her. Even after all this time, we didn't need words to communicate. Bella nodded at me and tucked her head back in my neck, sighing gratefully as I sent wave after wave of calm and contentment through her.

Edward came in a moment later, stopping just inside the door to take in the scene in front of him. His emotions were only slightly more in control than hers were and I wondered what he had uncovered. "Later," he whispered, shooting a quick glance at Bella. He clearly didn't want to upset her further. Edward bent down and kissed her on her temple and her head shot up, so closed off she hadn't even heard him approach. He smiled at her comfortingly, rubbing her shoulder for a moment and kissing her chastely before throwing himself down on the couch next to us. "Hey Jazz? Think I can get a shot of that?" I expanded the bubble of calm and Edward sighed in much the same way as Bella had. I had to chuckle.

"Hey, who the hell is going to calm me down, huh?" I teased.

Edward lifted his head minutely and with a completely straight face replied, "I'm pretty sure my wife is doing that right now, isn't she?" He smirked at my dropped jaw in good humor before dropping his head back down and throwing his arm over his eyes. "Jesus, this sucks."

Bella sat up then, regarding Edward a little warily for a second before kissing my cheek and climbing off my lap. I resisted the urge to tap her on the ass as she stood up. She sat next to him and his arms were immediately around her, pulling her flush on top of him almost desperately. I stood up and headed for the door, prepared to give them some time alone when Edward stopped me.

"No, Jazz. Don't. The three of us need to talk. There's been a development."

I heard the sound of a chair sliding along the floor from the adjacent apartment and shook my head at him.

"No, Edward. Not right now," I said in a normal tone of voice. "I'm not in the mood to talk." Meet me at the gate at midnight.

Luckily, I had a shift at the gate that night, so it was relatively easy to sneak Edward and Bella out, promising to meet them at the spot where we'd buried our supplies as soon as I could. When I arrived, I could tell they had hunted and burned off some stress in other ways, for which I was both grateful and unbearably jealous, in more ways than one. My thoughts briefly drifted to Heidi, but I forced them away. It would do me no good to entertain those thoughts right now.

Edward eyed me sympathetically and tossed me a blood bag that was now only about a third of the way full and I cringed before emptying it. It tasted awful, but was a necessary evil to keep up the ruse.

"Okay, what's going on?"

"Rafael and Francesco came to see me today. Said they wanted my advice in acquiring new test subjects. Apparently, most of the humans they bring in to this point have been bought from the human trafficking trade, but they've overused those routes and their vendors are starting to get suspicious, so they have to find other means." I sensed his hesitation.

"There's more."

Edward sighed and nodded his head. "Yes. Apparently they are not having the success they hoped for in terms of increasing blood replenishment and such. They think that perhaps the key is testing on younger and therefore stronger specimens."

"Children," Bella said.

"Yes, in part. But it's worse than that. They want to impregnate women with genetically altered embryos. They want help setting up what they called a recruitment program, luring in down on their luck females under the pretense of being well-paid surrogates."

"How long do they expect to take setting up these recruitment centers?"

"Sixty days. Just long enough to move to their next base of operations."

"Any idea where that's going to be?"

"No, just that it's going to be somewhere in the U.S., and they want recruitment centers in every major city from coast to coast."

"Well, then, we have no time to lose. We are going to have to step things up a bit. Edward, I know it's hard, but really, this is excellent news. They are starting to trust you. Help them, make yourself invaluable to them. Try not to worry, if everything goes according to plan, and it will, then all you will have helped create will be a multitude of empty offices."