Disclaimer - This is strictly fanfiction and I own no legal rights to any of the trademarked IP within. Capcom, please don't sue me.

Ashley flicked the joystick and tapped a button on the keyboard. She was starting to get a hang of the surveillance system in the panic room.

Will was sleeping with his head on her shoulder. She was still mad he hadn't backed her up when she'd tried to insist on going with Jill and Carlos, but she still didn't have the heart to disturb him.

This was the most peaceful he'd looked all night.

Heck, this was the most peaceful she'd seen him ever. Before facing off against monsters tonight, they'd both had to deal with the butterflies they got in their stomachs whenever they were around each other. It had taken nearly dying together to finally address that tension.

Rosita had excused herself to use the attached bathroom.

All of the guards in the paramilitary uniforms Ashley could spot on the security monitors were running somewhere with their guns drawn. She got the impression they were all converging on something, and she was anxious to find out what.

She hated just watching. Jill and Carlos were putting themselves in danger for the sake of fighting evil. Ashley hated seeing that evil unfold before her eyes, just imagining what she'd do if she was there, while she was trapped on this side of the monitor and unable to help.

Despite holding on to her youthful appearance, Ashley wasn't a little girl anymore. Her fourth decade on this Earth was looming just on the horizon. She hadn't been a little girl during the Las Plagas incident, either. She was a young woman in college, trying to do what she could to survive in the face of certain doom, putting all of her trust in the stranger who became her only ally. Leon had combat training. She had a GPA of about 3.2 and a pocketful of herbs.

When the time came to confront her chief tormentor, Leon told her to stand back and hide. At the time, Ashley felt she had no choice but to trust him and do what he said. So she watched at a distance as Saddler transformed into something gargantuan and inhuman, and Leon nearly got himself killed fighting the monster the cult leader had become.

Leon got the help he needed in the nick of time. That beautiful, mysterious woman in the red cheongsam provided Leon with the rocket launcher he needed to reduce the mastermind behind Ashley's abduction to charred limbs and a puddle of slime.

Ashley was forever grateful for Leon saving her. But she was also forever looking back, wondering if there was more she could have done to help save herself, if there was anything she could do, however small, that would have made more of a difference than just hiding. Maybe then she would have had more closure?

Maybe that's why she was so resentful towards Jill and Carlos right now, for once again putting her in the position of hiding while someone else got payback for her torment.

Speaking of Jill and Carlos . . .

Ashley pulled her shoulder out from under Will's head. His eyes half-opened and looked at her groggily. She shook his shoulders and kept calling his name until he finally seemed fully awakened.

"What? What?"

"It's Jill and Carlos," she said, pointing to the monitor. "They're in trouble. They need us."

Will stared as the armed guards surrounded Jill and Carlos on all sides.

"They're fine," Will insisted, though the concerned look on his face as Jill and Carlos raised their arms in surrender said otherwise. "They've got this. They're professionals, right?"

The guards were marching Jill and Carlos towards a cell, and then tossing them inside.

"We've got to do something," Ashley insisted.

"But what could we even do? There's about a million of them and two of us. If anything, we'd probably just get in Jill and Carlos' way."

Rosita's scream came from the bathroom.

She burst through the door.

Two long tentacles reached for her, dotted with the occasional glowing orange eyeball.

Will began firing his gun in the direction of the tentacles. From just out of reach, he and Ashley could recognize the thing that had attacked them in the hotel pool, somehow climbing out of the panic room toilet.

"You have got to be kidding me," Will said, discarding his emptied weapon and reaching for a rifle from one of the nearby weapon lockers to replace it.

"Safe room's been compromised," Ashley said, a little too cheerily. "Guess we'll have to abandon it and join back up with the others."

She opened the panic room door and stepped out. Will ran after her.

"We've got enough weapons here to take this thing out!" Will insisted. "We're still safer here than down there!"

Ashley grabbed him and kissed him like it might be the last time she'd ever see him.

"You do what you want," she said, as Will caught his breath. "I'm going after the others."

She made it a few steps before Will started following.

"Ash, wait up! I'm coming too!"

"Don't leave me!" Rosita called, chasing after the two of them.

"We'll give you a few minutes to catch up," Meloni said as he slammed the cell door, before he and the other guards left the area.

Jill looked at the other cells with the monsters in them, and then she looked at Maria. The expression on her face was at least as scary as anything in the other cells.

"What are you doing here?" Carlos asked. "Are you okay? Where are the children? Was anyone . . . ?"

"No!" Maria said. "You go first! What the hell is going on here?" She gestured with her head towards Jill. "And who the hell is she?"

"This is Jill," Carlos said. "She's a friend."

Maria's eyes, still burning with anger, bounced back and forth between the other two.

"You slept together, didn't you?"

Jill would have been offended, except it felt more like laser-sharp perceptiveness than paranoid jealousy.

"No!" Carlos said. "Well, yes. But it was just once and it was, like, twenty years ago. Before I even met you."

"You said you were on a business trip," Maria said. "What kind of business is this?"

"Look, I'll tell you everything," Carlos said. "But at least tell me what's happening to our kids."

"They're fine. They're still with Danny and Fernanda. Meloni said he didn't want to drag kids in to this. He just wanted me."

Carlos and Maria both seemed a little less tense after she said that.

"Now are you going to tell me who these people are and why they've shoved us all together in here?"

Maria's eyes were drilling holes through Carlos'. He thought quickly through all the lies and half-truths he'd told her, and all the snippets of speeches he'd planned to come clean to her with but then abandoned. Now he had no choice.

And yet he still wasn't sure where to start.

"It's kind of a long story . . ."

Maria crossed her arms and continued staring boldly up into his eyes.

"We've got nothing but time."

Jill stepped back until she was standing in the opposite corner of the cell, then turned to look out through the translucent wall at the cells of monsters and tanks filled with chemicals around her. Carlos wasn't getting any help from her on this one.

George stared down in to the tank containing what they'd managed to scrape up of Lance's body. The putrid mush still squirmed around like it had a life of its own, but it wasn't coming anywhere close to reshaping into Minos.

He looked over at his lieutenants, Fabron and Meloni, and then to his wife, who wasn't even looking at him but was instead still focused on filing her nails and chewing her gum.

"Quelle tragédie," Daniel said. "As a weapon, Minos was starting to show some promise, I admit."

"Minos was just an early example of what Alpha can do," Jasmine said, still looking only at her own fingernails. "There's a new, slightly improved, version of the formula already ready to go. It should compensate for a few of Minos' weaknesses."

George held up the vial and plunged a needle into it.

"But who will be our new subject?" he asked.

"I volunteer," Meloni said. "The power of Minos combined with my combat training? I'll be an unstoppable weapon."

George's expression was blank, as if he hadn't heard Meloni at all.

"We need someone as morally bankrupt as Graham's pilot was," he said. "Someone who is already devoid of scruples."

His gaze stayed on Meloni for a moment, but then moved to Daniel.

"Someone with a completely black heart."

He held the needle and walked around the tank. Meloni and Daniel both held their breath as he walked around them.

Jasmine dropped her nail file and looked up in shock when she felt the prick on her neck.

"Someone already perfectly evil," George continued, as he plunged the injection into his wife.

He took the needle away, and she began writhing around on the floor in intense pain.

She continued squirming around, but was now making a noticeable effort to suppress her groans and cries of agony. George saw her lips moving, trying to form actual words, and leaned in closer.

"I never loved you," Jasmine spat out.

George just laughed.

"My darling," he said, "I always knew that."

Daniel, looked down, sighing and shaking his head, as George stood back up.

"I was just beginning to like her," Daniel said. Then he smiled excitedly. "May we call her Jezebel?"