A/N

GM!

This chapter is dedicated to two readers—lana-metheo3 and oliviaadmond—who took the time to personally reach out with thoughtful messages.

Thank you both. Your words reminded me why I'm still here sharing stories in a space that sometimes feels more like a ghost town than a community.

I want to keep creating. I want to keep sharing. But it's been a little disheartening to receive more spammy commission requests than actual feedback.

I'm not against collaborating in the future, but right now I'm just trying to finish this story and survive two very expensive dental surgeries.

If you're genuinely moved by the work and want to help me keep going, please—leave a review. Share the story. Or if you're feeling generous, reach out.

But mostly—thank you. For reading. For seeing me. For letting this story live.

With love,

Kurojistou

(The author formerly known as "just tryna write in peace.")

The violins swelled.

Edward played without looking at the sheet. He hadn't needed sheet music since the 1800s, but it gave the humans comfort when he appeared to struggle through the ink like they did.

He was careful with them—careful with everything now.

The Cambion haunted his thoughts like a refrain stuck in a minor key.

Each measure he played felt like a calculation.

Each down-bow: control.

Each breath: planning.

He had drafted a message to Eleazar that morning.

Something benign. Familial.

His dear cousins were reliable—the kind of family you could trust not to flinch when the shadows started talking.

He was about to press send when his phone lit up.

ROSE.

The name still looked wrong in his inbox.

Too familiar. Too sharp.

dearest brother,

I heard you have a child.

A living one. Breathing. How poetic. How… addictive.

You know about Vera. My Vera. So let's not waste time pretending we don't understand each other.

Let's talk business.

—Rose.

The rehearsal continued around him. The bows dipped and danced. The flutist was slightly flat.

But Edward didn't move.

Rosalie.

He used to think she was all surface—beauty and grief threaded into machinery. But now?

Now he remembered the way she dismantled engines in silence.

How she tracked with her eyes, not her mouth. How she made pain efficient.

Maybe he had underestimated her. Maybe she had underestimated herself.

She was made for motherhood, he'd once said, foolishly.

But maybe she was made for more than that.

Maybe she could be useful.

A spy. A whisper-knife. A rose with wire wrapped around the stem.

He began drafting a reply. His fingers hovered over the screen, not yet typing.

You always had good taste in vengeance, he thought.

This could be a beginning.

If Vera was the ghost in Rosalie's chest, and the cambion the crown in his… then they finally had something real to barter.

The wind off the water was salted and sharp.

Isabella stood on the porch barefoot, gauntlets still on, arms tense as she rolled her shoulders in silence.

Her weighted socks pressed into the old wood boards like rooted intentions. Even standing still, she looked like someone in training. Or preparation.

Behind her, the ocean breathed.

Rosalie stepped through the open screen door behind her, quietly removing the plain cap she wore to blend in with the human cleaning crew.

She let her long blond hair fall, and for a moment, the wind caught it just enough to remind Isabella that beauty could still feel like a weapon.

Neither of them spoke first.

Didymium reclined a little distance away, spread along a chaise like a myth draped in dusk.

She held a carved obsidian goblet with both hands, sipping from something dark and living inside it.

She wasn't watching them. Not overtly.

But she was.

Rosalie's eyes swept over Isabella—scanning with clinical precision.

The shorter hair. The widened hips. The denser musculature. She looked perhaps three or four months pregnant, but carried it like armor.

Or ballast.

"The hair works," Rosalie said finally. Her tone wasn't warm, but it wasn't cutting either.

Isabella didn't turn. "I'm training."

"I can see that."

Rosalie's eyes lingered on her jawline, then the hair.

Shorter. Cleaner.

Intentional.

"You changed it," she said.

Isabella didn't look at her. She rolled her shoulder, the gauntlet creaking faintly at the joint.

"It needed to go."

Rosalie raised a brow. "Suits you."

A beat.

"Bella—"

"It's Isabella."

Rosalie paused. Not in offense. Just in calculation.

She adjusted her stance. Less combat. More recognition.

"Alright," she said softly. "Isabella."

The name settled between them like a new border.

Not a correction.

A warning.

A line in the sand that she had renamed herself to draw.

Rosalie's gaze dipped toward the gauntlets. "Let me guess. She wants soldiers?"

"Weapons," Isabella corrected. "She doesn't waste language."

A gull cried out above them. The wind shifted.

Isabella turned slightly, watching the pale outline of Rosalie's throat.

Isabella turned. Finally met her eyes.

"Does Emmett know where you are?"

A beat.

"Or are you with the College now?"

Rosalie didn't flinch.

"It's complicated," she said.

Then:

"But yes. For the foreseeable future, my allegiance is with the children. They are under the direct jurisdiction of Didymium."

Isabella paused mid-breath.

"Didymium."

The name cracked something open in her memory.

Carlisle's office.

Warm wood. Glass cases.

A photograph. Black and white but vivid in meaning.

Aro. Caius. Marcus—king-like. Silent.

Beside him, a woman. Beautiful in a way that unnerved her.

Edward's voice, offhand but reverent:

"Didymium. The conscience of the old court. Or the executioner, depending on whose version you believe."

Isabella's throat was dry.

"I've heard that name before."

Rosalie nodded. "Then you know what she is."

"I don't," Isabella replied. "Not really."

Rosalie's voice dropped

The goblet clinked faintly as Didymium shifted on the chaise, lips red, but her attention stayed elsewhere—for now.

Rosalie took a breath—habit, not need. Her voice dropped just slightly.

"You don't need to. You just need to carry them safely."

Isabella held her gaze.

"And if I don't?"

Rosalie's eyes didn't narrow. Didn't flicker. They just stayed locked.

"Then I protect them from everything. Even you."

There was no anger in it. Just fact.

Isabella nodded slowly.

"Then we understand each other. "

The goblet chimed—soft but sharp.

Didymium struck it once, twice, with the limp wrist of the human blood bag draped across her lap.

The sound carried like crystal through cathedral halls.

Conversation died.

Even the ocean seemed to pause.

Rosalie turned at once, spine straightening as if tugged by a leash made of etiquette.

Didymium lounged across the chaise like a queen carved from dusk.

The blood bag's arm dangled lazily from her grip, violet veins pulsing faintly beneath translucent skin.

"Come, come, Miss Hale," she purred, the faintest lilt curling her voice. "You look absolutely famished."

Rosalie did not answer—only waited.

"What kind of hostess would I be if I didn't take care of my guests?" Didymium continued, lifting the goblet slightly.

The liquid inside caught the light—thick, rich, still warm.

"You have free range. Over the temporary cleaning crew stationed here… or,"

she added, a soft smirk curving her mouth, "the closer counties near our stretch of Brazil's forgotten coast."

Isabella blinked. Brazil.

That tracked. Barely.

So much of this island felt unplaced on purpose—somewhere between heat and myth.

Didymium took another sip, her throat moving slow, elegant.

"After you've eaten and refreshed, do meet me by the hot waterfalls."

A pause. A smile with more edge than kindness.

"We'll discuss protocols and plans."

Then, her tone dropped into something almost affectionate.

"But I am happy to see your beauty shine upon me. I believe a fruitful day is coming for all of us."

The dismissal was clear.

Rosalie curtsied—flawless, silent. Then she pressed a kiss to Didymium's outstretched hand, the gesture reverent but restrained.

Without so much as a flick of the eye toward Isabella, she turned and walked into the house.

Isabella stared after her, mouth parted. Shock, confusion, betrayal—none of it had formed into a nameable feeling yet.

Didymium reached forward and gently, mockingly, pressed her index finger under Isabella's chin—closing her jaw.

Then she patted her head.

"There, there. Do not be amazed by my ways."

Her voice was low.

Sweet.

Coated in centuries.

"Many would kill to be where you are. To be this close to history."

She let her fingers fall.

"Tell me," she said casually, as though discussing the weather, "what do you think of Aro?"

Isabella blinked. Collected herself.

Her voice, when it finally came, was calm.

"He's a collector."

Didymium's eyes gleamed.

a beat.

Isabella tilted her head slightly.

"An old, erratic one. Useful. But hollow. Like something sacred that's been rinsed too clean."

"He talks like he's tasting memories, but I think he's forgotten the flavor of truth. Everything's performance. Nothing stays."

Didymium's lip curled—not in displeasure, but curiosity, like a cat watching a butterfly speak in full sentences.

She dabbed her mouth delicately with the limp hand of the blood bag—fingers still faintly twitching, wrist angled like a silk napkin.

Then, without looking, she dropped the arm onto the chaise beside her. It landed with a soft thud.

"And tell me, my Isabella," she said smoothly, her voice velvet stretched over barbed wire,

"have you actually met him?"

A pause.

"Have you stood in the halls of Volterra? Heard his voice echo in the marble? Or are these… accusations… built from secondhand accounts and scavenged pages?"

Isabella didn't answer.

She didn't need to.

She had already turned away—resuming her drills.

Her breath sharp. Her movements practiced. The gauntlets whispered against air.

The weighted socks made her footsteps sound like heartbeats from a buried place.

She didn't argue.

She didn't defend.

She let the strength of her rhythm speak instead.

And Didymium smiled.

Because that, too, was an answer.

Didymium rose.

She unclipped the cloak at her throat with a soft snap—a gesture almost reverent.

The heavy fabric fell away, revealing what had always been just out of sight.

Ivory blue skin dusted with a sheen of impossible light.

Shoulders bare. A corseted structure of bone and white silk beneath.

And when her hands reached up to remove the pins from her crown of coiled hair, the curls spilled free—falling in glossy waves, framing her face like the final movement in a ritual.

Bella's eyes caught.

Just a flicker.

Like an addict spotting a glint of glass in a carpet.

Didymium stepped toward her, not quickly.

Each stride deliberate.

Each inhale releasing something else into the air—something fragrant, ancient, and wrong in the sweetest way.

Bella's drills slowed.

The gauntlets moved sluggishly now, rhythm faltering.

Her breathing hitched—not from exertion, but… a softness.

A fuzzing around the edge of her skull.

The scent—Didymium's presence—reminded her of the first time she smoked a joint.

Back when the Pack boys passed it around by the fire.

Paul. Jared. Seth.

She remembered laughing so hard her ribs ached.

This was like that. But deeper. Stickier. And nowhere to laugh.

Her knees didn't tremble, but her balance shifted.

Didymium circled her now, slowly.

Not touching.

Just radiating. A dark sun made of blood and memory.

Bella bit her lip.

She hated that she bit her lip.

Didymium paused behind her, so close the curls brushed Bella's shoulder. She inhaled—not loud, not crude—but enough.

And smiled.

"Good girl," she whispered.

The voice didn't come from her mouth, but behind Bella's teeth.

"Let your body remember what your mind will soon forget."

Bella exhaled. Or maybe whimpered.

And resumed the drill.

Not because she had to.

But because she couldn't stop.

Didymium circled back to face her.

Bella's breath came faster now, her pupils fully blown. The drills had stopped entirely, arms slack at her sides, gauntlets gleaming faintly in the dying light.

Sweat traced the column of her throat, and her lips parted on a half-formed sound that wasn't refusal—but wasn't consent either.

Didymium leaned in.

She brushed up against her, deliberate—shoulder to chest, silk to heat.

One gloved hand lifted to tilt Isabella's chin higher, tilting her face like a sculpture she meant to claim.

She studied the dilation. The flush.

Then kissed her.

Rough. Thorough. Anchoring.

Not a seduction. A seal.

And Bella let it happen.

Because it felt like sinking into warm water.

Because it was easier than resistance.

Because something inside her still whispered that this—whatever this was—was hers now.

Didymium pulled back slowly, savoring the way Isabella swayed.

She turned without ceremony, already walking away, cloak forgotten on the chaise, curls bouncing like she hadn't just rewired a girl from the inside out.

A promising response, she thought.

Not just obedience. Not just hunger.

But attachment.

The first coiling thread of something that could hold.

If her suspicions were right—if this quiet storm of a girl was the West Coast's strongest singer yet—then the war was already tilting.

In her favor.

Behind her, Isabella swayed once more, vision blurring at the edges like wet film.

And in the seconds before blackness took her, she had one, absurd, spiraling thought:

"I always wanted to experiment with women…"

"…At least I'm doing that now."

Then—

Dark.