Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise, I just use their creations to have my wicked way with them. No copyright infringement is intended.

- Epilogue –

"In the case of the people versus Riley, we the jury, find the defendant…..guilty as charged." I grinned, nudging Hollander in the ribs as we sat back and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. No matter how many cases I'd tried, this….the winning….it still felt fucking amazing. Then again that was kind of obvious considering the amount of time we put into this shit.

Still, it never felt as good as it had that one time five years ago when that same sentence spoken in a different courtroom and what seemed now to be almost a different reality, had put the leaders of the Volturi behinds bars for the rest of their miserable fucking life.

And may they rot in hell, amen.

I sometimes wondered how things would have turned out if Victoria had been a more stable kind of person instead of a rabid raging gun-wielding lunatic. Would we still have ended up here, living our happily ever after?

I somehow doubted it.

I couldn't help but smile, thinking about how utterly Victoria Norrell had failed in her assignment to ruin the Cullens and the Swans. In fact, her actions had only meant that her husband was posthumously found guilty of yet another murder.

My mirth was replaced by a feeling of heaviness as I thought back on that day; the flashing lights of the ambulances, the pale deadness in my father's face as the gurney holding his body flashed by; an EMT straddling it in a desperate attempt to revive his heart….the sheer look of devastation on Bella's face when they finally let me see her, my mom's silent grief as we sat in the hospital's waiting room, waiting for news…..

It was the night I thought I'd lost everything but which strangely ended up being the night we won the battle.

The battle against the Volturi.

The battle against death.

The battle against the past….

In the end it took almost losing him forever for me to fully and completely forgive my dad for the decisions he'd made for us. Those four hours of having my dad on a surgery table fighting for his life and the three subsequent days he spent balancing on the brink of death that made me realize just how foolish I had been to hold on to my grudge.

He was still my father, no matter how many mistakes he'd made in the past.

No matter how wrong he'd been.

The memory of those four days was so bittersweet because not only had they been filled with tons of grief and regret, they had also marked a huge shift in all of our lives.

As Victoria's body was lying in the morgue, detectives searching her house managed to uncover a large amount of damning evidence, poorly hidden amongst the books and newspaper clippings that littered every available surface of her house.

It was like she'd never expected the police to ever come snooping around; like she'd somehow thought herself untouchable…..undefeatable.

And it had made her sloppy.

Which – for us – was a good thing.

A very good thing.

It turned out that the death of her partner had driven Victoria Norrell insane, her house remodeled into a shrine for her dead lover and her sole focus fixed on getting revenge. I think at first nobody realized just how important a role she had played within the Volturi, figuring she was just some madwoman wanting to kill the people she held responsible for her lover's death. It was only later that they found out just how big a part she'd played within the organization.

When my dad had spoken to the police as part of his plea agreement, he'd directed them to the converted warehouse in Monroe the Volturi used as the operating facility for their illegal transplant scheme. When a team of crime scene investigators arrived on site, though, they had found the place burnt down, its remains completely wiped down and devoid of any evidence, both in human traces or paper trails that could be of any help.

It had been a huge disappointment, both to them and to my dad, since they needed every bit of evidence they could get to build up their case against the Volturi leaders and their trustees. Evidence, it seemed then, they weren't going to find.

That was, until Victoria Norrell handed it all over to them on a pretty, silver platter and doused with a good splash of crazy on top of it.

When Victoria's home was searched after her violent death in my parent's foyer, they found a large number of documents in her house which, upon investigation, could only have come from the makeshift clinic in Monroe; documents which had probably been kept by Victoria because they contained the name of James Croft or Nemesis as he had been called within the organization as well as those – some encrypted some not – of many others.

His name.

Those documents had been saved just because they contained his name.

His name, underlined in red and surrounded by the deranged scribbling and tear stains of a madwoman.

His name, surrounded by enough information to put the Volturi behind bars even without my dad's or Renee's testimony in court.

Their finds had spurred another round of arrests across the city, the police now confident that they had every important member of the Volturi in custody with enough evidence against them to put them in jail for a substantial amount of time.

But that wasn't all.

Among Victoria's possessions they also found a set of keys to my dad's apartment as well as a box of surveillance tapes from the CCTV circuit of the floor my dad's apartment was on as and an ID-badge that had James' picture on it alongside a fake alias and the name of the building.

That was how he did it.

That was how they got in.

James had played this so well….He and Aro must have spent years planning this ahead to the smallest detail and regardless of the fact that neither of them was at liberty now to reap the benefits of it, they would have gotten away with it had it not been for Victoria.

No one would have known.

James had made perfect use of the fact that my dad had never seen his face without a mask to hide its identity by taking a job as a porter at my dad's building, this giving him access to it at all times even though he was never able to get inside my dad's flat. From that point on he just bid his time, waiting until the perfect opportunity arose.

I could still remember the look on my dad's face when he realized that the man he'd asked to make a copy of his house keys for his new housekeeper had been the same man who entered his house two years later and killed Jane Foster only to wipe all traces of himself away after he was done, including a switch of the surveillance tapes covering the hallway.

It was the perfect murder…at least, it would have been. If Victoria hadn't made such a mess of things, I doubted anyone would have found out the truth.

But they did.

And it meant that my dad went free.

While the state prosecutors all scrambled to apologize to dad for having him branded a killer and basically making his life miserable, Garrett and Jasper were already hard at work brokering a new deal; a deal that would still have my dad in court testifying against those rat bastards who did this to him but walking out of there a free man afterwards, the light sentence for racketeering, served in a minimum security prison as he awaited the Volturi Trial more than paying the debt he owed to society.

In fact, even the six months he had to spend in jail because of his involvement in the Volturi's criminal activities weren't necessarily a bad thing since they kept him safe from any other attempts at his life.

It still was hard, seeing my dad disappear behind the doors of Cedar Creek Corrections Center, especially on my mom. We'd only just gotten him back after his long stay at the hospital and now we had to make do with visiting hours and very public settings. Still we managed to make it work by using the time apart to work on our individual problems before making a fresh start once the trial was behind us.

As the first trial day grew closer, more and more members of the Volturi were starting to come forward with what they knew. It seemed that they had all been waiting, hesitant to crawl out of the woodwork too soon only to have the Volturi set free and engage in a rampage of revenge as soon as they could. When it became clear that the prosecution had more than enough evidence against the leaders to get a conviction, however, some felt confident enough to come forward both to avoid or lessen their own punishment or just because, like with my dad, they had always been disgusted by the Volturi and their own membership but too afraid for themselves or their families to speak up.

Still, the four of us – Dad, Renee, Bella and I – were the state's crown witnesses and as such the US Attorney handling the case took no risks when it came to making sure we were safe.

And being home wasn't a part of that.

None of us had been too eager to go back home after everything that had happened there, so when it was suggested that we move to Seattle, to a safe house that could be secured much easier than the Woodway property with all its grounds could have, we were all too ready to comply. The only thing that had been harder to deal with was the decision that Renee, in order to protect her safety, would remain in Florida until right before the trial would start.

Bella had been devastated by that news, as had Renee. After we had all come so close to losing Bella for a second time, I could more than understand their need to be with each other but even though my poor girl needed her mother more than she ever needed her in her life, they both knew that the decision was for the best. So they made do with Skype, phone calls and text messages while both resuming their lives as best as they could.

In the end, nothing had felt as good as standing up in a court of law and telling a jury all I had been put through by the hands of the Volturi. I felt strong, taking the stand and speaking out against Aro, my uncle and everyone else who was sitting across from me. For all the time I'd spent in courtrooms, trying cases before the bench, I'd never known how liberating it actually felt to take the stand and, as I stepped down again, a great burden dropped from my shoulders.

I was finally free.

No more anger.

No more resentment.

No more whoring around.

I was making a fresh start; a clean break with the past.

In the end, all fifteen members of the Volturi who stood trial – Aro, Eleazar, Heidi, Irina, a bunch of doctors from Seattle Grace and a few other prominent members, including former Assistant District Attorney Demetri Lalenkov – were convicted for their crimes and sent upstate on sentences that ranged from two years for the minor members to life without parole for the bigwigs and surviving members of the punitori.

It had been Renee who delivered the fatal blow to the Volturi by telling them everything she'd seen during her time as Aro's famula, from the drugging of prospective members to overheard conversations about murders and other criminal acts to the witness of an illegal organ harvest where a young boy, an illegal immigrant brought here by a human trafficking ring that worked closely together with the Volturi, was forced to give up his kidney in order to gain a new life in the United States. It turned out that she knew more than anyone else, more even than my father had and no matter how much the Volturi's army of lawyers had tried to weaken her testimony, they had failed at every attempt.

I chuckled, remembering a very amusing (though slightly nauseating when you came to think of it) day in court. Bella and I had been present as observers, both already having taken the stand, to watch Renee as she was cross examined by the Volturi briefs. It had been when the Volturi's chief attorney had 'opened fire' on Bella's mom and stated that Renee could never be certain of the fact that it had, indeed, been his client who had done all those things, since the most prominent members of the Volturi made sure to wear masks at all times. Renee had merely smiled at him and replied that, if the very distinctive accent in Aro's voice wasn't enough, they only had to ask him to drop his trousers and know that it was him and no other. It turned out that Aro, for all his precautions to protect his identity, hadn't factored in a very distinctive and oddly shaped birthmark on his penis.

Of course, the state prosecutor hadn't wasted any time in demanding visual evidence meaning that Aro had had to drop his pants in front of a court photographer and have his dick – or pictures of it – shown in evidence to the jury. The press had a field day that day and so did we, though Bella cringed every step of the way as she remembered why her mother knew all those things.

The day the gavel came down was the day that started our new life.

And we were all more than ready to start it.

My mother had been the first to suggest moving to another state and with Bella graduating only weeks after the trial was done, there never seemed to be a more perfect moment to do so.

Turned out, though, that my mom's suggestion hadn't been completely unselfish.

Ever since mom had started working for the San Francisco based Mary Hart Foundation, her spirit had started to bounce back to the sweet, loving and happy woman I remembered from my childhood. With a new goal in life and a future prospect that looked better than it had in years, she'd thrown herself into her work, getting Seattle's first Hart House, a home offering shelter to women who had suffered abuse in the widest sense of the word, up and running in record time. The chair people of the foundation had been very pleased with her work, so pleased in fact that they offered her a dream job at their headquarters in San Francisco.

Which was how we all ended up here, in sunny California.

It had been hard to leave our friends behind and – for Bella – her family, but in the end it had been the only way forward. Seattle, as much as we had both grown to love the city, would always be synonymous with what had happened to us there. Moving to a new place that lacked the gruesome memories of the old, allowed us to finally move ahead and leave the past behind us.

At least, for as far as we wanted.

After we moved to the Bay area, I'd started out working for a firm lead by one of Garrett's old college buddies, slowly but surely starting to push my way through the ranks again by working hard and – most of all – by winning hard. Then, a couple of months ago, I'd received a job offer from the District Attorney's office offering me a spot in their criminal division.

It had been a no brainer, really, seeing as my own history with crime had made me quite eager to be on the prosecution's side of the fence. I just never thought my situation – what with my dad's rap sheet and Bella's line of work – would make me eligible for the job I now held.

Apparently, it was on merit alone – personal merit. Not my dad's deep pockets or my mom's family name – that I landed this job. I had to admit. It felt really fucking good to know that.

This had been the first case I'd seen to completion, sitting second chair for Assistant District Attorney Nielson, the man rumored to be the next to take the top spot. It had been a lot of hard work and – because I still had to prove myself as 'the new kid on the block' – a lot of tension and nights spent pouring over witness statements and legal texts but in the end, it had all been worth it.

"Drinks at O'Donnells'?" Hollander chuckled as we watched our boss collect his congratulations from the sulking defense team.

"Nah," I shrugged, the idea of getting drunk with my colleagues not sounding particularly appealing when I knew what I would be missing out on. "I'm already late getting home. If I don't show up at all, my wife will fry my ass."

Hollander patted my shoulder as he shook his head at me. "You're so fucking whipped!"

I chuckled knowingly, not seeing his words as an insult even though they were probably meant as one. "You just wait until you find a good woman of your own…"

"Never!" Hollander looked positively shocked at the prospect of being tied down in the near future. Not that I could blame him. I mean, five years ago I was kinda in the same boat and all that.

But I knew better now.

"You keep saying that, Robbie," I grinned, "but when you find her….you know she's worth it."

He must have known not to mess with my girl or with my completely and utter fucking devotion to her because he merely smiled. "Bella's a lucky woman."

I shook my head. "Believe me, I'm the one who lucked out."

I shook my head as I grabbed my coat and made it out of the courthouse, pushing my way through the people who were still lingering inside, talking animatedly. One day Hollander would learn just how much strength a stable and loving relationship could give a man but until that day came I wasn't about to stand by his side and hold his hand.

I had better things to do with my time.

I smiled, coming face to face with my convertible BMW 650i in the garage. In the end, Bella won the battle just as she always did, though I always consoled myself with the fact that my surrender to a car that seated four had been more out of necessity than anything else.

Yeah, keep saying that Cullen.

I pressed the button, the top sliding open to another warm and sunny late California afternoon as I pulled out of the garage, heading south towards the building where Bella spent most of her days.

I spotted her immediately as I drove up to the main entrance of the San Francisco Gazette, pride swelling inside of me as I watched my Bella – my Mrs. Cullen – hold her own against a crowd of people without breaking a sweat or stopping to think whether or not some of those people wanted to kill her.

She'd come so far.

In the end, Bella's recovery had been nothing short of remarkable which was ironic seeing as we had Victoria Norrell to thank for it.

Where her first brush in with the Volturi had left her damaged and afraid, her second had just pissed her off and in her rage she'd found the strength and determination to not just carry on with her life, but do so in a manner that had us all sit back in awe.

She'd gone back to school two days after my dad woke up from his coma. At first it had been simply therapeutic, a meaningful way to spend her day without having to stop and think about what happened all the time. Soon, though, it became much more than that. As days passed and the Department of Communications slowly rallied from the shockwave that had crashed through it, Bella started to find that maybe journalism wasn't so bad at all…..maybe she could still become a kickass newspaper reporter even after what had happened to her.

It was around that time that her fighting spirit returned.

To Bella, going back to school and getting her degree had now become her way of showing the Volturi and the rest of the world that whatever they would throw at her, she'd always come back fighting. Being a reporter was what she'd wanted to do with her life ever since she'd started to really think about those kinds of things and she wasn't going to let Aro or Victoria or anyone else stand in her way when it came to reaching her goals, especially not when she was so close.

She'd even gone back to The Daily, though this time she was very careful to stick to campus news to work up her confidence again before venturing off campus for stories about music gigs or other small stuff. Nothing that would have a girl end up in a secret meeting, drugged up to her eyeballs and wearing a getup that looked like it came straight of the set of some kind of period porn movie.

When we'd moved out here she'd found a job way down on the totem pole at a small newspaper in town, driving into town with me from Sausalito, the place where she and I had our home, every morning but being forced to take the bus back most afternoons. Slowly but surely she'd worked her way up through the ranks until she was actually allowed to put words onto paper again and have them end up in print with her name attached to them.

"You're late," she scolded, taking a sip from a paper Starbucks cup as she got into the car.

"What did I say about drinking coffee in the car!" I scoffed as I leaned in for a quick kiss. "If you get a stain on my fucking seats…."

"Oh for heaven's sake, shut the fuck up!" She rolled her eyes, completely ignoring what I said by taking a deliberately long sip from her blasted coffee cup. "Why is it that you're always riding on me for making a mess the minute I set foot inside your damn car, but when Grace- who by the way is much more likely to make a mess than I am – drops her sippy cup all over your damn leather seats the only thing you're worried about is whether or not she's likely to die from dehydration within the next five seconds!"

She sucked in a huge breath, her scowl deepening when she noticed how my frame was shaking from holding in my chuckles. "Besides…I wouldn't have had to go into Starbucks to order a cup of coffee if you had been on time."

"My day was lovely, thanks for asking," I moped, hoping to take the easy way out by changing the subject, "we won the Riley case and I think that if I play my cards right Nielsen might let me try one solo sometime soon…."

"That's amazing, Edward!" I yelped in surprise as suddenly my wife's body was flung across the seat and around me, awkward as that was considering we were in a moving car.

"Love you too, baby," I gasped, "but I'm trying very hard not to get us killed here…."

"Oh," she blushed scarlet red as she retreated back into the passenger seat. "Sorry."

"Don't be," I snickered. "You're free to do a whole lot more of that as soon as we get home."

"And give your parents a full show?" she asked. "I'm sure they'd love that!"

"Right." I scowled, remembering that with Bella and me both working today, my dad would be at the house looking after Grace which meant that mom would have come down to Sausalito as well as soon as she finished work.

"We love them, remember?" Now it was Bella's time to snicker. "Even if their talent for cockblocking us never ceases to amaze me."

I laughed, the wind blowing my hair in every possible direction as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on our way back home.

Driving here with the top down and the wind having free reign always made me feel so free….so alive…so thankful that my mother had brought us here.

We'd all fallen in love with San Francisco, me and Bella finding our footing very soon with our new jobs and the new friends we made because of them ad my mom falling into place at the Mary Hart Foundation as if she'd been working there for years.

It had been dad who had struggled to find his place at first, the weight of the past still holding him down and keeping him from making something out of this new fresh start. He was so ashamed of himself and his actions that, for a few months, we all worried that he was going to kill himself but when push came to shove we knew he could never do that….not to mom or to me….not after everything we'd already been through.

In the end it had only been Grace who managed to get him out of the Bay-fronted apartment he and mom had bought after they moved out here, his devotion to her making him forget himself and his troubles to be the best grandfather in the world.

As well as the best nanny – or manny or whatever the fuck male nannies were called these days – a little girl could ever wish for.

He'd refused to let Bella and me even think about putting her into daycare or hiring someone to look after her while we were both at work. No, from the start it had been clear that he would be the one to look after her…..and who could have guessed he had such a talent for it?

Not me.

A great calm washed over me as I pulled into our driveway, the white and green of our house and garden immediately putting me at ease the moment I set foot on our land.

It was our haven. Our little garden of Eden. The place where we could check our busy, professional lives at the door and just be us, Bella and Edward: lovers, parents, children….people.

Yeah. Old age and a little girl had completely turned me into a sappy son of a bitch.

Who would have guessed that, five years ago when I was on the brink of sticking my dick inside Tanya Denali?

Not me.

Not that I regretted 'going soft' one minute, though. Nope. In fact, I was pretty damn sure it had saved me from a future of trophy wives, expensive divorces, groping interns and STD's. Or ending up like Tanya, with a five hundred dollar a day coke habit after her life and career had gone tits up in the wake of her short lived stint in the limelight.

The bitch soon found out newspapers weren't exactly chomping at the bits to hire someone who had no quells about 'selling out' and with the memories of her revelations still fresh in his mind, her rich daddy found himself reluctant to help her out in the job department. In the end, when his precious spawn had turned to drugs to wash away her bitterness in life, he had her committed to some celebrity rehab and shipped off to Alaska to ponder her many sins. Last thing I heard she was still there.

"Do you think they'll stay long?" I asked as I watched Bella's delectable little ass worm its way into the back seat to retrieve her bag, my eyes glued to her backside even after she'd caught me staring.

"You really are insatiable are you?" Bella snorted. "I thought that after last night….."

"Nonsense," I growled, locking her small body between the car and myself and pulling her into a searing kiss before muttering against her lips, "I can never get enough of you."

She swallowed hard, her face looking all kinds of flushed and needy as she stuttered out her reply. "O-okay….I guess…."

"Tonight," I promised her, making Bella squeal with delight as I swatted her ass as she ran up the front steps into the house.

"Shhh!" Mom shushed us as soon as we came into the house. "Carlisle and Gracie have just fallen asleep on the couch and I don't want you to wake them up."

I chuckled as Bella immediately shot into the living room to take a look. "So dad has really turned into an old man now. Needing a nap and all…."

Mom chuckled, playfully swatting me with a dish towel as she followed me into the huge open-space living area. "You try running after a three year old all day for a day and we'll see if you don't need a nap at the end of it."

"I do that all the time, mom," I snorted, rolling my eyes at her. "She's my daughter, remember?"

"Of course," mom replied, "but you know as well as I do how your father can't deny her anything she wants, so if little Gracie wants to play horsey with him all over the house…..they'll do just that for as long as she wants to."

"I couldn't have asked for a better nanny," I snickered, earning me another swat with that dishcloth from my mother as we entered the room.

So enraptured with the sight in front of me, I almost bumped into Bella as I walked into our living room, the sight of our little girl, fast asleep in the arms of her grandfather making me forget everything else.

"Sorry," I muttered, wrapping my arms around Bella small waist and pulling her body against me, her back against my chest as I leaned the side of my face against hers.

I only noticed the tears in her eyes when one started to trickle down, my grip on her waist tightening as I silently asked her what was wrong.

"I still can't believe we – the two of us – created her," Bella whispered, her hands closing over mine as she leaned into my body. "Looking at her I feel so…. so happy. Like my heart is going to beat out of my chest at any time."

"I know love," I breathed, pressing a loving kiss to her temple. "I feel the same."

And I did. As happy as Bella and I had been when it had just been the two of us and our families, living a nice quiet life after the upheaval caused by the Volturi had wound down, it was nothing compared to the complete bliss I felt now that there were three of us.

My girls.

I felt insanely protective of the both of them, taking my duties as a husband and a father so serious that it drove Bella near insanity sometimes and had her wondering what would happen when our little girl would show up at home one day with a boyfriend in tow.

Which was insane, of course, because my daughter would never date.

Not. Ever.

Maybe somewhere down the line my Gracie would immaculately conceive a baby as perfect as she was because perfection like that needed to be handed down to future generations….but the day would never come when I allowed some grubby little kid to put his filthy hands on my little angel.

"Ouch," Bella complained, my grip on her waist having entered painful levels as I thought about disgusting little boys having even more disgusting little thoughts about our Grace (I knew they would since I'd been one of those disgusting little boys myself). "What the hell are you thinking about that has you almost squeezing me in half…Oh wait. I already know!"

She snorted, lightly patting my hands on her hips as she went on. "She's not even two years old yet, Edward! You'll have plenty of time to worry about that when she hits her teens. Besides….if we had a son, you'd be egging him on to get laid as soon as he got his first wet dream….."

"Is that an open invitation to knock you up again, my love?" I crooned, nipping at the space behind her ears that was sure to drive her mad as my cock rose with the thought of all the things I wanted to do to my wife later that night.

"Maybe," she answered, her voice husky with want, "but it certainly is an open invitation to let you try….."

"Good," I chuckled, "because I have every intention to do so….all night long."

Bella let out a quiet moan, wriggling out of my hold before things could get out of hand and torturing me with one last wink, her plump pink lip sunken between her pearly white teeth as she looked back at me while fleeing into the kitchen.

I took a few breaths, willing myself – and my dick – to calm down again before I followed her, turning around in the doorway to take one last look at my little girl.

My Grace.

If only she knew just how much she'd saved all of us. Sure, before she was born we'd been doing very well; coping with the past and enjoying the fact that we were all alive and together and that the future looked brighter than ever….but then she came along, shooting across the heavens like a shooting star…..a saving grace.

She completed us and yet she added something to our lives so unique and so significant that it wasn't just completion we found in her….it was enrichment.

In our love for her we found our peace.

Our absolution.

And with that thought, we leave these two to their HEA.

(I know, finally)

My undying love and gratitude go out to The Real Teacher, my amazing beta and friend, for sticking up with me and my angsty ways. This story wouldn't have been what it is without her. (Really, if it hadn't been for her, the Aro-chapters never would have seen the light). A special thank you, as well, to my dear friend Ange de l'Aube for making a kickass banner and blinkie for this story.

My new story, La Dolce Vita, will go up later this week. It's about as different from this one as a story can get and it will be much lighter on the angst. It's based on a oneshot I wrote for the Fandom Against Domestic Violence, though I did take some liberties with the plot. I hope you'll give it a shot.

I do have plans to revisit this story one more time for my contribution to the Fandom4Tsunami compilation and so I would like to ask all of you what you would like to read. Do you want an outtake detailing Renee's testimony against the Volturi? The aftermath of chapter 38? The moment Edward really forgives Carlisle? The creation of Grace? Please let me know.

Last but certainly to least I want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to read this story and/or share your thoughts with me. It's been a hell of a ride but I have enjoyed every second (and ever chapter) of it. I hope you did as well.

Miss Baby