THERE ARE FEW TIMES WHERE ARO HAS A LACK OF EVIDENCE AGAINST HIS ENEMIES.

He has proved himself as a good leader by this very fact. Each time someone was brought to trial, a mass of memory evidence from the person being tried as well as their family members and friends. These memories being siphoned from Aro made sure that the government did not have vampires committing crimes under their nose.

Someone always knew something.

"May I touch your hand for just a second in order to gain your memory profile?" Aro asked, trying to be respectful as possible. He didn't want to see the horrors, but he had to tough through his complicated feelings on this matter in order to continue the Volturi's justice that flowed through his hands. "It would only be a second, and I will instantly pull away."

The woman was quiet for a short moment before she looked over to Rosalie, who nodded.

"Aro's gift is to see people's memories. You won't witness them over again, but he will. He can't do it without a light touch," Rosalie explained to her newly turned Covenmate. "Without a touch, you'll have to remember so Edward can see it that way. Both have their pros and cons."

"I don't want to remember," she said quietly, holding out her hands in front of her.

When Aro's hand met hers, he hated what he saw.

There was very little left of this woman's memory. Things were in bits and pieces, and many faces had been blurred out by an outside force. The tall man that River had described to Carlisle was the same one. Edward had seen this blurred out face. Aro had assumed that it was trauma, that River's brain couldn't handle remembering the face of her abuser.

He was wrong. Everyone was wrong.

This blur was a gift. This ability to delete and slightly shift memories just so... it terrified the Volturi King. Never before had his evidence, the core memories and much more gained from his gift, been tampered with.

Aro did as he said he would, having pulled back immediately after touching this young woman. There was nothing here, nothing of use. No names, no other human victims, only memories that had been kept to keep this human sane within the never ending loop of torturous removal of memory.

She knew that she was a slave, that there was no escape. She knew that she wasn't good enough. She knew that this man hated her crying. She remembered that she was never, ever going to be what he wanted.

There were fragments that this woman had that gave him just enough to know that he would be getting nowhere. A deep sense of dread and despair led in these parts of her memory. He hated it, he wanted out. Now that he was in... he would never forget this. These blurred faces all around him that could have been bodies, could have been humans still alive. There was static here, within the sea of blurred faces.

Was this what his mate had lived through, or was she able to get out less traumatized because this was what he wanted. She was what he wanted.

It made him sick. It made him want to sprint back to Volterra and lock her away. He wanted to protect her in whatever way he could purely because this man had evaded him.

Aro had not been confounded like this.

Never evaded.

He was a king. He was always the king who did as he had to do, had all of the information. Now he would have to search high and low. He had Carlisle's  note. he didn't trust that the name was even real. None of what he saw was the full truth. It was a lie, a lie by omission. Never had someone's memory lied to him.

They knew nothing. He knew nothing. This woman had truly been stripped of all but her baseline way of being a human. There were no memories before her capture, very few after. She was a blank slate of a human being that could be shaped and molded as she gained memories as a vampire.

It was someone waking up, and one of their very few memories being as a vampire, and continuing to live that way.

The king felt a horrible pit in his chest forming. He didn't want to take this whole situation personally, but his gift forced him to do just that. Aro's pride in his job was one of the main things that kept him sane through the centuries. With that challenged, what was left of him.

River. River was left. She was in Volterra, getting used to life as a vampire. The only other known human victim, Chrissy, she was also at the castle. She was locked away, threatening to tell everyone everything. She'd gotten her hands on a book that took away her faith in everyone. Her conversation with her best friend before her turning destroyed her sense of control.

Chrissy was not as bruised as this, according to Carlisle, and so it meant that she was also important to this horrible man. Important in a twisted, disgusting way that created a new pit in Aro's chest.

They were all in danger if this was the end of the memories.

"Aro?" Rosalie questioned him, forcing him back into reality. Had he fallen over? He vaguely remembered standing when he touched the palm of the girl. "Is everything alright? What did you see?"

Rosalie had always trusted him in his gift. Unlike her brother and sister, the young vampire had trusted him with a lot of secrets that came with her past. He would never break her trust because of that, and she was indeed his favorite out of all of the vampires Carlisle had made.

Perhaps that is why he told her the truth. Maybe he didn't have the guts to lie to someone who had been so open and honest with him in the past.

"I saw nothing. Nothing at all. Edward would have been of even less use, there is nothing there. Her memories are blurry and tampered with by a force I have never seen before." Aro was beginning to internally panic as he stood up, starting to pace around the room.

"It could be trauma, right? They could come back?" Rosalie denied him, having more hope than him that the bastard would be caught and that the memories used to condemn him would be hidden somewhere deep. Some memories Aro couldn't see due to traumas, but this was not that.

He hadn't looked into River's memories out of respect for her privacy as a human being within his home. Now he desperately wished he could, see if that could connect the pieces to this puzzle.

"You are wrong," Aro stated plainly. "This is connected." He waved his hands around to the door and to the young woman. "This is terrible. This is why I haven't known until now. Everything is gone. Wiped like a memory card on a computer. There are no back up drives, this fucker deleted them all."

"People can't just go in and delete memories, Aro," Rosalie said, still not believing what her King was saying. "All memories have to come back. They are all hidden somewhere, and through many methods we may be able to get a face, when she is more settled."

Aro was sure of his position that the memories were gone. It made him distraught to see someone who had more hope than him, and that in and of itself drained what small bit of hope he had left in relation to this young woman. He knew what he saw, and someone like Rosalie wouldn't understand his gift even if he did explain the reasons why he thought what he did.

That was what hurt about his gift, that lack of knowledge in others.

"We will get nowhere looking through her memories again. They will never reappear and that in and of itself should terrify you all." Aro stopped and looked at the door, where he saw Bella through the modern glass. "No young human woman who looks anything like River or Chrissy is safe. He probably has more, but their faces, their bodies, were deleted from the memory."

"Blurry?"

"More than blurry. Distorted. Ugly. They may have been dead, I couldn't tell. Pale. But that could have been from the lack of sunlight. Things all around were blurry, but those bodies were gone, yet not. Like you were looking at an object from afar, perhaps knew what it was, but couldn't figure out if it was really there," Aro tried to explain his experience the best he could.

"None of that makes any sense."

Well, that was the best way he could put it.

Guess it wasn't enough.

The woman on the couch stayed quiet, her arms within a jacket that had been placed upon her at some point, Aro wasn't paying attention as to when or how. She was a tiny vampire, barely standing at five foot. River was much taller, her body fitter than this slightly bony Newborn vampire.

Her face. He stared at her face for another minute, ignoring the questions that Rosalie was leveling at him. Her face was the same as his mate's, but she held a different aura than his mate. He felt nothing but a want to guard this woman. No desires, nothing. The mate bond between he and River was strong, despite being unconsummated.

Different eyes. River's eyes as a vampire were a deeper red, while this woman had electric red eyes that reminded Aro of the time that Emmett and Jasper had dragged him all the way to France to go to a rave they'd seen advertised on the wider web.

Body and eyes of her own, but her face was the same.

"I don't know what made her different from River," Aro admitted, "You two could pass as twins if you grew 12 or so centimeters. Not even just twins, identical twins."

"You didn't tell me that," the woman said to Rosalie. "You never said I looked like her."

"Your appearance should not be a comparison to someone else," Rosalie defended her decision to not share that information. "We didn't want to tell you that right away. We would have told you, sweetie."

"He wanted her," the Newborn vampire said, her voice dull and lifeless as she said it. "He said I was ugly."

"And that isn't true," Rosalie replied.

"Why would he call me ugly if I look exactly like the woman he wanted?"

"Sometimes people try to call others ugly to make them feel lesser than. You don't think I'm ugly, do you?" She shook her head at Rosalie. "Well, I've been called unattractive by many people. Obviously, that isn't true, but when people are insecure in themselves and their choices they like to make other people feel worse. Brings you down to their level."

This realization struck the young woman like a ton of bricks. She was seething with anger at what Rosalie had told her. Everyone had been given this talk as a child, but this woman was hearing it as an adult, as someone who didn't have memories of the person who first told her this.

Aro had to put a stop to this madness. This had to end.

"I think that our best bet is bringing her to Volterra," Aro put out his idea in the air. "You are having troubles at home and this is going to be an ongoing investigation. I can have one of the lower guard teach her how to hunt. She will be hungry very soon, and your woods are unsafe to hunt animals in at this moment due to your issues with Victoria."

"Edward will hate that."

Of course he would, he hated every single thing that Aro did. The king's scoff was enough for Rosalie to give in, however, knowing that she did not want her newest Covenmate to be the victim of Victoria and her Newborn Army.

Rosalie sighed. "Okay, take her with you. Have Luna take her, though. I don't like eating humans, and the uncertainty of it all, but if her gift is truly sensing bad intentions, then I guess no good people will be harmed in her hunt."

Aro was still utterly stuck.