Viola and Alec met when she was thirteen and he was twenty-five, when she was the golden child of an old and fading crime family and he was the up-and-coming right hand man of one of the most prominent crime lords in England. He caught her eavesdropping on a meeting, and although they both initially pissed each other off and each thought the other was full of themself, Alec found Viola entertaining and a kindred spirit in a few ways and Viola felt taken seriously by Alec and came to respect him in turn. Of course, he was absolutely grooming her. Their sexual relationship started when she was fourteen, and the more she fell in love with him and spurned other people, the more this formative dynamic got its hooks in her.

Viola sort of always knew that Alec was a bad person because of his job, because of his sexual interest in teenagers (like her), because of his open and unabashed sadism, among other things. Still, a few early moments helped her realize how twisted he is, such as watching him work, an incident wherein he had Viola assist him in raping another teenage girl, and his killing of his own brother. She has a love-hate relationship with his evil, but mostly it's love. She's a romantic that way.

Just to be clear, Isabelle's presence isn't canon to the Divorce AU if you know what I mean...largely because if he did find out, the obsession would overtake him again and the whole story would take a very very dark turn that poor Cy and Lynn very much did not sign up for. As a general rule, in the vast majority of AUs, if Alec finds out Isabelle's whereabouts after he loses her he'll stop at nothing to get her back.

Alec would love to ignore Lynn's safeword, but values her as a submissive too much to risk losing her like that...which is also why he respects her boundaries around knives and needles despite his love of them. Alec enjoys pretty intense impact play of course, electrical play, torturing Lynn by pushing her towards orgasm even though she's no longer able to...Honestly a lot of the same stuff as Cy, just more intense in some respects and with less of a dynamic of trust. He likes making Lynn feel that her life is in danger. Eventually he'd also love for her to watch videos of him raping other women, but that might take some work.

Alec has lots of bastard children. Tons! In AUs, some of my friends write their OCs as having been fathered by Alec; canonically, I have a few bastards of his developed. Isabelle is his only legitimate child, and in canon, the only one he's involved in the raising of as a parent.

He didn't, and it almost became a domestic violence situation, but Alec realized as he was about to hit Viola that escalating it like that right on the heels of Viola having learned that he sexually abused their daughter was a Very Bad Idea so he didn't follow through. He took out most of his anger on Isabelle instead because, of course, she's the one less likely to make him suffer consequences.

That particular incident becoming a fic isn't likely any time soon, because the emotional weight of that night from Isabelle's perspective is more than I feel capable of writing yet and Alec's perspective would just be truly nauseating in a way I'm not sure I want to tackle yet either. But down the road, who knows? If there's interest in just hearing the story of how it happened though, I'd be happy to put it in an ask reply here. It will also be referenced in fics as appropriate

He knows. Fortunately for him, inbreeding is a stacking effect, so the results probably wouldn't be too severe...But regardless, in this AU he mostly wanted it as a means of controlling Isabelle and exerting more power over the family. Nothing is ever enough for this guy. With age, Isabelle was getting more independent, so he wanted to sort of babytrap her. Backfired for sure. He didn't count on Viola actually being willing to help.

This is going in a story but it's such a long time down the road I'll answer it anyway! And thank you very much for your interest. Alec realized he wanted Isabelle when she was about five or six (ambiguous because the feelings were ambiguous at first) which was kind of alarming for him because before that point he'd never felt desire for anyone younger than about eleven. Alec was very disconcerted by how she was an exception for him, and the degree of "power" she had over him, in his own view. Isabelle meanwhile didn't have a clue and wouldn't catch on for years.

Would and did. It was a fairly common feature of that kind of "punishment", and because Isabelle mostly associated someone getting hit in the crotch with jokes, slapstick, etc, she didn't put it together and was mostly just bewildered. It helped that of course the incidents were traumatic and she didn't want to think about them, much less contemplate whether they meant she was being molested by her own dad.

Oh, things would be very different if Isabelle was assigned male at birth. Isabelle was born in the midst of Alec's turmoil over his twin brother, Bertrand, and Alec projected a lot of those feelings onto her even with her being seen as a girl. If she'd been a cis boy instead, Alec probably would've been even more repressive, fearing that Isabelle would ultimately kill him the way he killed Bertrand when she was a few months old. I'm genuinely not sure that Isabelle would've survived as a cis boy.

The good news is that if boy!Isabelle did live, Viola wouldn't be so harsh or cruel to him, because he would trigger her trauma less. She would probably still be very distant, but not as hostile. Still, though, overall I think Isabelle would be worse off as Alec's son. As it stands her being genderfluid adds enough complications.

Two people have asked this question! To answer you both: yes, but the details I have are still kinda fuzzy so I'm working out exactly how it goes. I do plan on her leaving him, and she moves to London where she sort of disappears.

Alec started being physically abusive with Isabelle when she was young, so later on he can enact sadomasochistic kink in the guise of just being punishment. Isabelle doesn't inherently know that there's a difference between Alec beating her with his fists in the spur of the moment and Alec beating her with a riding crop in a more ritualized, intimate way. In her view, at that age anyway, it's all just pain that results from her being bad. She doesn't come to understand that Alec gets off on it until she's older.

Viola spends years in denial of the fact that Alec is grooming their daughter until Isabelle, age fourteen, tells her about the first rape—after which she knows but blames Isabelle for what's happening.

That depends on who you ask, but the real answer is that she was twelve. Alec abused Isabelle in ways he could deny were sexual due to their lack of resemblance to traditional sex from twelve to fourteen, which is when he raped her and when Isabelle would say it started.

A combination of a LOT of factors, ranging from the way he was raised (his mother's abuse + the encouragement of truly awful behavior he got as baby English nobility) to untreated inherited mental issues and rampant sadism to the moral gutting he experienced first at the hands of his twin brother, then scraping by a living on the streets of Bali, then as right hand to a crime lord. But ultimately Alec has no desire to be a good person. Any of these things could have been resisted if he wanted to; he doesn't. Why exactly he doesn't is up for debate.

Sure is!

Viola didn't want to have Isabelle in the first place, and would have preferred an abortion. Alec talked her out of it pretty easily, but months later when Viola developed pretty severe eclampsia (featuring hallucinations and seizures) during the pregnancy, his methods of denying her an abortion became more coercive. This culminated in Viola giving birth in critical condition, and Alec took newborn Isabelle and left Viola to recover without so much as a visit.

Viola absolutely resents Alec for this, but she also sees Isabelle as "that thing that took my husband's attention and love away from me when I needed it most." Not to mention that Isabelle is at the center of Viola's most traumatic experiences. Alec uses this as a means to drive a wedge further and further between them over the years to enable his abuse of Isabelle. Jealousy is his favored tactic, as well as strategically activating Viola's trauma to make her want Isabelle as far from her as possible.