Page 45 of Unbound

“Yeah. Like that. The woman—my mother—wasn’t surprised when the attack started. She knew that I needed to come back here, and she knew how to guide me. Plus, she talked a bit about things she and my papà had taught me. I didn’t come away with the impression that my family was normal.”

Aidan barks out a laugh and I glare at him. “Sorry, boss,” he says quickly. “No offense. It’s just, well, there’s no way on earth your family would ever be normal, is there?”

I stare at him some more and he concentrates intensely on his dark beer. Wise man.

“Who does have a normal family?” Rosa asks. “Definitely none of us. Well, I don’t really know about yours, Minnie.”

“Mine are pretty ordinary,” adds Donatella. “Well. As ordinary as a centuries-old family of Seers, Makers, and Healers can be, I guess.”

“My family is all of you,” Matteo says. He immediately looks embarrassed, and Donna gives him a kiss on the cheek.

“Aw, you’re so sweet,” she says, stroking his hair back. Matteo is six foot seven with a nose that’s been broken for over two hundred years. He’s a killing machine who has slaughtered countless victims. But underneath all that? She’s right. He is kind of sweet.

“Back to the subject at hand,” Minnie says, neatly avoiding all conversation about her own family. “I think it was like you said, Luca. A bubble. Since we broke the blood spell between you two, you’ve had a few memories, haven’t you? A few flashbacks?”

“Yeah. But nothing like this. Nowhere near as much of a head-fuck. I was a fucking kid for Christ’s sake!”

“I know. It must have been odd. And I suppose the question is why it happened. I think I have some answers.”

“Thank fuck for that,” I mutter, slamming down my glass. It’s not Minnie’s fault that any of this is happening, but I’m pissed. Everything feels out of control. “What are they?”

“Yvonne helped me go through some of the papers. She’s really good at that stuff, you know? Figuring out what matters and what doesn’t, taking information in with a glance. Must be her journalism training, I suppose. Anyway. Most of it was crap, but she found something interesting hidden under the desk. I couldn’t see it, even when she pointed it out. It was so weird. Lucky Yvonne was there.”

Aidan snarls into his pint glass. “Why are we giving that woman so much access? We don’t really know a thing about her!”

“Why does she annoy you so much?” Rosa asks, a mischievous grin on her face. “Do you like like her?”

He rolls his eyes and snaps out a denial, but there’s a flicker of something on his face before he gets the words out. Between Matteo and Donna and now this, I seem to be running a fucking dating agency at the Firenze court.

“No,” Aidan says, forcing calm into his voice. “I do not like like her. I don’t trust her. She’s not one of us.”

“She wants to be,” I tell him. “And in all honesty, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. What else are we going to do with her? Anyway. Fuck that for now. Minnie, what did she find?”

The witch pauses for effect. I know that’s what it is because I’ve seen it before. She’s got something big to tell us and she wants to make sure we’re all listening.

“I’m not totally sure, Luca, but I think she found an original copy of the Bargain.”

We all stare at her, dumbstruck. Rosa is the first to recover.

“Wait. What? Nobody should have an actual copy of that, should they? Wasn’t the whole idea that it was signed, then the witches took it and put it somewhere untouchable?”

“That was the whole idea,” Minnie answers, shrugging. “But it’s ancient history, isn’t it? The stuff of legend, so old it’s almost fiction.”

She’s right. We know it happened, but it’s so long ago even those of us who lived through it can barely remember. Especially me.

“Hardly anybody from back then is still around, present company excepted, Luca,” she goes on. “You were a freshly turned teenage vamp back then and don’t remember much at all. There was Vincenzo, now late and unlamented. The other Cosca Dons, who we can’t trust. Undoubtedly some we don’t know about. But not many, and certainly none of the original witches, we’re not blessed with vampire longevity. So, either Vincenzo stole it, or there were more copies than we were led to believe. Either is possible, neither is certain.”

He never mentioned it to me, but I now realize that our whole relationship was built on lies. Including who the fuck I am.

“What makes you think that’s what it is, Minnie?” I ask.

“For a start, it made my spidey-senses tingle when I touched it. Once Yvonne convinced me it was real, that she wasn’t passing me a piece of air. Then, once I could see it, the language—I didn’t understand every word, but it was a hybrid of Latin and Florentine. That would have been the official language they used back then for legal documents and the like. And … um. The fact that it was signed in blood. Now, this is where I can’t be more specific, as hard as I tried, I could not read those signatures. Every time I looked, they blurred on the page. Like literally turned into squiggly lines. Same for Yvonne, which freaked her out. But there are two sets of four signatures and one of three. If I had to guess, they could be the heads of the four Coscas, the heads of the four Vecchissime families, and the witches. We like to do things in threes.”

Donna sniggers, and I glare at her.

Rosa’s ancestor, Alberto Capelli, the long-gone Vecchissime elder who helped broker the Bargain, would have been one of those signing. Giulia, my creator, would have been another. The other Cosca Dons. As for the witches—who the fuck knows?

The others are debating how likely it is that this mystery document is actually what she thinks it is. But as Minnie talks, it starts to come back to me. The file cabinet. The spell. The ancient papers hidden in a blood-red leather folder. The way that I blacked out the moment I touched it.