Page 60 of Unbound

“I know it doesn’t. It’s a lot. I’ll tell you everything I know. Look, she also sent you a gift.”

She roots around in the bag, comes back holding a fucking apple. “She said you always liked these.”

I close my eyes. I do remember that at least—the crunch, the sweetness, the fresh, rich flavor of fruits grown on our own land. I pick the apple from Rosa’s hand and bite into it. I have no idea why, just a compulsion that comes over me.

One bite is all it takes. One bite, and all my memories come flooding back. It’s not gradual, or gentle, or in any kind of order—it’s a tangled mass of everything, all at once. An explosion of the past that almost makes my brain burst. Some of it is a blur, moving so fast I can’t even see it. Other moments seem to pause, vivid and bright as the day they happened.

My mamma’s face, leaning over my crib, my hands grabbing for her hair as she laughs and tickles my tummy. My papà hoisting me onto his strong shoulders, taking me out to walk the fields he loved. The scent of the orchards in summer, trees heavy with ripe pears and plump, velvety peaches. Learning to ride my first horse, a white pony called Perla, who delighted in throwing me over her head in front of the entire village. A pretty girl called Lauretta, with smiling eyes and plump lips. My first kiss, sweet and innocent.

Long days filled with sunshine, fields of swaying barley, the vineyards and olive groves that spread across our land. My parents, at peace after a day of work, lying in thick grass looking on as I played with a puppy. A mutt, one I’d found as a stray and begged to keep. Our home, a handsome stone building in the valley, steeped with age and history, rich with love. The smell of herbs, the small church, always cool and dim even in the height of summer.

My papà waving his hands over a dying crop of wheat, teaching me how to see what ailed it, how to repair it from the inside out. My mamma, mixing ingredients in a mortar and pestle, teaching me simple casts for good fortune and fertility. Me spending hours poring over family texts, collections of spells that had been passed down the d’Argento line for generations. Study, play, work, laughter.

It was a life well lived. I was loved, cherished, and I loved in return. I was powerful, learning and growing faster than they expected. Surrounded by knowledge, but also by people who cared for me—my parents, extended family, villagers who had lived and worked with the d’Argentos for their whole lives, for generations. Friends, teachers, pets. And then … then it was all gone, torn away from me in the most vicious way possible.

I remember it all now. My mamma left for a few days, traveling on her big black stallion all the way to Firenze. My papà was proud, kissed her goodbye, told her to be careful. I remember wanting to go with her, but being told no, not this time. Did she know? Did she have some hint, some instinct that things were not as they seemed? Or was she simply being a good mother, protecting her young from the potential depravities of a vampire court?

I was disappointed, but I did as I was bid. There was work to do, crops to tend, a dairy cow soon to calf. None of it happened. The cow was slaughtered, along with all the villagers. The priest, screaming as they impaled him on a spike, was left to slowly bleed to death. The women and girls chased from their homes in the middle of the night, held down and brutally raped for sport. Babies pulled from their mothers’ arms and thrown into the well as their mammas wept and begged for mercy that never came.

We fought as best we could. None of us were skilled, and we were taken by surprise as we slept. My father was brave, but his spells were no use against them, especially when they slit his throat. My stomach turns as I remember the smell. The look of shock on his face as that bright red line appeared, his neck slashed by one of Giulia’s fingernails. My father had told me to hide, to run, but I could not. When I saw that, I attacked, screaming in fury, my mind too scrambled to use any magical power. Instead, I went at her with my fists, a teenage boy going up against a centuries-old monster.

She merely laughed, picked me up by my hair. I was taller than her, even as a boy, but she held me up as though I weighed nothing, as I fought and kicked and raged, feet dangling from the ground.

“Be still, little one,” she said, her red-rimmed eyes on mine. “My, you are a handsome child. Not quite a man yet, but still good enough to eat …”

She nipped at me, ran her fangs along the side of my face, licked the blood clean from my skin. “Delicious,” she’d said. “And useful. Keep the witch’s brat. Kill everyone else. Leave no trace. Let nobody find out it was us.”

She’d keep me by her side for the rest of the night, making me watch the unspeakable torments that were inflicted on people I knew and loved. Vincenzo was her lackey, doing her bidding, relishing every moment of pain he doled out. Lauretta, the sweet girl I’d once kissed, cried out for help when she saw me, and it was the worst thing she could have done. It revealed her importance to me, and that appealed to his cruelty. He killed her so slowly, slicing off her eyelids and eating them as though they were delicacies. Biting into her breasts like they were fruit. Dragging out her agony until finally, as the sun started to rise, he simply drained her dry. I remember her body thudding to the ground, discarded and lifeless. Mutilated. Vincenzo and Giulia gazing around at the place, at what they and their monsters had done.

Blood everywhere. Limbs, bodies, torn clothing. Heaps of corpses. Buildings on fire, all animals butchered, grain stores and the vineyards ablaze. I was stupefied by it, numb and empty. Incapable of speech or movement, my mind broken. Giulia threw me over the back of one of their horses, and we raced back to Firenze to beat the dawning day. A day that saw everything changed, not just for me, but for the whole vampire world. She took me to her chambers, stripped me naked. Inspected me like livestock. “Oh, yes,” she’d murmured. “You will soon be a strapping young thing … We’re going to have so much fun together, young Luca.” I remember the groaning cries that echoed around her room, later learning it was the sound of her prisoners, trapped within the walls, dying the slowest and most painful of deaths.

They let my mamma see me once more, and that is perhaps the hardest memory of them all to face. She ran into that hellish room, held my cheeks between her hands, kissed my face as I sobbed against her. I let my pain pour from me and into her, unleashing a torrent of grief and anguish. I expected her to make it all better, to be what she had always been, the person I could count on to fix things. Now, I realize, she did the only thing she could. She couldn’t undo what had taken place, couldn’t change what had happened, but she could make me forget. It was a mercy, and it probably saved my life. If she hadn’t done that, I would have found a way to end myself, I know. I could not have gone on living after the events of that night, after seeing the things I saw. It saved me, and it allowed me to go on and find Rosa, to be what I was supposed to be.

Now, though … now, I remember it all, and even as a grown man, it is overwhelming. It is agonizing beyond belief, that whole past life suddenly dumped into my unprepared mind.

I do not recall moving, but I’m lying flat on my back on the bed, a concerned Rosa cradling my head in her lap. She’s stroking my face, murmuring soothing words. Telling me that she’s here, that we are together. That we are whole.

I have tears running down my cheeks, and a world of pain in my heart. I grab hold of her hands, kiss her palms, gaze up at her concerned face. She’s crying too, her eyes huge and shining.

“I’m sorry,” she says, leaning down to kiss me. “I should have known it wasn’t just a damn apple. You saw it all, didn’t you? Everything that happened that night?”

I nod. “How did you know?”

“I was there with you for some of it; I kind of got sucked in ... I’m so, so sorry, Luca. What was done to you, to your family …”

Her heart is as broken as mine, her empathy as vast as the ocean. I sit up, take her in my arms. Her own family was torn apart by a monster as well, one that called himself her grandfather. We have both lost so much, this brave, beautiful woman and I. We have lost so much, but together, as she says, we are still somehow whole.

We sit, wrapped in each other, and we both cry. For those we have loved, those we have lost. For the peace that we never seem to find. In my case, this grief is tinged with fury, with a hatred the likes of which I’ve never known. I thought I knew anger, but now I realize that what I felt before was a pale imitation.

I despise Giulia; she made my young life a living hell. She was the embodiment of evil, and I was happy to kill her. But after that, I was loyal to Vincenzo for far too long, doing his bidding, being the good little soldier he raised me to be. My obedience to him a combination of fear and fucked-up love. Now, each time I think of him, I see him torturing poor Lauretta. I think of Isabella, a woman I once loved who was also murdered by vampires. I think of Yvonne and Freya and the countless others who have suffered untold torments at their hands.

All the way through my memories, I felt the purity of the child I used to be. A touch of the wild, a hint of rebel, but my heart was full of love. I was a good boy. My soul was clean.

Then they took me, and they made me something different. They drenched my soul in blood, perverted my innocence. Changed me beyond recognition.

I am a vampire, but right now, I feel like the whole species should be wiped from the face of the planet. We are parasites, leaches. Foul predators of the worst kind.

Did the other Coscas know what Giulia and Vincenzo did to the d’Argentos? They wanted to hide it; I remember that. Why? To maintain their air of respectability, to convince the witches and the Vecchissime that they were to be trusted?