You give me that love, even though I don’t deserve it. Angele, I wish we didn’t have to sneak around to meet in private, but maybe soon we can leave. We could go to Venice. I have family there. Tell me my hopes are not in vain.

Yours faithfully,

Torija

“This is insane. There is no way this is the bloodthirsty Victorija Dred talking.” Daisy leafed through some of the other letters, and the loving words continued between Angele and Victorija. She found a notebook in her mother’s handwriting and opened it up. She ran her fingers over her mum’s sentences, trying to connect with the woman who wrote them.

Daisy was seven when her dad died, and eleven when her mum died. She wished she could remember more about them. She guarded jealously any new information she found about them. The notebook seemed to be her mum’s research into their family.

She spotted an entry marked: Angele Brassard, aged 17—everything changed!

Everything changed? What did her mother mean by that?

Daisy put the letters to the side and picked up the notebook again. It was elaborately decorated gold filigree on a duck-egg blue background, with tropical birds on top. The clasp that held it securely closed was gold.

Even though her granny said no one could open it, there was no lock. Just to satisfy her curiosity, Daisy put her thumb under the clasp and pushed. It opened easily.

“It opened,” Daisy said with surprise.

Her heart began to pound and her spidey sense tingled all over her body. She opened to the first page and saw the name Angele Brassard.

“Angele? That name again.”

She turned to the next page and got to the first entry. It was in French. She’d never studied French longer than a few years at school, so she didn’t have a clue what was written there. Like she had with her mother’s words, she traced her finger over the letters. As she did, Daisy was hit with a myriad of images and sounds, confusing and coming all at once.

A marketplace, a blond-haired young woman, blood dripping from a knife, a scream, and sobbing. Daisy closed the diary quickly, and the sounds and images stopped. She tried to catch her breath. Her heart was hammering like she’d done a ten-mile run.

“What is going on?”

No one else could open the notebook, apparently, but Daisy could, and she’d been assaulted by sounds and images she couldn’t understand.

Daisy felt a breeze across the back of her neck, as she had in her bedroom, and then a whisper in her ear said, “Look at her through my eyes. Save her.”

“Save her? Victorija? Victorija doesn’t need saving. People need to be saved from her,” Daisy said to the apparently empty room.

The breeze returned and flipped open the notebook to the first entry. Was Daisy brave enough to pick it up again?