Page 25

I drove up to the gate and killed the headlights. For a moment, the world went black. The woman’s breathing rasped in the silence behind me. I stepped out into the rain, crossed to the intercom, and pressed the buzzer. Static crackled. Then a woman’s voice came through, brittle with sleep.

“Yes?”

“It’s Father Demitri.”

A pause.

“At this hour, Father, you had better be dying or bringing someone who is.”

I looked back at the car. The woman had not moved.

“I need help.”

The gate buzzed. I pushed it open and drove through.

By the time I reached the courtyard, the convent doors were already opening. Light spilled across wet stone. Three figures stood beneath the archway in grey habits, their veils dark against the yellow glow behind them.

Sister Marina was in front.

She was seventy if she was a day, with a face carved by years of prayer and eyes that made grown men reconsider lying. I had once seen her reduce a wealthy donor to embarrassment because he called the women in her care “unfortunates.”

“They are not unfortunates,” she had snapped. “They are survivors. The unfortunate ones are the men who mistook them for weak.”

The donor had never returned. Sister Marina had not missed him.

She took one look at me as I opened the back door of the car. Then she saw the woman. Her expression did not soften, and instantly I knew she understood the situation for what it was. Delicate women gasped at violence. Women like Sister Marina measured it.

“Bring her in,” she ordered.

I slid one arm beneath the woman’s shoulders and the other beneath her knees.

The sisters moved around us quickly, without panic. One held the door open. Another shut it behind me and threw the bolt. A third hurried down the corridor ahead of us, calling for blankets and hot water.

The convent hallway was narrow, lit by wall lamps that threw soft pools of gold over cracked plaster and framed icons. Somewhere deeper in the building, a woman coughed. In another section, a child whimpered in sleep.

Santa Caterina did not advertise what it was. To the town, it was a convent. To women with nowhere to run, it was a door that opened when every other door had become a roadblock.

The sisters ran a small medical refuge in the east wing. Not officially, because official things attracted official questions, and official questions too often led frightened people back into the hands from which they had escaped. The women who came here were abused wives, undocumented migrants, girls who had fled farms and factories and men with locked rooms. The sisters treated wounds, arranged documents, hid names, fed children, and lied to anyone who came looking. They lied better than most criminals I had known. Perhaps because they did it for the right reasons.

Sister Marina led me into a small infirmary with two iron beds and a locked medicine cabinet. A wooden crucifix was mounted high on the wall opposite two beds.

I laid the woman on the nearest bed. Her hand slipped from the blanket and fell limp against the mattress.

Burn marks circled both wrists, indicating she’d been restrained at some point. I hadn’t noticed them before.

I stared. The skin was torn in places, possibly from struggling against her restraints. It was obvious she had struggled long enough to shred her wrists.

“Sister Joanne,” Sister Marina called.

A woman in her late fifties entered with a medical bag in one hand and spectacles perched low on her nose. Sister Joanne had been a nurse before taking vows, and she still moved like one.

She glanced at me. Then at the woman.

“What happened?”

“She came into the church,” I told them. “Men were following her.”

“What men?”