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Ella couldn't put her finger on what bothered her about Sister Mary's outbuilding. It wasn't the concrete walls or the oddly utilitarian exterior that looked more like a bunker than a home for a woman of God. It was something else.

She'd parked near the church's side entrance and made her way around back. The congregation's cemetery stretched between the church proper and the small concrete structure.

Ella knocked on the door.

‘Hello? Sister Mary? Anyone home?’

Silence answered.

The door wasn't locked. It swung inward at Ella's touch. The space inside held none of the sterile chill the exterior promised. Instead, warmth enveloped her, like someone had been here recently.

‘Sister Mary? FBI. I'd like to ask you a few questions. The door was open.’

The outbuilding was essentially one large room with a curtained-off area that Ella assumed contained a bed. A kitchenette occupied one corner. Religious prints covered the walls in a chaotic collage that reminded Ella of case boards in police stations.

She stepped inside, closed the door behind her. The room felt like a time capsule. No television. No computer. The most advanced technology appeared to be a radio that wouldn't have looked out of place in the 1970s. If Sister Mary owned a laptop, she kept it well hidden.

She examined the religious artifacts next. A wooden crucifix that dominated one wall, large enough to make a statement but not so ostentatious as to suggest performative faith. Prayer beads had been draped over a small hook beside it, and there were some devotional candles arranged on a shelf. Most were genres Ella expected to see. Theology, philosophy. But others surprised her. Psychology journals. True crime anthologies.

Ella pulled one from the shelf at random. Confessions by Augustine of Hippo. The irony wasn't lost on her .

She was about to move on when a glint of gold caught her eye. There, amongst the smaller books, was a Bible. Ella pulled it out. The title read Biblia Sacra Vulgata in faded gold letters.

Vulgata, Ella thought. Polish? German?

No. Latin.

Latin.

A connection sparked. The kind of connection that starts as a whisper and builds to a scream.

Something Canton had said about Biblical translation. About Latin versions of sin.

Ella's neck muscles tensed.

She took in the rest of the room. The place was sparse, like someone had cleared out the essentials and left their luxuries behind. She couldn’t see any clothes or food or shoes. There was a fridge-freezer combination in the kitchenette, but inside was just a row of sauces and some fruit that hadn’t yet gone rotten. Which meant Sister Mary still lived here – or someone did.

She circled the place again in just a few steps, then she moved to the curtained-off sleeping area and pulled back the fabric. There was a narrow cot against the wall with their blankets pulled military-tight across the thin mattress.

Ella turned and scanned the floor. The concrete had been polished to a dull sheen, but around the center of the room, she spotted faint scuff marks. The seam was almost invisible, but up close she could see a slight depression where a panel met the surrounding floor.

A basement.

Ella hooked a finger into the hole, pulled. The trapdoor resisted at first, then lifted with a reluctant groan. Cool air rushed up from below.

‘Sister Mary? Anyone here?’

She peered into the darkness. A wooden staircase descended about eight feet to a concrete floor. Ella pulled out her phone and activated the flashlight. The beam cut through shadows to reveal what appeared to be a basement room roughly the size of the living quarters above.

Curiosity and duty warred within her. Every second she wasted here was another second Thomas Walsh had to stalk another victim or flee the state or brand another forehead. She needed to call Ripley and see if she’d found anything at Walsh’s house, but Ripley would have text her if there were any signs of life at his house.

Then Ella heard a sound .

Scuffling. Clinking.

Coming from where? The basement? Outside? Concrete walls didn’t make for the best acoustics.

‘Hello?’

Ella began descending the stairs on autopilot. When the maw beckoned, Ella couldn’t resist going on. When her feet touched concrete at the bottom, she swept the beam around the space, and any anticipations were shattered when she found emptiness. She’d expected furniture or storage boxes or a ladycave but was sorely disappointed.

No.

There was something.

Her beam caught something at the far end of the room.

Ella illuminated in full and found a full-length mirror. The kind that might hang on a bedroom door propped up against the wall. It drew her closer, if only because it was the sole item in this place. Her reflection approached in parallel, and now Ella stood three feet from the mirror, close enough to make out her own silhouette but not the details. She was in that liminal mental state where the mind filled in what the eyes couldn't discern.

Something glinted in the upper corner of the glass itself. A marking, etched or scratched into the surface. It wasn’t deep enough to compromise the integrity of the mirror, but it drew the eye no less.

Ella first suspected it was a brand name. A manufacturer’s initial.

Then realization came hurtling towards her.

First, the Latin Bible.

And now the fact that Ella’s reflection had a W branded into her forehead.

W for Wrath.

The illusion froze her. This was Sister Mary's mirror. And Sister Mary had used this mirror to brand her reflection and conceive an alternate version of herself. Sister Mary saw herself as Wrath incarnate.

Thomas Walsh was not her killer.

Adam Canton was not their killer.

The killer was Sister Mary Elizabeth.

A shrill, piercing sound shattered the moment. The flashlight in her hands became a cell phone again when Mia Ripley's name strobed on the screen.

Ella pushed the answer button and shouted down the line. ‘It’s Sister Mary. She’s the unsub. ’

Before Ripley’s words could reach her ear, something stirred inside the mirror world in front of her. A shadow detached itself from the corner, expanded in size, loomed closer. Ella was distantly aware of noises coming through the phone line, but her attention was elsewhere.

She spun on her heels. A figure materialized where empty air should have been.

Sister Mary, draped in black clothes that dissolved her edges into shadow, silver blade clutched in her hand.

Time collapsed into crystallized moments that stacked atop each other. In one, Sister Mary's arm scythed forward, with her blade forming a deadly pendulum aimed at Ella's throat. In the next, Ella dropped the phone with Ripley still connected and the flashlight still burning.

The knife came at Ella with a backhand that suggested four victims had rendered Sister Mary an expert in slashing throats. Ella caught the woman's wrist with both hands. The impact traveled through bone and tendon, up to her shoulders, down to her feet. Ella twisted Sister Mary's knife hand until tendons stood out like wire beneath skin. The blade dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers and clattered to the floor. Ella kicked it away. It skittered across the floor and disappeared into darkness beyond the phone's illumination circle.

Sister Mary’s free hand suddenly lashed out, fingernails raking across Ella's cheek, opening lines of fire that immediately wept blood. She released Mary's wrist and shoved her backward with both hands. The woman staggered, balance compromised by her injured knee. The phone's light cast her in fragments; an eye here, a hand there, the curve of a grimace.

Ella's Glock materialized in her hand. She trained it on the nun-turned-killer, who was now standing in front of her mirror.

‘Don’t,’ Ella breathed.

‘Shoot me.’ Sister Mary’s voice was a gentle thing. A Sunday School teacher voice.

‘Don’t make me.’

‘Go on. Kill me.’

With the gun steady between them, Ella truly saw the woman for the first time. Sister Mary was nothing like the looming specter of judgment Ella had constructed in her mind. She was small, barely five-four, with a frame built for slipping through shadows. Natural ginger hair pulled back tight enough to hurt. But it was her face that snagged Ella's attention. Sister Mary had thick foundation from her forehead to her chin, poorly matched to her neck, like she was hiding something.

‘I’m no killer,’ Ella said.

‘Neither am I.’

‘Why’d you kill them?’ She kept her sights on Sister Mary’s shoulder, but in the near-darkness a clean shot was impossible. If her bullet caught Mary’s abdomen, she could bleed out right here. Ella knew Sister Mary was her unsub, but she needed hard evidence of it, and dead suspects didn’t confess.

‘I was just messenger,’ Sister Mary said.

‘Their sins. How did you know about them?’

‘Can’t you figure it out?’

‘No.’

Sister Mary laughed. ‘Police. Pure envy. Jealous of real justice.’

Ella’s finger itched on the trigger. Discharging bullets in near darkness was best avoided, but the alternative was hand-to-hand combat, and a woman this slender could easily slip from her grasp.

‘Is that right?’

'Yes. They were easy to find. Grant, Torres, and Harper were all over the news. And have you read Summers’ book? It angered me so much I left it on her desk.’

‘With a message inside.’

‘Yes. Now, are you going to shoot me?’

Ella knew she should go for the arrest, but she wanted the details, the motive. This was her best chance to get into a serial killer's mind while the adrenaline was flowing and the confessions were pouring.

‘You never met them before you killed them?’

‘Why does it matter?’

‘You killed four people. You appointed yourself God’s editor when no one asked you to. That needs an explanation.’

Sister Mary twitched. Ella sensed she was looking for a way out because a mission-oriented killer would never turn themselves in. That was the third option, after involuntary capture and suicide.

‘They all confessed.’

‘To you?’

'Not in a booth with a screen between us. But in the moments thought no one was listening. When they boast rationalize, and justify. Grant and Harper in court. Summers in her book. Torres in city hall meetings. It all made me sick. ’

Four victims connected only by their sins, not by any traceable relationship to Sister Mary herself. That's why they'd missed it. They'd been looking for personal connection when the only link was moral judgment.

All publicly available information.

The phone on the floor still cast its light in a pale circle, and in its fractured light, Ella now saw Sister Mary's pupils dilate. It was the bodily response to a limbic system preparing for flight. The decision telegraphed itself through her body a half-second before she moved, in that infinitesimal tell that separated the living from the dead in situations like this.

Sister Mary lunged sideways in a sudden explosion of movement. Ella's decision-making bypassed conscious thought.

The Glock recoiled in her hand.

The bullet sailed past Sister Mary's shoulder – exactly where Ella had aimed – and struck the mirror behind her.

Physics took over. The mirror shattered into a million shards. They caught what little light remained and created a kaleidoscope of deadly fractals. In the rain of glass, Sister Mary became a blur through the darkness. Ella spun in time to see her hit the stairs, and then she was in pursuit.

Good , Ella thought. Give me some light so I can see this bitch properly.

Mary disappeared above, and just as Ella reached the opening, the trapdoor above slammed shut with enough force to send wood dust raining down. It caught Ella in the forehead and nearly sent her sprawling, but she held steady on the side railing and shook off what would surely become a concussion. She shouldered the trapdoor open, and Ella erupted into the main room just as the outside door banged against the wall.

Through the window, Ella caught a flash of black clothing and ginger hair disappearing into the cemetery. At her feet, Ella saw Sister Mary’s tools of the trade. A branding iron and a metallic pan for heating. Sister Mary had ambushed Ella with every intent to brand her like the others.

Ella leaped over them and made for the cemetery. Her legs and lungs both burned. At the halfway point across the graveyard, Ella saw that Sister Mary had reached a car. An old Ford Taurus. The ignition rumbled to life, then the vehicle lunged forward before the door fully closed. The tires spat gravel in a spray that stung Ella's shins through her pants.

She drew her Glock and planted her feet. ‘Stop!’

The Taurus accelerated. The suspension bottomed out as it hit a dip in the church driveway. The distance between Ella and Sister Mary stretched from forty feet to sixty in seconds.

Ella's hands found that perfect stillness that came only in moments like this. Four monks lived at the monastery of her mind: Breath, Sight, Pressure, Release. They worked in harmony now as she aligned the sights with the Taurus's rear tire.

If she didn’t hit this, Sister Mary could disappear before the night was out.

First shot: The bullet struck the pavement two inches right of the target.

Miss. Ella breathed. Try again.

Second shot: The rear tire shredded in a spray of rubber. The Taurus fish-tailed but kept momentum.

Got you.

Third shot: The front tire disintegrated. The car's right side dipped violently as metal rims bit into asphalt.

The Taurus swerved hard right. Its trajectory was now governed by the laws of inertia rather than human intent. It jumped the low curb between the church property and the adjacent farm field, and for a suspended moment, all four wheels left the floor. It ascended briefly toward heaven before returning to the ground. The momentum carried it forward, directly into a JCB truck parked outside Granville Power Station. The impact folded the Taurus's hood in half and possibly Sister Mary too.

Ella let out a breath she’d been holding since she fired her last shot.

But her relief was momentary, because Sister Mary spilled straight out of the wreckage.

She tumbled once, twice, then scrambled upright despite physics' best arguments against it. Her body was no doubt operating on adrenaline and survival instinct now, which was a dangerous cocktail that defied human limitations. In the distance, Ella saw blood streaming down the woman’s face.

Ella's hand recalibrated the Glock, but only two bullets remained in the magazine. Two chances at a moving target in fading light. Statistics weren't on her side .

She needed a clearer shot.

Sister Mary was already a black shape dissolved into the dusk. She was heading for the only escape route available: the power station. She had maybe fifty feet on Ella, running full tilt toward six million dollars worth of municipal corruption.

Ella's boots hit gravel, then grass, then back to gravel. Sister Mary threaded through the construction site like she'd memorized the layout. Front-end loaders and cement mixers were frozen mid-task, waiting for morning to reanimate them. Fences of scaffolding that threw latticed shadows in the security lights. The worker bees had disappeared, leaving just two women and the violence between them.

Ella's lungs burned clean oxygen into carbon dioxide. She gained ground with each second, but Mary still had too much of a lead. Up ahead, Mary reached a squat concrete building. Some kind of control center or monitoring station. She yanked the door open and disappeared inside.

Ella slowed her approach. Doorways meant ambush. They were fatal funnels that had ended plenty of law enforcement careers. She flattened herself against the wall, drew her last breath of evening air, and pivoted inside with her Glock leading.

The building surprised her. It wasn't a control center at all but a base station for what she guessed would be the power plant's main cooling tower. A concrete spire rose up from its center, and inside, a spiral staircase wound around the tower's hollow core.

And Mary was already halfway up it.

‘Nowhere to go, Mary!’

Ella’s forehead burned with sweat. When killers like Sister Mary went up, they tended to come down at terminal velocity. She suddenly thought of Luca, who was on leave because he’d found himself in this very situation a few days ago.

Mary kept climbing. Her shoes clanged against metal treads.

Ella followed. The staircase went up and up like a dizzying corkscrew into gloom. No windows broke the monotony, just occasional safety lights. Her thighs burned. Her bruised ribs screamed complaint. This was what madness must feel like, Ella thought – circling ever upward without reaching resolution.

But ahead, Mary's labored breathing gave Ella hope. The killer was tiring .

Then, without warning, the stairs ended. A rectangular opening cut into the wall revealed an evening sky. Ella emerged onto a construction platform that encircled the tower's upper edge.

And the world opened up.

Granville sprawled beneath her like a circuit board. The church where they'd started this chase was a distant toy. Streetlights traced the town's arteries in amber. Beyond that, darkness swallowed the countryside.

Sister Mary stood twenty feet away on a steel I-beam that bridged the gap between this platform and an identical one on the tower's opposite side. The drop below was sixty feet at minimum. Not certain death, but death was an option next to paralysis. No handrails. No safety nets. Just eight inches of metal separating solid footing from empty air.

Ella leveled her Glock. The distance was optimal now. Close enough for accuracy, far enough to react if Sister Mary charged. The wind at this height tugged at her clothes.

‘Stop,’ Ella commanded. ‘Mary, there's nowhere to go.’

Mary turned. Blood had washed off her mask of foundation to reveal a real W branded in her skin.

‘I can go to God,’ she said.

‘Not like this. Step off the beam or I’ll shoot.’

Sister Mary took another step further out onto the beam, testing either Ella's nerve or God's patience. ‘No you won’t. You need me.’

‘What?’

‘I’m valuable. I destroyed all of the evidence. You’re not recording me. Without my confession, you have no case. And if you shoot, I’ll fall to my death. Then what?’

Sister Mary’s delusion was right there on display. Her murder weapon and branding iron were both back in her home, both likely teeming with DNA evidence.

But even so, Mary woman was right. Even after four murders, the rulebook said to take Mary alive. Justice through courts, not gunfire. At this height, a bullet in the leg was a death sentence.

‘Come back from the beam, Mary. Let's talk this through.’

‘Talk?’ Mary's laugh was sharp as the knife she'd tried to bury in Ella's throat. ‘You want a confession? Fine. I killed Chester Grant because he slept with students half his age and kept teaching. I killed Evelyn Summers because she prescribed drugs to hide her own incompetence. I killed Rebecca Torres because she stole from her own community. And I killed James Harper because he mutilated women on his table and called it beauty. Lust, Pride, Greed, Blasphemy.’

‘Right. And the others?’

‘Envy and Sloth? I had plans for more, but God intervened.’

Something caught Ella's eye. Movement down below. From this height, it looked like an ant scurrying through dirt.

The shape disappeared behind a cement mixer, reappeared near a stack of scaffolding, vanished again beneath the tower. Ella's pulse recalibrated. She couldn't make out details at this distance, but some things you knew in your bones.

Ella shifted her weight, adjusting her stance to keep Sister Mary's attention fixed forward.

Keep her talking.

‘And the W?’

Sister Mary's hand drifted unconsciously to her forehead. ‘Wrath is the ultimate sin. It’s the one that drives all others. God's wrath cleansed the world in the flood. Christ's wrath cleared the temple. Mine cleared Granville of its corruption.’

‘You used a branding iron on yourself?’

Sister Mary took another half-step backward on the beam. The metal groaned beneath her feet. She splayed her arms wide and said, ‘The time for talking’s over. Shoot me. Or I go to hell.’

Ella’s breath caught in her throat. What else could she say?

‘The Bible quotes. Why?’

‘Everyone needs an epitaph.’

‘The Latin. Why did you choose that?’

Sister Mary smiled. ‘You caught that.’

‘Blasphemia.’

‘Well done.’

Ella tracked the conversation with half her mind, the rest attuned to subtle changes in the air around them. Someone was climbing inside the tower now. Metal stairs whispered against concrete.

‘Blasphemy,’ Ella said. ‘Odd translation, isn’t it?’

Sister Mary peered down below, maybe assessing the fall she was planning. Presenting suicidal minds with tangibility of their plans sometimes deterred them, but Sister Mary showed no fear. Her body language suggested that she had every intention of leaving this power plant in a body bag .

Sister Mary's face reflected genuine offense. ‘No. It’s correct.’

The footsteps had reached the top of the spiral staircase. A presence hovered at the edge of the opposite platform now. The shadow inched closer, now just fifteen feet behind Mary

‘I’m sure it is. I just prefer Gluttony. The G is… better.’

Five feet.

‘What difference does it make, it’s-‘

The figure suddenly moved across the I-beam with the fluid confidence of someone who'd walked narrower paths with higher stakes. Mia Ripley wrapped one arm around Sister Mary’s neck and the other around one of her arms. Sister Mary began to flail like an insect who’d lost its wings, and Ripley’s submission hold briefly elevated Sister Mary off the ground. Her legs kicked at nothing but open air for three long seconds as Ripley held her aloft. The killer's eyes bulged, and Ella saw in them the same desperate flash of mortality that had probably been the last thing her victims had known. That sudden, terrible understanding that the world was about to continue without you in it.

Sister Mary's hands clawed at Ripley's forearm. Her face turned purple-red as oxygen became a theoretical concept. The color reminded Ella of freshly clotted blood.

This was the clinical application of unconsciousness, the same technique Ripley had demonstrated a hundred times in Bureau training rooms, but never sixty feet up on an exposed beam with nothing but physics preventing a two-body fall.

And throughout, Ripley never loosened her grip. Blood from Sister Mary's forehead wounds painted streaks across Ripley's forearm, but the former agent didn't flinch. She'd been baptized in worse fluids than this.

Ripley eased them sideways. The beam creaked. Protested. Three steps to the platform. Two. One.

‘Dark, grab her!’ Ripley screamed.

Ella holstered her Glock and extended both hands. Her palms were slick with sweat, and for one hideous moment, she thought Sister Mary might slip through her fingers and plummet to the concrete below. But then her grip found purchase on the woman's clothing, and she pulled hard.

The three of them landed on the platform in a graceless heap. Ripley rolled to her knees, never letting go of Sister Mary's arm .

The fight seemed to have drained out of the killer the second her body hit metal. Maybe she'd finally realized she wasn't getting the death she wanted. Not the glorious martyrdom of a suicide leap, not the blaze of a bullet. Just cuffs and concrete cells.

‘Jesus, Dark.’

Ella propped herself up on her elbows. ‘Bad choice of words.’

‘How many times have I gotta save your ass?’

‘You didn’t save me. You saved her.’

‘Same difference. Cuff this bitch.’

Ella fished her cuffs out of her back pocket, threw them to her partner. ‘Do the honors.’

Sister Mary had accepted her fate. Ripley locked the cuffs in place and rolled her onto her back. ‘You committed the worst sin of all, sister. You underestimated a woman with nothing to lose.’

Ella caught her breath. Up here, the air was different. She’d never ended a case at an altitude of sixty feet before. Sister Mary spat out a cocktail of fluids. Sweat, blood, phlegm.

‘I told you G was better,’ Ella said. She nodded at Ripley. ‘Except this G stands for grandma.’