Melissa watched her sons ruin my little girl’s Easter dress and called it a joke—so I calmly told everyone to leave, and the look on her face said she had just remembered something important. / Chapter 86 / 117

Chapter 86 - The Sister in the Shadows

The drive north through the eastern townships of Quebec was shrouded in a dense, weeping fog that smelled of wet slate and decaying pine needles. We crossed the St. Lawrence River at Sorel, taking the narrow secondary routes that wound through the low-lying agricultural flats bordering the river.

The address led us to an isolated promontory three miles east of Trois-Rivières. Looming through the mist stood a towering gray limestone structure surrounded by high, rusted wrought-iron fencing. A weathered wooden sign near the locked iron gate read: *Maison Saint-Joseph — Propriété Privée.*

The gate's heavy chain was unlocked, dangling loose in the damp grass, fresh tire ruts cutting deeply through the mossy driveway.

"Someone arrived here ahead of us," Caleb muttered, cutting the headlights of the truck and coasting silently into the shadows of an overgrown lilac grove.

Vance drew his sidearm, keeping it low against his thigh as he stepped out into the mist. "Stay behind me. If you hear anything resembling a discharge, get on the floorboards of the truck and don't move."

We crept through the courtyard toward the rear service entrance of the old convent. The heavy oak door hung slightly ajar, its brass lock scarred by crowbar marks. Inside, the air was freezing, thick with the stench of long-unopened rooms, moldering plaster, and something sharp—kerosene.

"Smell that?" Caleb whispered, catching my sleeve. "Someone’s pouring accelerant."

Vance bolted forward, his heavy boots making no sound on the wet floor tiles. We followed him down a long, vaulted hallway lined with empty, padlocked rooms that once served as solitary infirmary cells. At the end of the corridor, an iron-bound trapdoor led down into the limestone foundations beneath the kitchen.

A flickering, orange light danced against the stone walls of the subterranean staircase.

"Drop the can! Drop it right now!" Vance's voice boomed down the stairwell like thunder.

I reached the top of the stairs just in time to see the tableau illuminated by the glow of a battery-powered work lantern. Standing in the middle of a dirt-floored cellar was a man in an oilskin coat, holding a five-gallon red plastic container of gasoline. On the ground behind him, tied to a wooden support beam by thick nylon rope, was a woman.

Her hair was silver-streaked and matted, her face hollowed by decades of grief and confinement, but the high, elegant cheekbones and the pale gray eyes were unmistakable.

It was Clara.

The man with the gasoline can slowly turned toward the light. When the yellow glare of the lantern hit his face, the breath left my lungs in an icy gasp.

It wasn't a hired gun. It wasn't an anonymous hitman from Montreal.