“Oh, for the love of the Holy Mother.” Charity’s worst nightmares were confirmed.

“And your dear old daddy, Wembley, used his money to pay off everyone, including Mike and Mary Brown, so that no one would know. Everyone kept the secret, just as long as the money kept flowing. Sinners, every last one of them!”

“Don’t listen to her,” Charity said, and was rewarded with another sharp tweak to her left arm. Her right was free; she could swing back and hit Devota in the face, but that would probably ensure that she would die as the knife blade found her jugular or carotid.

“But I’m not lying, am I?” Devota whispered with a kind of horrid, dark glee. “I found out the truth that you worked so hard to hide all these years . . . your secret love child.”

“Please,” Charity whispered, her head thundering, the truth hammering away at her brain, chipping at her pride and exposing her self-loathing as warm blood slid down her neck in this musty, dark tomb.

“Wasn’t too hard to do,” Devota bragged. “All I had to do was shadow the whore. She was on to something, found out about the adoption papers being altered when she worked at St. Elsinore’s. And then she came down here and verified everything she’d put together.”

“I don’t believe you! Let her go!” Valerie insisted, unflagging, her eyes directed on Devota.

“Then again, you always were dull. I remember you from the orphanage.”

Charity could feel Devota’s bitterness curdling through the dusty air. She, the unwanted one, the lame girl, the one always passed over.

Valerie took another step forward. Her voice was low. Threatening. “I said, let her go!”

“Not just yet.”

“Now.” Valerie didn’t drop the gun.

“You’re not in control,” Devota reminded her.

But Valerie, as tough as Charity had been in her own wasted youth, didn’t back down. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, verbalizing the questions that had formed in Charity’s mind.

“God’s work,” Devota said again, with that drip of satisfaction at finally explaining herself, her mission.

It scared Charity to death.

Devota tightened her grip. “Someone has to get rid of the harlots who shame the church, who defile the order. So you see, your ‘sister, ’ she really wasn’t any blood relation to you. Oh, yeah, she looked like you, but there was nothing between you. Nothing! It was a lie. Anything that said otherwise, about how you resembled each other, was pure coincidence . . . or fantasy. People see what they want to see, you know, but Camille, she found out.”

Charity felt her captor tense at the thought of Sister Camille, as if the prettier woman had been her rival. “Everyone bought into her act, but she was dark below the surface. Pure evil.”

Val’s face, in the weird light, remained impassive.