“They plucked her right off the street,” Mother Ines said. “She was blindfolded and brought to a nobleman’s estate on the outskirts of the city. He … defiled her.”

The lines are shaky, uneven. But they gain confidence as she draws. Abstract shapes become a chin, a nose, an aristocratic forehead. Sharp cheekbones. Hollow cheeks. Empty eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to draw them.

I lean over her shoulder. Kiki does the same, brow furrowing.

A nobleman with long hair and regal bearing. That description covers half the sycophants who crowd the viceroy’s halls, sniffing around like dogs for scraps for even the slightest chance of garnering favor with the man. But there is something to the curve of his lips, the angle of his jaw.

“It’s him,” I say, the moment it dawns on me. “Cristobal.”

Catalina presses the quill to the parchment with such force it breaks.

“You know him?” Mother Ines asks.

“Not really. He bailed us out of jail.”

Kiki looks from me to Catalina and to Mother Ines, searching for answers that none of us have, not yet anyway. “This doesn’t make any sense. He’s a close friend of the viceroy’s. Surely, Sebastian’s father wouldn’t associate with someone who could do this.”

“What do we really know about him?” I ask. “One day he’s a nobody, the next day he’s the Viceroy of Peru. Maybe he had help from a certain marquis.”

Kiki releases a shaky breath. “What happened next?”

“When he finished with her,” Mother Ines continues, her hand coming to rest on the poor girl’s shoulder, “he released her into the woods. Chased her down with his dogs.”

“He hunted her like game.” I can’t keep the horror out of my voice.

Catalina nods, her eyes fixed to the portrait. She makes a pained noise, her hand rising up to graze her scar.

“A young man on horseback found her. He must have been on the property. He brought her to us.” Sadness and fury war in Mother Ines’s voice. “Asked me to save her. Green around the gills, he was.”

“Sebastian. The viceroy’s son,” Kiki says. “He was with the marquis at the stables. Our stables.”

“I saw them together at Santiago’s. Cristobal and Sebastian. That night you got blisteringly drunk.”

I tear my eyes away from the drawing, away from Catalina’s scar to meet Kiki’s gaze.

“So he was involved,” I say. “Just not how I thought. But why would the magistrate be involved?”

“The man is hungry for power and wealth,” the prioress says. “If that boy was the son of a viceroy, doing him a favor would be a boon. I assume the young man did not want his name tracked back to us or her.”

I turn back to Catalina. Her eyes are haunted but there is something else in them, something I understand quite well. “Is there anything else?”