Carefully pulling it out, Esteban held a small, leather-bound diary locked with a brass latch, along with a small silver key taped to the cover. Beneath the diary was a folded piece of heavy paper bearing the official wax seal of the Convent of Santa Clara.
“What is that?” Camilo asked, peering over Esteban’s shoulder despite his terror.
“The answers, hopefully,” Esteban replied softly.
Checking the wall clock, Esteban noted that only thirty minutes had passed since the two-hour countdown mentioned in the skin inscription had begun. Whatever reason Sister Beatriz had for demanding a delay, Esteban decided to honor it. He motioned for Camilo to stay quiet, and together they stepped away from the gurney into his glass-walled office overlooking the morgue floor.
Esteban peeled the silver key off the leather cover and unlocked the small diary. The pages were filled with neat, dense handwriting, detailing the daily routines of life inside the Santa Clara cloister. But as the entries progressed toward the past month, the script grew hurried and chaotic.
Sister Beatriz had recorded a disturbing discovery. The Convent of Santa Clara, long regarded as a sanctuary of charity and prayer, held a hidden floor beneath its ancient stone cellars. According to the diary, high-ranking administrators within the order had been using the isolated convent as a front to conceal millions of dollars in illegal contraband and dark offshore accounts linked to corrupt city officials. Beatriz had accidentally stumbled upon the hidden vault while looking for historical records in the archives.
When she tried to confide in the Mother Superior, she quickly realized that the leadership was directly involved. Realizing her life was in grave danger, Beatriz knew she could not simply flee; the convent was tightly guarded, and her disappearance would be covered up instantly.
Reading through the final pages, Esteban’s eyes widened in disbelief. Beatriz had detailed her final desperate plan. She had obtained a rare, temporary paralysis toxin—a compound that mimicked death so perfectly that it slowed the heart rate to an almost undetectable level and lowered body temperature dramatically. She had ingested a carefully measured dose to force the convent to send her body to the public morgue for an official examination, knowing it was her only way to escape the cloister and deliver the evidence to an outsider…
