“My pleasure,” he said, his curiosity about me and our clandestine meetings clawing at him. I could feel it, but it wasn’t his place to ask.

Mr. Alaniz was the private investigator I’d hired a couple of weeks after we’d absconded to the convent. Since I couldn’t be out there trying to figure out firsthand who murdered my father, I’d hired someone who could. True, Uncle Bob and the entire Albuquerque Police Department were on the case, but I’d never felt so helpless, so useless. Freedom meant a lot more to me than it used to, and I had to conduct my own investigation one way or another. I had to do what I could, and if that meant doing it against Reyes’s and Uncle Bob’s wishes, so be it.

He looked past me, then said, “I’m not going to ask why we meet in secret like this, but I have to know if you are in danger.”

I listened to the heavy breathing of the hounds. If he only knew.

“No,” I said, dismissing the thought with a wave. “Absolutely not.” And I wasn’t. Not in the way that he meant. He wanted to know if I was in any danger from Reyes or anyone else who could stumble upon us.

“And if you get caught? What then?”

What then, indeed. “Let’s just say my husband would be upset with me, but, no, I would never be in any danger from him. Never.”

He seemed satisfied with my answer but looked past me again for good measure.

“What did you find out?” I asked, trying to hurry this along. Reyes would notice my absence soon. I was a little surprised he hadn’t figured out my secret meetings with Mr. Alaniz before now. I was bright, according to everyone around me. So bright, I could be seen from anywhere on the planet. Why, then, didn’t he see when I snuck out of the convent? How did he not know where I was every minute of every day?

A growl rumbled not ten feet away from me. I stilled and watched as a glistening of silver appeared, then disappeared in the trees. Fear tightened around my chest as Mr. Alaniz scratched his chin where a smattering of blond stubble grew. He pulled out a notepad.

I’d been to this spot a dozen times. They had never gotten this close. Right after we’d escaped to the convent, Osh had marked the sacred grounds with stakes, then threaded string around the entire area to indicate the border. Either I was closer to the border than I thought, or Osh’s calculations were wrong.

I saw another flash of silver as a hellhound’s muscles rolled in the shadows of the trees. I could hear its breathing, causing me to retreat involuntarily, but it kept its distance. As long as we had an accord, I didn’t feel the need to run screaming back to the convent, but an uneasiness settled in my shoulders and neck, my senses on high alert.

“Your uncle is on the right track,” Mr. Alaniz said.

I blinked back to him. “In what way?”

“You were right. After the last time we met, I staked out the place.” He gestured toward another small access road above us. “I waited there, and sure enough, a man showed up and parked right about where I am parked now.” He indicated his car with a nod, and an excited thrill ran up my spine.

“Were you able to follow him?” I asked. The entire police department had been looking for this guy, but he seemed to be a ghost. Until now.

“I was.”

I clapped. It was the first good news we’d had in months. Apparently, some guy had been following me my entire life. My father figured it out and had been tailing the man when he died. We found pictures that my dad had taken of him, but we could never get an ID. So while my father was able to track him, we couldn’t get within a mile of the guy. That we knew of, anyway. I began to wonder if he’d vanished until I was out walking Beep and Artemis one day and saw a car parked on the access road. The moment I looked up, the driver started the car and sped off, but I recognized him from the pictures my father had shot of him.

When my dad went missing, we found those pictures along with a whole slew of other photographs in the hotel room where he’d been staying. Photographs of me growing up. Some were as recent as mere days before my father died, and it couldn’t have been a coincidence that he died soon after finding this guy. Whoever he was, he could have had something to do with my dad’s death. And even if he didn’t, I really wanted to know why he had been following me, literally, since the day I was born.

“But there’s more to it. While you were right, he does have pictures of you from when you were very young, when I tailed him back to his apartment, I managed to snap some shots through his windows. Just like you said, he had pictures of you, articles, yearbook photos, pretty much your entire life pasted on his walls, but some of them were from just after you were born.”

“And?”

“And, he isn’t old enough to have been following you that long. He’s barely in his thirties. Unless he took up stalking at age five, someone else is involved. Has been involved for a very long time.”

He was right, and I had a feeling I knew who—or more precisely, what—was behind this.

Mr. Alaniz handed me a photograph.

I nodded. “That’s him. That’s the guy from my dad’s surveillance photos.”

“Then you were right. He does work for the Vatican.”

I knew it. A former client, Father Glenn, had clued me into the fact that the Vatican had been keeping a file on me since I was born—but why? And if my dad discovered the truth, would the Church have had him killed? Over a few photos? Either way, I needed proof of this man’s existence. And his address.