In Ella’s experience, this rang true if seven dollars of PVC piping or the lives of two hundred innocent people were at risk. No one could have predicted the event which led to the coming disaster. Who would have thought a little thing like walking down the street to put the goats in the lower pasture would derail everything? As Ella was to realize painfully later, it wasn’t the novices walking with the goats that were the problem. It was that they had Rowan as their protector—a role that Deputy Marshal Rowan Pierce took very seriously. The night before all their plans began to unravel, Rowan and Ella met away from the ears and eyes of the convent in Greta’s chamber. Greta had heard a disturbing rumor that she needed to share with them. While she trusted every woman in the nunnery with her life, she would not take the chance of paying for that trust with the lives of her two American friends. “This is the last of it, I’m afraid,”
