"Good heavens, Sister Maria... Are you at dawn prayer again today?"

In the dim prayer room where the darkness had not yet faded, Sister Maria, with her hands piously gathered, looked truly holy.

"...Sister Guest, you're up early."

Sister Maria was a woman from an orphanage who had only recently joined the convent.

She introduced herself as someone who had nowhere to go after becoming an adult and ended up at the convent. Perhaps because of that pitiful story, she was always quiet and spoke little.

Was it because she had suffered so much? Whenever I happened to hear her voice, I could sense a subtle roughness to it.

Contrary to that rough voice which suggested a life of hardship, the skin of her hands was not so coarse, and despite being from an orphanage where she might not have eaten well, she was quite tall and had excellent table manners... Truly..

A nun full of surprises. Maria.

I only recognized her to that extent, but looking back, those were all clues I should have noticed.

"Ma... Maria... Sister? First, put the gun down and talk to me."

Clues that told me I should never have gotten involved with Sister Maria... no, with Ivan de Rosendale, the assassin who came to kill the Mother Superior.