So he had forced Soledad to sedate them — the ones whose cells lay along his passages, Amparo worst of all, because her remodeled cell sat directly on his route to the sacristy.

A sleeping house was a house he could rob at leisure, carrying out its treasures piece by piece through the tunnels, night after night, while the women who guarded them lay drugged and unknowing a few feet away.

He had been clever about it, in the patient way of a man with nothing but time.

He never took enough at once to be noticed.

A single candlestick from a set of six, a coin from the alms box rather than the box itself, one small reliquary from a shelf crowded with them — losses small enough that a busy convent would blame its own record-keeping before it suspected a thief.