Penance Protocol

Cassian Voss was a star prosecutor until the execution of Valentin Cross. When a serial predator confesses to Cross’s crime nine years later, Voss’s polished career implodes into guilt. Now a disgraced civil rights lawyer, he takes a last-ditch case against Warden Seraphine Marsh of the notorious Mournshollow Penitentiary. Marsh runs her prison like a psychological laboratory, and she possesses proof of Voss’s suppressed exculpatory evidence. She offers him a diabolical trade: abandon his client to her hellish “silent wing,” or she exposes him as a murderer of an innocent man. Trapped by emotional blackmail, Voss realizes his only escape is to destroy himself. He devises a legal sacrament of self-sacrifice, turning a civil trial into a public confession, proving that the prison of conscience can be far more torturous than any cell.