There is no crime to fit this sentence; there is no sentence to fit this crime. Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate’s words are echoed by the zealot Judas Iscariot only hours before history takes a bloody turn on a cross atop Golgotha on Calvary Hill. Two thousand years later, these words are found scrawled in blood in New York next to three crucified men hanging on a basement wall.

Judas, now Jude Issachar, an enigmatic social worker and part-time professor, and Pontius, now Peter Pheiffer, an unsettled defense attorney at a ravenous global law firm, have lived many lifetimes since their original encounter. However, Jude is aware of his past and is cursed by the fateful lure of the noose and the tree. Peter is damned by a recurring ignorance, a cruel cyclical awakening that creeps up on him as he is compelled to defend a sociopath who crucified three men.

Condemned for their role in humankind’s darkest betrayal, they must reckon with their pasts—and their futures—after a fateful, bloody collision of violence and addiction two millennia after their sentence began brings these lost souls together once more.