In July 1928, Addie LaRue revels in a masked Chicago speakeasy marked only by a stained-glass “angel” and the number XII. She dances hard to the jazz and retreats, drunk and breathless, idly touching the wooden ring she wears on a cord—an object that always returns to her and that she refuses to slide onto her finger.

Addie reflects that she has resisted putting on the ring for fourteen years, and Luc has not come in all that time. Lonely and wavering, she goes to the bar for a drink, but a masked bartender serves her Champagne with a candied rose petal and gestures toward a velvet booth.

Luc waits there, masked in branches, and Addie greets him with a mix of relief and defiance, claiming victory because she “didn’t call” and yet he came. Luc counters that the club belongs to him; Addie suddenly notices the signs everywhere, realizing the “angel” has no wings and the design hints at Luc’s darkness. Addie understands these clubs are part of Luc’s pattern—places he cultivates across cities, both tempting and harvesting human desire.

Luc admits he sensed Addie falter and that he was tired of waiting, then turns cruelly intimate, telling Addie she has not been human since their first bargain and cannot live, love, or belong among people. He presses that Addie belongs with him, revealing a momentary, unsettling imbalance in himself that Addie seizes on, cutting back: Addie would rather be a ghost.

Luc flinches into anger but does not whisk Addie away; instead, he tells Addie to return to the humans. Addie goes through the motions of the night feeling newly separated from everyone around her, and she leaves. By the next day the speakeasy is boarded up and Luc is gone, and Addie recognizes that new lines have been drawn in their long conflict—one that will not bring Luc back to her again until the war.