Kai leads Paedyn around the shabby inn and decides they should avoid the innkeeper and break into a room through the windows instead. After testing several latches, Kai finds an empty room at the back. Because he is still secretly chained to Paedyn, he kneels to unwrap the chain from her ankle and boosts her through the window, then awkwardly hauls himself in after her when the taut chain drags him forward.

Inside, their banter quickly turns flirtatious and tense. Paedyn insists she still hates Kai and tries to dismiss the kisses they have shared, but Kai challenges her denial and points out that she wants to kiss him again. Still determined to keep some distance, Paedyn claims the washroom and orders Kai to sit outside the door so the chain can reach while she takes the bath she was promised.

While Kai waits in the doorway, listening to her bathe, he asks why Paedyn dived back into the sewer to save him. Paedyn admits she could not bear to take another life because she already feels stained by the people she has killed. Kai reveals that he found the soldier she killed in the desert and tells her he understands the burden of deciding whose life matters.

The conversation deepens when Paedyn confesses that she had watched Kai discover the Imperial she killed earlier and had been in position to kill Kai from the rooftop. She says she spared him because he intended to bury the body for her, just as he once buried Sadie, and she could not throw the knife after seeing that mercy. When Kai asks whether she regrets not killing him, Paedyn quietly answers that she will regret it in the morning, echoing their earlier emotional connection.

When Kai fetches a clean shirt from Paedyn’s pack, he finds her father’s worn notebook filled with healer theories. This brings up the house Kai burned down, but Paedyn asks him not to apologize, because an apology would only make his actions harder for her to hate. After she steps out in the oversized shirt and dries her soaked clothes, she settles in the doorway wrapped in a towel and tells Kai it is now his turn to bathe.