Parisa has been carefully cultivating Dalton Ellery's desire for her over the course of the summer, using subtle physical proximity, her perfume, and strategic touches to make him fixate on her. She can always sense where he is in the house due to the bursts of magic surrounding him, and she knows his mental defenses weaken when he is working alone or aroused. She slipped a telepathic latch into his thoughts the first time they kissed, ensuring she could always gain access to his mind.

Tonight, Parisa finds Dalton alone in the reading room. He warns her she shouldn't be there, but makes no effort to stop her. Dalton becomes urgent and cryptic, telling Parisa she has enemies and must not make them—she should find a reliable ally among her initiation class or make herself indispensable. When Parisa presses him, Dalton offers to give her whatever she wants if it means she'll take the elimination game more seriously. Parisa deflects, insisting she doesn't know exactly what she wants from him.

Dalton reveals he watched through the house's surveillance wards as the assassin died during the earlier attack, and he clarifies to Parisa that the woman wasn't killed by Callum—she killed herself. Callum convinced the assassin to turn the gun around and pull the trigger without lifting a finger, an act that cost him nothing. This revelation deepens Parisa's unease about Callum's power, and she recalls his chilling words to the assassin about exhaustion, death, and the futility of resistance.

Their encounter escalates into a desperate, physical intimacy on the reading room table. Parisa uses the act strategically, knowing that even the most disciplined mind cannot maintain its defenses during sex. As Dalton's mental barriers weaken, Parisa slips deeper into his thoughts. She finds fragments: fear, guilt, memories that cut like knives, a boyhood recollection of reviving a dead sapling only to watch it die again. She also catches echoes of Reina's belief that Dalton knows something critically important that the candidates don't.

At the climactic moment, as both Parisa and Dalton reach their peak of vulnerability, Parisa finally glimpses the thought Dalton has been trying to suppress: he desperately wants her not to die. She seizes the moment and demands to know who is going to kill her. Dalton, still exposed and unable to guard himself, answers with a single devastating word: "Everyone." Parisa understands the implication—the elimination process requires the remaining candidates to kill one of their own to survive, echoing Callum's words to the assassin: "They will have to kill you to keep themselves alive."