Trystan rides through a violent rainstorm to Evie's cottage, terrified that her father might harm her. He bursts through the front door and finds Lyssa Sage crying in the hallway. The young girl tells him she heard yelling, crying, and someone falling in her father's office. Trystan instructs Tatianna, who arrived with him, to take Lyssa back to the manor through the back entrance, keeping her sheltered from the rain.

Trystan opens the office door to find Evie alive and her father unconscious on the floor. Evie explains she figured out the truth—that Griffin was the traitor—and sedated him before Trystan arrived. She tells Trystan she knew he would have given her the choice about what to do with her father, and he silently acknowledges she's right. He would have deferred to her wishes despite his desire for retribution, because what she wants matters to him. He orders two guards to remove Griffin's body through the window so Evie won't have to see him again, sending him to the cellars.

As Evie drinks heavily from a bottle of wine, she reveals the full story of Otto Warsen's attack—how her father effectively offered her to Warsen, how Warsen lunged at her when she refused him, slashing her back with a dagger as she fled, and how she went home alone to wash away the blood in silence. Trystan listens with carefully contained fury. She also shows him her father's forged ink, King Benedict's letters, and the full scope of how both she and her father were used as the king's pawns.

Evie spirals into dark humor, wondering aloud if imprisoning her own father makes her evil and joking that having a monstrous father and an absent mother is "every villain's origin story." Trystan flatly reassures her she is not evil, just someone who made a difficult choice. He struggles awkwardly to comfort her, but she smiles at his efforts. Then her expression shifts to accusation, and she asks Trystan the question her father wouldn't answer: what does the king want with the mated guvres? Trystan's internal reaction—"Fuck"—signals he knows the answer and dreads revealing it.