As Laurie disappears into the shaft, screams ring out from the hallway. Fearing that Heart Eyes will discover their escape route, Jamie urges Laurie to keep moving, then pushes the cover closed.

The killer enters the bathroom wearing the pink Heart Eyes mask and carrying a meat cleaver. Jamie jumps down from the counter to draw his attention from the vent and throws Laurie’s heeled shoes at him; they connect with his chin, but he recovers and charges. Jamie locks herself in a toilet stall. He batters the door repeatedly before stopping without forcing it open. He scrapes a blade slowly across the mirror glass and leaves.

After verifying he is gone, Jamie finds a crude heart with a J and a pledge of forever etched into the mirror and notes he has taken Laurie’s shoes. Wes arrives, and they embrace in relief. They nearly kiss, but both pull back. Wes explains he searched for Billie, found a jammed exit, and returned to find no one waiting outside the bathroom. In the hallway, a bloody smear across the men’s restroom door stops them.

Inside the men’s restroom, Jamie and Wes find John badly stabbed in the shoulder, propped against a urinal. John says he tried to block Heart Eyes from reaching the bathrooms, that Dani and Jennifer got away, and that the killer’s only concern was reaching Jamie. Jamie kneels to apply pressure to the wound but has no supplies since she gave the first aid kit to Jennifer earlier. Wes breaks open the toilet paper dispenser and improvises a bandage.

As they prepare to move, John turns openly hostile toward Wes, noting that Wes tends to vanish whenever the killer appears. Wes shoulders most of John’s weight as they exit, but the two men continue to argue. Jamie stops cold when she spots a motionless figure in the shadows at the far end of the corridor. She struggles to get the men’s attention, finally shouting to break through their argument. Wes raises the flashlight, and the beam falls on Heart Eyes, perfectly still and watching all of them.

Heart Eyes stands at the far end of the hall, a kitchen knife in one hand, his other arm concealed behind his back. Wes quietly tells Jamie to retreat to the entrance and hide upstairs while he handles the situation. Jamie refuses. When Wes brings his own knife into view, Heart Eyes tilts his head as if accepting the challenge—then draws a large machete from behind his back. Wes immediately recognizes his knife is useless by comparison and steps back.

John, rapidly weakening from blood loss, tells Jamie everything will be all right—then pushes himself off the wall and staggers forward in a deliberate charge at Heart Eyes. Jamie screams. Wes seizes her, lifts her off the ground, and sprints toward the entrance. He sets her down, and they run up the stairs to the mezzanine together.

Wes and Jamie take cover in a VIP room, hiding behind a partition to catch their breath. Wes is shaken, replaying John’s death. Jamie tells him that pulling her away was the only viable choice. When their hands find each other on the carpet, the contact feels easy and unforced.

Wes admits he had fully intended to fight Heart Eyes directly. Jamie urges him not to, convinced it would be fatal. The conversation shifts; Wes says he is glad it is her with him during all of this. Jamie says the same. They lean toward each other and are about to kiss when a shoe scuffs the hallway floor outside.

They press back against the partition. The figure who enters is Stu, now armed with a boning knife. Wes slips out to investigate approaching voices and returns with Dani and Jennifer, still carrying the first aid kit.

Jennifer starts to ask about John, but Jamie’s expression tells her that he is dead. When Jennifer asks about Laurie, Jamie repeats her cover story—that Laurie fled during the bathroom attack. Stu challenges this aggressively, suggesting it’s convenient that Laurie escaped, but Jamie isn’t looking for her. Wes steps in sharply, and Jennifer defends Jamie, citing her role in keeping people alive. Tensions settle enough for Wes to ask Stu about his knife. Stu reveals he pulled it from Campbell, who is dead.

Stu confirms he found Campbell’s body riddled with blades and another arrangement of roses left for Jamie. Stu also claims he spent an hour hiding in a janitor’s closet.

Wes notices a fire alarm sensor near the ceiling—distinct from a standard smoke detector—and explains that a monitored system automatically dispatches emergency services when triggered. He proposes either locating the manual control panel or triggering the detectors by starting a small fire. Stu’s pointed question about how Wes knows these details causes Dani and Jennifer to grow wary as well. Sensing he has lost their trust, Wes confesses he is a police officer.

Wes clarifies that he is a homicide detective who attended the event while privately investigating the murders of five women, each of whom had previously visited singles events around the city. The revelation stings Jamie, who wonders whether his attention toward her all night was a performance. Wes confirms he has no badge, firearm, or backup, and Jamie deduces that he is no longer the officer officially assigned to the case. Wes admits he was suspended after punching a colleague who spoke dismissively about the victims.

Wes insists the night was never a formal operation: He came to observe how the killer might choose targets. The killer’s behavior—massacring a crowd behind a mask—is a complete departure from his previous pattern, which involved taking one woman at a time and killing her in private. Stu argues that Wes’s profession makes him the strongest suspect, a point Wes cannot fully counter. He asks them to trust the alarm plan regardless.

The group splits: Stu, Dani, and Jennifer will search for the fire alarm control panel, while Wes and Jamie head to the janitor’s closet for something flammable. As they disperse, Jamie and Jennifer exchange silent looks—Jamie’s warning Jennifer not to trust Stu, and Jennifer’s cautioning Jamie about Wes.

Jamie and Wes walk to the janitor’s closet in tense silence. Inside, Jamie confronts Wes about his deception while washing John’s blood from her hands. Wes denies that his interest in her was an act: She absorbed his attention so completely that he failed to retain his awareness of the room—a critical aspect of his training as a police officer. He tells her that while she does match the killer’s victim profile, she’s also very much his type—and admits guilt over the possibility that his distraction caused him to miss the moment the lights were cut.

Wes describes what the evening would have looked like if the killer hadn’t struck—he would have taken Jamie out for a drink and then asked her to spend the night with him. The speech moves Jamie enough that she admits, with effort, that she had started to like him. Wes crosses the room and pulls her into a kiss.

The kiss escalates quickly. Wes presses Jamie against the wall, and the encounter nearly breaks her cardinal slasher survival rule about not having sex. Wes stops them from going further—insisting one of them needs to stay alert—but brings Jamie to orgasm, covering her mouth to keep her quiet. The intensity, after hours of sustained terror, causes Jamie to cry.

Jamie suddenly realizes she doesn’t know Wes’s last name, which makes her cry harder. He provides it along with other personal details: “Wes Carpenter, homicide detective, badge number 21397, Taurus…apparently. I have two younger sisters—they're the ones who told me my star sign is important" (257). She returns the favor: Jamie Prescott, PhD candidate, Scorpio, older sister, Laurie always comes first. The exchange of ordinary information steadies them both, and they agree the night counts as a shared traumatic experience rather than a first date.

Wes then spots a bottle of hand sanitizer bearing a flammable liquid warning on the shelf. He picks it up, hoping it will help them trigger the alarm, and promises that once they are out, he will take her on a real date.