Two weeks after The Whisper Gazette reported that the Prince of Hearts’ church door had vanished, Evangeline finds a shabby, hidden door in a decrepit alley in Valenda’s Temple District. Though the door seems to resist her and even draws blood from her fingers, Evangeline recognizes its broken-heart shape as the symbol of the Prince of Hearts and believes it is the missing entrance she has been seeking.

Evangeline reflects on her faith in magic, inherited from her father Maximilian and her mother’s stories of the Magnificent North. Knowing the dangers of praying to the immortal Fates, she still chooses to enter because she is desperate to stop Luc Navarro, the boy she loves, from marrying her stepsister Marisol that very day.

Inside the church, Evangeline notices that it smells not like Luc, as she expected from stories about the church, but like apples and blood. The all-white cathedral is full of broken benches, and in a shadowed corner she glimpses a golden-haired young man tearing at the sleeves of his burgundy coat. With time running out before Luc’s wedding, Evangeline continues to the dais and the statue of the Prince of Hearts.

Evangeline gives blood into the offering basin marked Blood for a Prayer and prays haltingly to the Prince. She explains that her parents are dead, that she and Luc loved each other in secret, and that Marisol abruptly announced an engagement to Luc on the day Evangeline and Luc meant to reveal their love. Evangeline suspects her stepmother Agnes cursed Luc and possibly Evangeline herself, because Luc will not see her and Evangeline cannot tell Marisol the truth.

After Evangeline begs the Prince to stop the wedding, the young man from the back of the church mocks her prayer. He lounges on the dais, eating a white apple that drips red juice, and challenges Evangeline’s reverence for a Fate whose kiss is said to kill. As Evangeline feels an uncanny attraction and fear, she realizes the cruel, beautiful young man is not merely another supplicant but the Prince of Hearts himself.