The next few days went by in a blur as Feyre waited for Rhys to contact her.

"I need the approval of my handler before we can do anything. I'll call you with more information in a few days. Don't do anything in the meanwhile, Feyre, okay?" he'd told her while leading her back up the stairs to the cinema. She'd agreed to wait for him, and now it was Sunday, and she was getting impatient. The temperature was rising more everyday as the summer rolled in, and Feyre was lounging on her bed in a light summer dress when her phone beeped with the sound of a new message. She eagerly grabbed it and found out it was Rhysand sending her a short but precise message: "It's done. I'll contact you."

"What are you smiling at, Doll?" Tamlin asked her from the small desk near the window.

"Oh, nothing big. Nesta started to receive her wedding photos so she sent me some. Do you wanna see?" she added eagerly, knowing what his answer would be. He grunted a "no" and went back to the papers he'd been reading. Feyre stared at her phone for a while, before erasing the text and putting her phone away. She needed to be careful. And she needed to ask Nesta for some pictures of the wedding.

"Feyre, this is my handler, Amren."

Organizing the meeting had been complex and had taken a while. Feyre had told Tamlin she wanted to go to an art show a town over, and, as predicted, he'd insisted on some of his men going with her. She had protested at first, saying she could go on her own, just enough for him to buy it, and then had agreed. She'd driven up there with Bron and Rhys, and they had managed to get rid of Bron for a short while, as he was standing watch outside the art gallery while Rhys accompanied her inside.

And now they were standing in a deserted part of the gallery, looking at a painting with a very short woman beside them. Upon arriving, Feyre had realised it was the woman she'd seen sitting on the bench with Rhysand a few weeks back. She was wearing a grey pantsuit, and very large red earrings that framed her face delicately.

Following Rhysand's introduction, she actually turned to Feyre to shake her hand and scan her from head to toe twice, before going back to the painting.

"So, she's the informant you want to work with?"

Rhys answered as quietly as she had spoken. "Yes."

"And you," she added, clearly now talking directly to Feyre, "are you aware of the risks you're taking? You know that if you're discovered, it could have dire consequences on your life as you know it?"

"I do."

"Why do you want to help us with this case, Feyre?"

She was at a loss for words for a moment. She had been clear with Rhys on her motivations, but it was harder to express them in front of this woman she didn't know. She had come to trust Rhys, and she felt comfortable sharing with him, but this was harder.

"I'm not a bad person." She thought of Sandy's blood on her legs. "I didn't use to be, anyway. I didn't know about what was going on around me, but now that I do, I can't just let it go. I can't stand by and do nothing if I know that so many bad things are happening around me. When Sandy died, I think I hadn't understood the magnitude of what was happening before that night. I do now, and I want to help."

Amren had turned towards her while she was speaking, and she had an unreadable expression on her face, her arms crossed and somehow looking down at her despite the fact that she was so much smaller than Feyre. But Feyre didn't back down, she took a deep breath and looked into her beautiful, but somewhat scary, grey eyes. The moment lasted forever, or it felt like forever, before Amren nodded slightly and said "Alright. I'll take care of registering you with our department, and I will let Rhysand work out the details with you. I will not see you again if we can avoid it. Is that clear?"

"Crystal."

She felt extremely silly, like she was starring in a spy movie. Sneaking around in her own home, trying to listen in on conversations, and today, actually going into Tamlin's office to take pictures of the books she had spotted during her first time in there.

"Are you sure you can do it?"

"I can. Tamlin will be out all afternoon with you, won't he?"

"He will, but…"

"Rhys, we talked about this. Trust me, I know what I'm looking for."

"All the books from the last two years?"

"Yes."

Rhys and her had talked about this day many times over the phone, not her usual phone but a small burner he'd given to her so that they could communicate more easily. She felt so silly.

But she shouldn't. Rhys had assured her that what she was doing was so much more valuable than anything he could have imagined.

"I could never have had access to these books. What you can do for me is of great help. But be careful."

She had rolled her eyes then, and she did it again when she recalled their conversation. She understood why he was wary about her involvement, but she knew she could handle it. She trusted Rhys to keep Tamlin away long enough, and she had snuck the office's key from Tamlin's pocket that morning during a kiss. He had been very distracted by their closeness, and she couldn't really blame him. She hadn't felt the need to have sex with him since just after Nesta's wedding, and her connection with Rhysand made her wanting to be close to him even less.

She loved him, but she didn't feel bad for lying to him, and she found it easy to avoid his advances. Maybe a little too easy. But she refused to dwell on that as she thoroughly scanned through the books, took out the ones from the last couple of years and started making scans of every page. Her relationship wasn't supposed to be her main priority right now, and she didn't seem to mind. For the first time since the night of Sandy's death, she felt like she was doing something truly useful with her time, and it was invigorating, to a certain extent.

She was still scanning the files when her phone rang, and she saw Rhysand's text. "We've finished early. I'm trying to stall him but it won't work for long. Get out."

She felt her heart starting to race inside her chest as she quickly closed all the books in front of her and put them back in the shelves. It took her too long to find the exact place for each book again, and she got out of the study at the same moment the front door opened to reveal Tamlin and Rhysand.

But Tamlin didn't appear to realize where she was coming from, he was smiling and laughing.

"Doll, we had a great afternoon!" He said as she reached the entrance. "We managed to lock down this huge new client and it's going to get us a much larger market to work with."

He squeezed her tight against him and she saw Rhysand smiling at her from beside them. A warm feeling spreading in her chest at the sight of him, she smiled back.

"That's great," she said, getting out of Tamlin's embrace.

"It is! We'll celebrate this weekend, we're throwing a party on Saturday, what do you think?"

"Er… sure, why not?"

"Great. Now make us some coffee, will you? Rhysand and I still have work to do."

"Actually, why don't you go ahead to your study and I'll help her with the coffee, Tam?" Rhysand's voice was sweet and charming. Feyre was surprised by the use of the nickname, and even more surprised when Tamlin agreed and left them alone. Immediately, Rhys grabbed her hand and led her to the kitchen.

"Are you okay?"

"I managed to get only part of the documents, I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter, what matters is that you're fine. I saw you come out of the study, it was way too close, Feyre, you need to be more careful."

"Hey! I did my best with the time you gave me! You could've given me more of a heads up."

He stared at her. "You're right. I'm sorry." Letting go of her hand, he turned to the kitchen counter and filled the kettle with water, while Feyre grabbed the coffee from a drawer. It felt strangely domestic, standing in a kitchen and making coffee with him, but Feyre didn't let that thought grow any larger.

"Tamlin seemed to like you more than he usually does today."

"That's 'cause I put his fears to rest."

"What fears?"

She felt him look at her before he answered. "The fears that you and I were getting too close."

Heat invaded her cheeks. "What?"

"Yeah. He's very jealous. Unhealthily jealous. Ever since you and I met he's been on edge with me, he thinks I'm taking a special interest in you."

Tamlin wasn't wrong on this one. It just wasn't a romantic interest.

"So what changed today?"

"I mentioned in passing that I had a girlfriend."

She ignored the low sting in her heart. "Oh?"

"Yes, I figured that now that we're working together, we need to keep him as unaware as possible. So I lied."

"You… lied."

"Yep."

"So, you don't have a girlfriend."

"Nope. But between the new client and this lie, he's been much more at ease with me this afternoon so I think it was a good choice."

She watched as he poured the water over the coffee and slid the lid on the pot. She looked at his delicate hands and his muscular forearms, and when he turned to grab mugs, she looked at his large shoulders moving under his clothes.

Then she coughed and forced herself to look away.

"I have a large part of the books, but I'm still missing some of it. When do you think we'll have time for another operation?"

He turned to look at her.

"How much are you missing?"

"A little more than a book."

"Then it's fine. We should have more than enough to work with. Good job, Feyre," and he gave her another warm smile that made her heart falter, before leaving the kitchen with two mugs of coffee.

She felt better. Or sometimes she did, anyway. She spent most of her nights that week awake in the living room, but she didn't feel the need to write to Rhys about nightmares. Not that it stopped her from writing to him anyway. She found herself pulled towards him, wanting to know more about his real life, and what had been real or not during their exchanges. She wasn't mad when he told her of his lies, instead she was understanding and eager to know the truth about his family, about his hobbies. And maybe she was seeing things because she wanted to, but it seemed like he too was glad for the conversation, he always answered her texts quickly and thoroughly, making her smile with jokes and what she thought might be flirting. But she didn't want to think about the flirting. She was in a committed relationship, even though she couldn't deny her steps back from her boyfriend in the last few months, and she didn't want to dwell on the fact that these days, she enjoyed the messages from another man more, so she pushed the late-night conversations to the back of her mind.

That is, until the party on Saturday came. The guests were almost the same as the ones from the garden party a few months ago, mainly from Tamlin's job, legal and otherwise. She spent a good hour that afternoon getting ready, choosing a black dress and arranging her hair halfway up on her head, wearing heavy makeup that helped conceal her tired eyes and made her lips look somehow more beautiful. She was very proud of the result, and she accepted the many compliments she received when she welcomed the different guests at the door that night. But she didn't dwell on it, and she started mingling until finally she found who she was looking for.

"Lucien!" She called to him from across the room as she entered the very large dining area they never used but had cleaned up for the occasion. The redhead turned to her and smiled, immediately abandoning his conversation with a blonde man to join her.

"Feyre," he said as he hugged her, "how are you?! I feel like I haven't seen you in ages!"

"Right?! It's been way too long, I think I haven't seen you since…" Since the garden party where she had met Rhysand.

"Since the last big work party, I think. Oh it's been way too long Feyre."

"It has. What have you been up to?"

"Not much, mainly working for your boyfriend over there," he said with a quick look in Tamlin's direction, "and trying to get something going with that cutie over here," he finished, nodding towards the blonde man he'd been talking to, and Feyre chuckled. "What about you?"

She thought about how she could answer that question without talking about covered-up murders and police investigations, and then it hit her. Lucien worked for Tamlin's company. He was a salesman for them, taking care of redistributing products coming from their regular shipments. She had never been interested in knowing what he did exactly before, and after she'd learned the truth, she hadn't thought much about him, but now she was wondering. Was Lucien involved in the drug deals and illegal shipments? Was he a salesman like Sandy had been a saleswoman? She felt the air leave her lungs as she stared at one of her only friends and started wondering if, like Tamlin, he had been lying to her for months. But his smile was starting to turn into a frown at her lack of an answer, so she smiled back.

"Not much, really. My sister got married!"

"Really? When was that?"

She let the conversation roll between them, giving him mundane details of her life from the last few months, as her mind went into overdrive reliving their every conversation regarding his job. She needed to find Rhysand.