Her wrists started bruising a few hours into the morning. Or that was when she realized they were bruising, anyway. Rhys had left the apartment for work, 'just for an hour' he'd told her, and she had been chilling on his bed, brainstorming about how to write to Tamlin that she had left him for good.

Thinking of different ways to tell the man who'd wanted to marry her that she wasn't coming back, she took off the hoodie to get more comfortable in the summer weather. That's when she saw it. Her wrists had been hurting since the day before, but she hadn't wanted to focus on it much. But now, seeing the skin of her arms laid bare, she understood why it pained her so much.

Both her wrists were completely red, some parts even starting to turn a darker shade of crimson. And the bruises were big, too, covering nearly half of her forearms. But what really scared her wasn't their color, or their size. It was their shape. Because here, in the midst of reddish marks, you could clearly distinguish the places where strong, large fingers had held her.

She was so absorbed by her discovery that she didn't hear the key turn in the lock, or Rhys come inside the apartment. So she jumped when he said:

"We need to put ice on those."

"Rhys. You're back."

He took off his leather jacket and went to his fridge. "I am. We need to put something cold on your arms if we want to help with the healing." He grabbed a pack of frozen peas from the freezer and wrapped it inside a dishcloth. "Sorry, I only have one, we'll have to switch from one wrist to the other."

He sat beside her, gently took her left hand to rest it on his knees, and laid the pack on top of it. Feyre winced for a second at the sudden cold, but then she smiled at him.

"Sorry for wasting your peas."

"You're not, these are my bruises-and-swellings peas, it's not their first day on the battlefield."

"Do I want to know why you would have something lying around in case of violent fights and black eyes?"

"Maybe I'm just using it after intense workouts."

"You're not, though."

It wasn't a question, and he looked up from her arms to look her in the eyes. "No, I'm not." But he quickly changed the subject, his tone changing. "Feyre, we should take pictures of these."

She wasn't sure she had understood him well. Did he want to… "What?"

"We should take pictures of the bruises, now, and maybe every couple of days as long as they're apparent."

"Why?"

He seemed to think about his answer for a while before saying: "I know this must be the least of your concerns right now, but it could be useful in the future to have proof of what he did to you."

"Proof? You mean… like for a trial?"

"Not necessarily. But if it ever were to come to that, or a similar situation, it could be useful. We don't have to if you don't want to, it's just… I know how these things work, and it wouldn't be right if I didn't tell you my professional opinion on this."

His tone was so solemn, so much like the way he talked to her when they were working, that she couldn't help but take him seriously. She agreed to the photos, and they spent the next ten minutes taking pictures of both her forearms at every angle. All the while, he was talking to her about some art show he'd gone to the week before, and even though she was only half listening, she was grateful for the casual tone of their conversation.

She wrote to Tamlin just before noon. A short message, because she couldn't handle to write more to him, and she didn't want to keep seeing his calls and messages on her phone.

I don't want to see you or talk to you right now. Don't try to contact me.

She felt awful the second she sent the message, but she also felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

He didn't stop calling.

"I'm going to do something," Rhys told her around three o'clock, "and it's going to be something very stupid, and you will have to keep it a secret, but it's important. Okay?"

She nodded, and she watched him as he went to his dresser, took out an old pair of socks from the middle drawer, and unfolded it to reveal a crumpled piece of paper. He then grabbed his phone, copied the info from the piece of paper, and waited. After a few seconds, she heard an unintelligible female voice answer him.

"Mor, it's me." A pause, during which she could hear the voice getting frantic. "Yeah, this is for real. Mor, Mor, stop talking." And suddenly, Feyre remembered Morrigan, Cassian's cousin she had met at the wedding, the short blonde woman with a tendency to hug anyone she liked, and a memorably cheesy speech.

But Rhys continued speaking. "Mor, I'm going to need you to listen to me very carefully, and do exactly what I say. No questions asked. Can you do that?"

A muffled sound that she imagined to be a 'yes,' as Rhys' lips split into a smile. "Good. I'm going to need you to go to the house in The Rainbow - Mor, stop talking and listen to me. You're going to go into the library, open the third drawer of my mom's dresser, and take out the credit card you find there. With the card, you're going to buy women clothes." Feyre started to protest silently beside him, shaking her head, but he covered the phone and whispered "this is just for now, Darling. You can pay me back, okay?" before speaking into the phone again. "I need you to buy at least two or three pairs of pants, about ten tee-shirts, and maybe one or two dresses. In M size. Oh, and some underwear, too. What size? Errr…" He looked awkwardly at her, and heat invaded her cheeks as she whispered her bra size to him "... 34D. Once you have all of this, I want you to bring it back to the house. Okay?" Another pause. "Good, thanks, Mor. Oh, and Mor? The clothes, try to buy average, not something you would wear, alright?" He chuckled at the answer. "Talk to you soon. I love you too."

He hung up, and spent a few seconds staring at his phone with a faint smile, before sighing heavily and glancing at her. She could see he was still somewhat lost in the call to his cousin, so she asked:

"Is it the first time you've talked to her since the beginning of your assignment?"

"It is. It feels strange to hear her voice, it feels so… real."

"I'm sorry."

He turned to her. "For what?"

"For having your first call to your cousin in years be about buying me clothes."

"Don't apologize. If anything, I wouldn't even have talked to her if it hadn't been for you. Plus, Mor loves buying clothes, I'm sure she's thrilled at the idea of an unlimited credit card to spend with."

She chuckled. "I met her at the wedding, you know."

"Oh, that's right! What did you think of her?"

"I liked her. I wasn't in a very good place back then," she decided to gloss over the fact that her situation hadn't changed much since, "but she was very friendly, it felt good."

He smiled, in a lost sort of way that she had never seen on his face before. She tried to imagine how lonely he felt, unable to contact his friends and folks for more than two years, but she found that she couldn't fathom it.

Rhys shook himself and said: "We'll wait an hour and then we'll go."

"Go where?"

He answered with a large grin. "To a house I know you're definitely going to like."