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“Even if she strayed, trust me,” Fey insisted. “It wouldn’t have been this guy. It wouldn’t have been…” She nibbled her lip. “It wouldn’t have been any guy.”

Alastair’s lip twitched. “She wasn’t into males?”

“Can you blame her?” Fey asked, her smile sharp as a knife.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Alastair’s eyes sparkled. “I think some of us can serve a useful purpose if we know what we’re doing.”

Fey rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to flirt with him, not tonight.

“So…” She looked at the man in the photo, memorizing his face. He looked… so ordinary. Normal. “He’s not a dealer. Not a whistleblower. What was he doing with Alice, then?”

“That’s a question for you to answer.”

Fey huffed, shuffling through the photos, flipping through them, looking for something, anything. She stopped on one, leaning forward over the image to look closer.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing.

“He gave her something,” Alastair told her. “My cameras aren’t good enough to pick up what it says, though. A stack of papers, it looks like.”

Fey stared at the photo, a still image of the man, Phillip, handing a few sheets of paper to Alice. Fey flipped to the next image.

The man was leaving, and Alice wasn’t watching him go. She was staring at the pages in front of her.

Shaking, Fey flipped through the remaining photos. Alice, reading. Alice closing the packet. Alice sitting there, thinking.

There was a look on her face, one almost indescribable. But Fey knew that look.

It was betrayal.

This was it. This hadn’t been a waste at all. Whatever that man had given her, that was the answer to their questions. That was the reason Alice had been killed.

All they had to do was find Phillip Danvers and find out what was on those pages.

“Thank you,” Fey told Alastair. “Can I keep these?”

“Of course,” he said, motioning to the photos on the table with elegant fingers. “They’re yours.”

But she didn’t move to gather them. Didn’t move to put them away.

“Something tells me you’re not doing this out of the kindness of your heart,” Fey said, finally, her voice barely a whisper. “So, tell me, Alastair—what do you expect in payment for this information?”

She hesitated to ask. Hesitated to know what she’d give him for this, what she’d hand over willingly, happily, regardless of how she might feel afterwards.

Alastair shrugged. “I want a lot of things, Witchling. I want every drug dealer within five miles of this building dead. I want the freedom to do whatever the fuck I want, without having to answer to anyone.” He looked at her, then, his eyes afire with intensity. “And I want you looking up at me with those perfect green eyes while you suck my cock.”

Fey clenched her teeth together. This was it, then.

“But we don’t always get what we want, do we?” He smiled, and it was almost a little sad. “So, consider this a gift. And if you need to think of this as transactional, remember I don’t like trash in my club. And I’m more than happy to do my part to get rid of it. This guy might be a ghost, but if had something to do with your sister’s murder, well…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t need that kind of shit around here, you know?”

“No payment?” Fey asked.

“Consider us even,” Alastair smiled at her. “No payment necessary.”

It was… a relief, Fey realized. She gathered the photos into a pile, slipping them back into the folder.

“Thank you,” she told him, again.

He smiled at her and turned back to his drink.