Page 106 of Lethal in Pink

Hyunjae Kim. Twenty-seven. Born and raised in Seoul. Trained as a performer from age six, debuted at seventeen under the stage name Kai Ryu, finished a punishing international tour schedule, and walked straight off the road and into Blackthorn University’s veterinary program. Clean rap sheet. No shadow organizations, no illicit associations, no red flags that should register on a standard background check—let alone the deep-tier channels I pay thousands to access.

Then there are the supplemental notes. The things the contract didn't include, but I had to dig for anyway because I refuse to go in blind.

He pulls clinical hours at the on-campus pet hospital and adoption center. He got into a pointed seminar debate last semester with a visiting parasitology lecturer over feline protozoal protocols, citing a three-year-old European veterinary journal the lecturer had clearly skimmed and forgotten. He tips twenty percent on a cup of plain coffee, even when it tastes like burnt copper. He props historical manga volumes inside his organic chemistry binders to get through long, dry lectures, yet somehow still manages to sit comfortably in the top ten percent of his class.

And in a high-rise apartment in Seoul, a tortoiseshell cat named Sheba sits in a sunlit window, waiting for an owner who is currently six thousand miles away studying canine cardiovascular systems—a detail that makes my chest twist with a sudden, vicious ache because he is genuinely, stupidly terrified of the day he finally goes back to Seoul and she won’t be there in the window to greet him.

I have justified execution orders on flimsier foundations. A corporate whistleblower whose leaked data would have tanked a pension fund. A corrupt security consultant selling backdoor exploits to hostile states. A middle manager who authorized dumping heavy metals into a residential watershed because the quarterly bonus was worth the fines. People who made calculated, malignant choices. People who understood the math of human collateral and signed off on it anyway.

My code is quiet, rigid, and absolute. I do not kill targets I cannot morally justify. That rule is the only thing separating me from the monsters my father warned me about before Chino—the mercenaries who treat human breath like a line item, sleeping soundly because they never bothered to calculate what "innocent" actually means. I built the walls between my dual lives with that code as the mortar. Without it, I am just a woman with a law degree, a hidden Glock, and a terrifyingly good poker face.

In the dark glass of the window, my reflection stares back. My sleep shirt is twisted at the collar and dark crescents bruise the skin beneath my eyes. Behind me, the city breathes, entirely indifferent to the mess in a twenty-second-floor studio.

I hold my own gaze. One beat. Two. Three.

I cannot find the seam. I cannot figure out what Jae Kim did to earn a death sentence.

The ignorance is a physical weight, pressing down on my lungs. I have spent three nights running simulations, looking for the angle I missed—the secret gambling debt, the hidden blackmail, the bruised ego of a powerful man with a grudge and a blank check. Nothing fits. The dossier is a closed loop. A target with no context. A hit with no reason.

Or worse: a hit where someone decided I didn't deserve a reason.

I reach out and snap the tablet closed.

The glare dies. The room plunges into a deep, velvety dark, save for the gold lines of city light striping the floor where my bare feet have worn a jagged trench between the desk and the window.

I stand there in the quiet.

Not sleeping. Not deciding. Just anchoring myself to the stone in my chest because the contract remains active, the retainer sits untouched in an encrypted offshore account, and my father is still sitting in a federal penitentiary with one appeal left on a life sentence.

The network tolerates a lot of things. Hesitation isn't one of them. In my line of work, doubt is a liability, and liabilities have a habit of getting buried.

I press my forehead against the cool glass. Outside, the headlights on the interstate smear into long, red ribbons of motion that look almost peaceful from this height.

Somewhere out there, Jae Kim is sleeping. Or studying. Or pacing his own apartment, entirely unaware that his life is currently being weighed on a scale by someone sitting in the dark. His hands are clean. His pulse is steady.

And I am standing in a room of my own design, trapped between a duty I despise and a survival instinct that demands compliance.

The stone in my chest doesn't move.

I close my eyes, letting the hum of the glass cool my skin, suspended between the woman I engineered myself to be and the person I might have been if I'd never learned how a trigger breaks under pressure.

Tomorrow, I will open the file again. I will look for the blind spot. I will invent another framework, run another simulation, tell myself another lie about why this makes mathematical sense.

Tonight, I just stand here.

Waiting for the window to open.

Knowing, in the quietest, most honest part of my soul, that it never fucking will.

Chapter thirty-nine

Amiyah

The bowling ball crashes into the pins with a sound like a car hitting a dumpster, and somewhere behind me a kid screams. The ceiling speakers are bleeding a distorted pop track down over the lanes, and the air is thick with the greasy reek of diner food and the fermented damp of rental shoes worn by a thousand people trying to kill a Saturday night. I am one frame into our second game, trailing Jae by fourteen points, and my pink clutch is sitting on the scoring table beside a basket of wings I’ve systematically destroyed while pretending I don’t care about the score. Inside the bag, nestled against my keys and the Lullaby perfume roller, the glass vial waits like a dead weight.

Jae steps up to the approach. His shoulders are loose, his weight shifting forward with an unhurried rhythm. Four clean steps. The ball swings low and quiet, hooks late, and bites hard into the pocket. All ten pins explode backward.

He walks back to the table without a single flicker of satisfaction on his face.