Page 111 of Lethal in Pink

Ugh, this shouldn’t be so nerve-racking.

The chicken is marinating in a glass dish on the counter, the lemon and garlic scent cutting through the sweetness of the diffuser. I stir the pasta sauce with a wooden spoon that cost more than most people’s dinner entrées, and the apartment around me is doing its best impression of a lifestyle magazine spread that has never once contemplated the concept of mortality.

The entire place smells like someone’s idea of a perfect Friday night, and absolutely nothing like a staged kill site, which is exactly the point and also exactly the problem.

Penelope’s voice hums in my earpiece. “Route’s clear,” she says. “Building cameras are scrubbed. Garage footage loops at twenty-minute intervals. His building’s cameras will only show him coming home from the clinic. You’ve got a clean window from the moment he steps off the elevator. No one will ever know he even stepped foot in your apartment.”

“Copy that.” I give the sauce another stir. It bubbles, thick and red, and the steam rises into my face with a warmth that feels obscenely normal. “Twins status?”

“Parked in the service alley behind your building. Engine off, lights dark. They’re running silent until you call.”

The plan is sequenced and clean. Sparkle Shock Compact to drop him fast—fifty thousand volts through the nervous system, immediate neuromuscular lockup. Then a precise, microscopic dose of potassium chloride directly into a central vein to induce a fatal cardiac arrest. Because potassium naturally floods the bloodstream through post-mortem cell breakdown, any standard toxicology panel will write it off as a natural anomaly. The twins handle the physical side: scrubbing my apartment of any trace he was ever here, then transporting his body back to stage it at his own apartment. Penelope handles the digital end, wiping the feeds, leaving us with an airtight, natural-looking case within twenty-four hours.

I have run the logic seventeen times. It holds. The math is solid. The variables are controlled.

I am also marinating chicken for a man I am planning to murder in approximately ninety minutes, and the cognitive dissonance is so sharp it’s almost funny.

Almost.

“The compact’s charged?” Penelope asks, her voice careful in that particular way she gets when she’s holding something back.

“Fully. Tested it this morning.” I reach for the salt, sprinkle it into the sauce with the precision of someone who is absolutely not thinking about how a man’s body responds to a lethal micro-dose. “Battery’s at a hundred percent. It’ll drop him.”

“Good.” A pause. The sound of keys clicking on her end. “Route’s still clear. He left the clinic twelve minutes ago. Heading north on Westwood toward your apartment. ETA to your place... call it thirty-five, forty minutes.”

“He already told me he picked it up last night. The good stuff.”

“Naturally.” Something almost like a smile in her voice, quickly buried. “Not the gas station Merlot, I assume?”

“The man has standards, Pen.”

“Everyone has standards until they’re dead.”

The joke lands between us with a thud that neither of us acknowledges. I stir the sauce harder than it requires.

I set the wooden spoon down and wipe my hands on a dish towel that matches absolutely nothing in my kitchen because I bought it at a gas station three years ago and cannot bring myself to throw it away. The chicken goes into the preheated oven with a timer set for twenty-eight minutes. The pasta water is boiling. The table is set for two—placemats, cloth napkins folded into precise triangles, wine glasses that catch the pendant light and throw small rainbows across the marble island.

Normal. This is what normal looks like. A woman cooking dinner for a man she likes, in an apartment she’s proud of, on a night when nothing is wrong and everything is exactly as it should be.

Penelope goes quiet in my ear. The silence stretches, filled only by the soft bubble of the sauce and the low drone of the oven.

“You good?” she asks finally, her voice softer than it was a minute ago.

“I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“Just remember why you’re doing this,” she says, and her voice is so gentle it makes something in my chest crack. “Your dad’s appeal. Law school. The bar. Everything you’ve built. This one job buys all of it.”

I stare at the sauce bubbling in the pan, thick and red and entirely innocent.

“I know.” I whisper.

“Okay.” The line goes quiet again.