Page 118 of Lethal in Pink

Instead, I lie there for one more minute, staring at the ceiling, and let the quiet turn into whatever it’s going to be.

Chapter forty-two

Amiyah

The morning sun cuts a sharp, blinding line across the kitchen counter, hitting the side of a half-drunk glass of water. I’m still in last night’s clothes—creased, smelling faintly of wine and skin and entirely too much of him—with my phone sitting face-up beside the glass.

The screen is alive with a backlog of unread messages from Penelope. A rapid-fire stack of increasingly unhinged texts sent between 2:00 AM and 7:00 AM.

Penelope: okay but what the actual fuck WAS that

Penelope: Like, actually?

Penelope: [Image attached: Screenshot of the taser's voltage readout]

Penelope: FIFTY THOUSAND VOLTS, Amiyah. Fifty. Thousand. And he just looked at you like you’d offered him an appetizer???

Penelope: we are so unbelievably fucked.

Penelope: And I don't mean 'fucked' the way you were so thoroughly and loudly fucked on that couch for three hours. I mean we are professionally, legally, and terminal-velocity dead fucked.

I stare at the screen for a long beat, my thumb hovering over the glass keyboard.

Me: last night didn't go according to plan

Penelope: DIDNT GO ACCORDING TO PLAN

Penelope: Amiyah, I was live on coms. I heard every single decibel.

Penelope: The taser didn't malfunction. He just... absorbed fifty thousand volts of electricity and treated it like a mild static shock. How is that even biologically possible? Is he made of rubber? Is he a government cyborg? I am going to need at least three to five business years of trauma therapy just to process what my ears were subjected to.

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Penelope: [Image attached: A meme of a woman staring blankly into a void, captioned "this is my face right now."

Penelope: Fuck Do you think he knows we're criminals?

I look down at my hands. They aren't shaking, but they feel impossibly heavy.

Me: he thinks it was a kink thing

Me: i improvised

Penelope: I can't keep making excuses, Amiyah. The twins are wondering why they were sent home again.

Penelope: The board is going to pull our files by noon and I am not going to a black-site prison because you have a terminal weakness for broad-shouldered veterinarians with suspicious pain tolerances.

Me: please stop typing

Penelope: No. Because you're sitting in your kitchen right now pretending like we aren't completely exposed.

Penelope: Do you love him?

The typing bubble appears instantly, then vanishes. Then pops up again, hovering for a long, agonizing stretch before disappearing.

I leave her on read. One minute ticks by on the kitchen clock. The digital numbers shift silently.

Penelope doesn’t wait. She screenshots the read receipt and sends it back immediately as evidence, no caption needed.