Page 124 of Lethal in Pink

The word sits there in the cabin of my car, absurd and tiny against the vast, indifferent hum of the freeway. A hit. Like something from a movie I watched too young, the kind of phrase that belongs in subtitles beneath a man in a black suit walking away from an explosion. Not here. Not in my car, on the 10, with the radio murmuring about summer love and the city lights pressing through the glass.

I almost laugh. The sound forms in my chest and dies there because Kiho isn’t laughing. Kiho has called me Hyunjae, and the silence that follows my flat repetition is long enough to confirm that whatever this is, it is not a joke, it is not an exaggeration, and it is very, very real.

“Jesus Christ,” I whisper.

“I know.”

“How sure is Nari?”

“Sure enough that she called me crying from the bathroom. She recorded part of it. I’ve heard it. It’s—” He stops. “It’s him, Jae. It’s Baek. Talking about timelines and clean execution and making sure the body reads natural. I can send it to you, but I don’t think you want to hear it.”

“Send it,” I tell him.

“I’m sending it now. Look at your phone in a second. It’s him, Jae. Talking about the contract, the clean execution, making sure the body reads natural.”

“Got it.” I pull off at the next exit. Don’t signal. Don’t care. The ramp curves down toward a strip mall parking lot flooded with the bright glare of afternoon sunlight, and I park in the farthest corner from the building, engine off, sitting with my hands on the wheel and my breath coming in pulls that feel too shallow for the size of my lungs.

Kiho is quiet on the line. Giving me the space. He’s good at that—knowing when words help and when they just take up oxygen.

“There’s something else,” he says, finally. Carefully. Without the full apology the admission probably deserves. “The leak. The Kai Ryu thing. That was me.”

I close my eyes against the glare bouncing off the hood.

“I did it,” he continues. “Posted the side-by-side. Started the threads. Got the accounts talking. I—” A breath. “I reasoned that if someone was already hunting you, visibility was safer than anonymity. Harder to disappear someone everyone is watching. Harder to make it look accidental when half the campus has you on video crossing the quad. I know I should have talked to you first. I would make the same call again.”

Fuck. The anger flares up, a hot, clean line running from my sternum to my throat, ready to be weaponized into something sharp enough to cut with. But the bandwidth isn’t there. The hit takes up too much space, leaves no room for the secondary betrayal, and somewhere in the back of my skull a cold, clinical part of me is already nodding. He’s not wrong. Visibility is armor. Not perfect armor, but better than nothing.

“Okay,” I say. The word comes out steadier than it has any right to. “Okay. I need to call my father.”

“I know.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Jae—”

“I know.” I hang up.

The parking lot is half-full. A shopping cart sits abandoned near the dumpster, one wheel bent at an angle. I sit for one beat. Two. Then I pull my father’s contact up and press call.

He answers on the second ring. Always does. The man treats his phone like an extension of his arm.

“Hyunjae.” He answers.

“Dad. I know this is going to sound crazy but—” I pause.

How do you tell a man his family is in danger and his son is being actively hunted?

“Baek is trying to have me killed. Possibly the whole family. You need to double security.”

“Hy—”

“Dad, I’m fucking serious. Kiho sent proof.”

Silence then…

“Send it to my secure line,” he says, his voice dropping into a register so cold it makes the back of my neck prickle. “Now.”

“Sent.”