Page 131 of Lethal in Pink

“And you’re my daughter, which means I get to tell you when you’re walking off a ledge.” He leans forward, his hands, scarred and steady, hovering over the table. “You’ve been paying that bill since you were eighteen. I’m done watching.”

He looks at me, and for a second, the architect vanishes. There’s a ghost of the man who once taught me how to tie my shoes in the way his eyes soften.

“I’m free here, bug,” he murmurs.

“You’re in a cage, Marcus.”

“I’m free of the expectation that I’m anything other than what I am.” He picks up the crane. It’s white, impossibly fragile under the harsh, buzzing lights.

I know what he means. Not the locked doors or the guards or the walls. He means the particular freedom of a man who has accepted the terms of his sentence, who has built something inside the cage that belongs entirely to him, who has stopped fighting the geometry of the room and started living in it instead. Marcus Dawson, serving life for murder, has found a version of peace that I, with my fifteen floors and my fairy lights and my double-registered identities, have never once approached.

“You still have a chance,” he says. “To be free in a way I can’t be.The only thing standing between you and a life that doesn’t end in a grave or a concrete box is a decision you already know how to make.”

He leans forward slightly. The metal chair doesn’t squeak because Marcus doesn’t allow things to squeak when he’s making a point.

“Finish the job. Take the money. Disappear.”

I go still.

Not the trained stillness. Not the kind where my body locks because my brain has issued an instruction. The real kind. The kind where everything stops before the instruction arrives, where the machinery of composure just... quits. My breath catches. Holds. My hands on the table go completely, utterly motionless, like they’ve forgotten they’re attached to anything.

I stare at him. Wait for the caveat. The lesson underneath the lesson. The twist. The Marcus Dawson special—deliver the hard truth, then deliver the harder truth underneath it, the one that turns the first truth inside out and leaves you standing in the wreckage of whatever you thought you knew.

He holds my gaze. Steady. Unblinking. The fluorescent casts a shadow under his jaw that makes the scar there look deeper than it is.

There is no twist.

He picks the origami back up. His fingers find the creases without looking, the motion so practiced it could be sleepwalking. Fold. Turn. Fold. The paper—prison-issue, the thin, slightly waxy kind they hand out in the arts and crafts hour that nobody admits exists—submits to his hands with the particular obedience of something that has been folded this way a thousand times before.

A crane. Sharp-edged. Precise. The wings angled just so, the beak a clean point, the body creased along lines that have been the same since I was seven years old and sitting cross-legged on our living room floor watching his hands move like they were speaking a language only the two of us understood.

He sets it on the table between us. The paper is so white under the light it almost glows.

“You were never built for this cage,” he says. His voice is soft now, the particular softness he reserves for things he means with his whole chest. “The only reason you’re still in it is because of me. My faults as a father. As a person. Debts have a way of expanding to fill whatever space you give them, bug. You need to stop giving it space.”

I reach for the crane. The edges press into my palm, sharp enough to register, not sharp enough to break skin. The paper is warm from his hands. I close my fingers around it and feel the, delicate architecture of it against my skin—hollow, weightless, engineered to hold its shape against nothing but the air.

The guard at the door shifts his weight. A boot scraping concrete. The universal signal for wrap it the fuck up.

I stand. Pocket the crane, feeling it settle against the lining of my jeans, a small weight that has no business feeling as heavy as it does.

“I love you,” I say, his words sitting heavy on my chest.

“Love you too, bug.”

A small smile tugs at his lip. “You know what you need to do.”

I do.

I need to tell Jae the truth.

Chapter forty-eight

Amiyah

Jae is already at the counter at the boba shop, his silhouette sharp against the glass. He’s wearing a black long-sleeve that does nothing to hide the tension in his shoulders. He doesn’t turn when the bell chimes. He knows it’s me. He has known since the door handle moved.

I join the line behind a girl frantically mouthing the periodic table. She’s vibrating with the low-frequency hum of an impending breakdown, a mirror of the static currently frying my own nerves. Four-seventeen. I sent the text three hours ago, after a prison visit that left me feeling hollowed out, as if Marcus had reached into my ribcage and pruned away everything that wasn't strictly necessary for survival.