Page 144 of Lethal in Pink

My phone grows cold against my ribs. The diploma is ruined, creased and torn in my death-grip. A sudden gust of wind snatches the last flake of confetti from my sleeve, wiping away the final piece of fake joy, and leaves me standing in the sun like an executioner waiting for the bell to toll.

Twenty-four hours. Less. The math is simple, brutal, and inescapable. If I don’t put a bullet in Jae’s head tonight, the underground will send someone who will carve through both of us, leaving nothing behind to bury.

I’ve known this was coming. I’ve known it since the night I confessed the truth on a park bench and he looked at me with those dark, devastating eyes and told me he already knew. I’ve known it every morning I woke up wrapped in his arms, suffocating under the weight of a future that was never ours to keep.

Knowing doesn’t numb the blade. It just makes the bleeding slower.

Then I see him.

Jae is cutting across the thinning crowd, his own graduation gown slung over one shoulder, the heavy black fabric dragging through the grass. His face is open, flushed with the amber late-day light, wearing that bright, ruinous smile that has been quietly dismantling my sanity since the first week of class.

He hasn’t noticed the ruin in my posture yet. He’s too close, moving with that easy, devastating grace of a man who thinks the world is soft.

I have ten seconds to piece the mask back together.

Shoulders back. Chin up. The smile—not the genuine one, but the polished, impenetrable armor I’ve spent a lifetime perfecting. I relax my death-grip on the ruined diploma, hiding the torn edge against my palm. I breathe in. I breathe out. By the time he’s close enough to touch me, The Pink Precision is back online, running at full capacity.

“Found you,” he says, his voice a warm, heavy stroke against my chest.

“Hard to miss,” I reply, my voice steady, light, weaponized.

He smiles, and it reaches his eyes, cutting straight through every defense I have left. His hand finds the small of my back—not possessive, just absolute, the casual ownership of a man who thinks he has forever. I lean into it. I let the fiction consume me, letting his palm burn a brand through the custom satin of my gown.

The farewells blur past in a surreal montage. Classmates hugging, professors shaking hands, the collective shedding of academic armor. I laugh at the right cues, play the blushing graduate, all while my other hand clutches a ruined paper cylinder like a hidden blade.

When the quad finally empties out, leaving behind only the ghost-town quiet of an abandoned stage, Jae pulls me close.

I kiss him.

It’s slow, deliberate, tasting of salt and dust and the bitter iron of ruin. My hand cups his jaw, my thumb tracing the rough stubble along his cheekbone, mapping every agonizing contour of a face I am about to erase from the earth. He smiles against my mouth, kissing me back with that reckless, blind devotion that makes my soul tear right down the middle.

I pull back before my hands start to shake.

“Dinner,” I say, my voice impossibly, terrifyingly even. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll meet you.”

He nods, completely unbothered, kissing my forehead with casual permanence. “I’ll pick the place.”

“Pick somewhere good.”

“I always do.”

He walks away. Gown over his arm, stride unhurried, cutting across the grass toward the parking garage. I watch him go step by step—the broad geometry of his shoulders, the faint stain on his collar, the way the light catches his dark hair.

I watch until the limestone swallows him whole.

Then I turn in the opposite direction.

Diploma clutched to my chest, hiding the frayed edges. The clock is screaming in my ribs, a metallic countdown ticking down to zero.

I keep walking. Shoulders back. Chin up. The performance intact.

I’m walking toward the finish line. And for the first time in my life, winning doesn’t feel like a victory at all.

Chapter fifty-three

Amiyah

The restaurant doesn’t need a sign. It announces itself in the heavy, grease-thickened air: fermented cabbage, seared fat, and the sharp, medicinal sting of raw garlic that claws the back of your throat before you’ve even crossed the threshold. Jae chose it. He chose it the way he chooses everything—with the absolute, unyielding certainty of a man who owns the room he’s standing in. His fingers graze the small of my back as he holds the door, a casual, habitual touch that feels less like a courtesy and more like a brand burning through my clothes. It nearly ruins me before the first course even hits the table.