Page 89 of Lethal in Pink

I tell myself this is fine. It’s winter break. This is what winter break is for. Decompression. Rest. The recalibration of a nervous system that has been running at prosecutorial intensity since August.

It’s not fine. I know it’s not fine. The part of my brain that handles self-deception is currently on strike, and the part that handles brutal, unflinching honesty has seized control of the microphone and is reading aloud from a very damning internal report.

By day six, I have reorganized the weapons cache behind the closet panel twice.

The secure panel slides open with a soft click—a sound engineered to register below the threshold of human hearing for anyone standing more than three feet away. The walk-in closet smells like cedar, gun oil, and the chemical trace of the non-porous coating I apply to the metal components every six months.

I pull on nitrile gloves from the drawer beside the panel. The left one tears at the thumb. I discard it, reach for another pair, snapping them on with the sharp crack of latex settling against skin.

The cache is arranged by type and caliber. Pistols on the top shelf, rifles below, blades along the side wall in magnetic sheaths. Each piece has been cleaned, inspected, and logged within the last fourteen days. There is no operational reason for me to be handling them right now. The last contract was completed nineteen days ago. The next one has not been assigned. This is maintenance without purpose. Ritual as displacement.

I run a gloved hand over the Beretta 92FS. Check the slide. Check the magazine well. Check the firing pin. Re-shelve it. Move to the Glock 19. Same process. The Walther PPK. The Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose that belonged to my father before Chino, before the conviction, before the carefully constructed narrative of his life collapsed into thirteen years of concrete and razor wire.

This last appeal is literally his last hope…my last hope.

The throwing knives are next. Three of them, balanced to the gram, the edges honed to a mirror finish. I test the weight of each one in my palm, feeling the heavy, precision-engineered metal designed to travel through air and find its target with minimal resistance.

I put them all back. Exactly where they were. The organization is already perfect. It was perfect before I started. It will be perfect after I finish. The only variable is me, standing in a walk-in closet at two in the morning, handling weapons I don’t need to handle, because the alternative is sitting on the sectional and thinking about the empty space where Jae’s shoulder should be.

I open the Chrome bookmarks manager and manually drag Arizona v. Hicks into the custom folder view, placing it above Arizona v. Miranda. I move Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents below Boyd v. United States. I create a new folder for Fourth Amendment exceptions and populate it with twelve cases that have absolutely no business being grouped together. One hundred and seventy-four total bookmarks, dragged and arranged by hand because the default sort view is useless when your brain is fraying at the edges.

I close the laptop. The screen goes black. I stare at my reflection in the dark glass, entirely alone with the silence.

The secure tablet buzzes on the coffee table.

The sound is distinct—a low, resonant pulse engineered to cut through ambient noise without being audible through walls or floors. I know that sound the way snipers know the crack of their own rifle. My body responds before my brain does. My spine straightens. My hand freezes halfway to the remote.

The tablet rests beside the half-empty milk tea cup, its matte black surface illuminated by a single notification on the lock screen. The encryption icon pulses gently in the corner—a small, geometric pattern indicating a message has arrived through the channel that doesn’t route through any server a subpoena could touch.

I reach for it. My thumb finds the biometric scanner. The screen unlocks.

Penelope’s message sits in the center of the display, rendered in plain text on a black background. No emoji. No voice memo attachment. No lengthy preamble about her upstairs neighbor’s bass-heavy taste in music or the new energy drink flavor she’s decided is either brilliant or a war crime.

Just a single line: files incoming in the next day or two. Next contract. Good one.

I set the takeout container down on the coffee table. The plastic clicks against the glass with a sharp, echoing snap.

The encrypted text changes the math. No more grease. No more gray-noise television. Just parameters, a timeline, and a target.

The poodle documentary is still playing. The British narrator is describing the judging criteria for the continental clip with the grave intensity of someone discussing nuclear non-proliferation. I reach for the remote and mute it without looking away from the tablet.

The apartment is quiet now. Just the soft tick of the wall clock in the kitchen and the almost inaudible whir of the espresso machine’s heating element cycling on for no reason.

I open the secure messaging app and type a single character: K.

Then I set the tablet down, stand up from the sectional, and walk to the kitchen.

The sink is full of dishes. I turn on the hot water. I squirt dish soap into the basin. I pick up a sponge and I start washing.

The problem has arrived. The parameters are set. I will receive the files, review the dossiers, and execute the plan with the ruthless precision that has kept me alive and out of prison and on the dean’s list simultaneously for the past three years.

I scrub a curry-stained plastic container with surgical force. The hot water turns my hands pink. Steam rises around my face, carrying the sharp, clean scent of lemon detergent.

I am back.

Chapter thirty-two

Jae