Page 94 of Lethal in Pink

I move to the physical profile. The promotional photo loads first: height, build, sharp jawline, styled black hair with that deliberate, artfully disheveled quality that costs three hundred dollars to achieve. I scan it with the same clinical attention I give every target—posture, visible identifying marks, the particular set of the shoulders that tells you how someone carries tension. I take another bite of food. Chew. Swallow. Look again.

Absolutely fucking not. No. I seriously have to be tripping right now.

Something in the back of my skull sends up a low-grade alarm I don’t immediately act on. The specific wrongness of a face appearing in the wrong context, like hearing your ringtone in a stranger’s pocket.

I tell myself it’s a passing resemblance. K-pop artists are styled to look a certain way—sharp features, careful lighting, the universal template of marketable beauty that turns individual humans into interchangeable units of consumption. I’ve seen a hundred faces like this across a hundred dossiers. This one is just better lit.

I keep reading.

Known alias: Kai Ryu.

Legal name: Hyunjae Kim.

I read the legal name twice, a cold spike of suspicion hitting my gut so hard I inhale a stray crumb of sourdough. I choke, chest seizing as I cough into my fist, my vision blurring as I scramble blindly for the Burgundy glass to wash it down. My throat burns now. Great. Love that for me.

Panic claws its way up, sharp and frantic. There is no goddamn way in hell.

My hands shake as I swipe furiously across the tablet screen, bypassing the text, desperate for more images to prove the file is wrong. I pull up the supplementary surveillance photos. Candid shots, not promotional—the kind taken from distance with long lenses, the kind that catch people in the unguarded moments between performances. A man crossing a parking lot, shoulders hunched against the cold, one hand shoved deep in a coat pocket. A profile shot through a café window, the steam from a cup obscuring half his face. A third image, taken from an elevated position, catching him looking slightly off-camera.

I know that look.

I’ve sat across from it at a library table in Thornfield Hall while a heavy veterinary anatomy textbook sat cracked open and unread between us. I’ve watched it at Beaned & Brew’d when his dark eyes tracked the room with a slow, heavy focus. I’ve felt it on a couch in the Hollywood Hills while his thumb traced slow circles against my bare knee.

My fork is on the plate. I don't remember putting it there. My hand is empty, fingers flat against the white tablecloth.

The restaurant noise crashes back in—dishes clattering, people talking, the low hum of the room. A server brushes past my chair. I don’t move. I just sit there and let the truth of it sink straight into my bones.

Jesus Christ.

Kai Ryu is Jae Kim.

My target is the exchange student with the black coffee and the good laugh, the one whose hand traces patterns on my thigh. It’s the boy who drove me up Mulholland and kissed me against a fogged windshield while LA sprawled out below us. The one who crouched on linoleum in a vet clinic, palm flat on the floor, waiting for a trembling dog to trust him. The boy I fell asleep next to last night through a screen, eight thousand miles of ocean between us, listening to the soft static of an open line filling both our rooms.

I close the tablet. The screen goes dark, and the privacy filter turns it completely opaque, hiding my reflection entirely.

The server drops the check. I throw down enough cash to cover it, don't look at the total, and push through the glass doors into the Koreatown night.

My car is parked three levels up. I take the stairs instead of the elevator, my heels cracking against the concrete steps.

I sit in the driver’s seat and leave the engine off. The garage smells like stale exhaust and damp asphalt, completely empty except for my car. I just stare straight ahead through the steering wheel at the concrete wall.

The payout figure sits in the back of my mind, heavy and insistent. The vague reasoning sits next to it, worse—a hollow space where certainty should be, and I have been doing this long enough to know that hollow spaces are where the worst fucking truths live.

I start the car. The engine turns over with a low, smooth rumble, and I pull out of the structure into the neon wash of Western Avenue, heading west toward the Hills without thinking about where I’m going, because thinking is the one thing I cannot afford to do right now.

***

I don’t sleep.

The kitchen island is freezing under my forearms. My secure tablet is propped open in front of me, the contract file for Kai Ryu spread across the screen, and I’ve been sitting here long enough that my lower back is locked up tight.

My chest feels hollow. I force a breath down, locking the panic behind the wall I use for everything else. Because if I actually stop to process what this means, I am completely useless.

What I can't shake, what refuses to be filed away, is the payout.

I have read it enough times now that it has stopped looking like a number and started looking like a life.

No more contracts. No more coded messages arriving at three in the morning through channels that don’t exist on any server a subpoena could touch. No more rotating fake IDs and weapons caches behind closet panels, no more lying awake calculating exit strategies for scenarios that haven’t happened yet. Law school, the bar exam, a practice I actually control with my name on the door and clients who hire me for my brain instead of my trigger finger. The resources to pry open my father's case file, hire the investigators he deserves, and tear apart the conviction that put him in Chino. Freedom, the clean and permanent kind, bought and paid for with a single job.