Page 95 of Lethal in Pink

I have never had a number like this attached to my name before. I am acutely, painfully aware of what it means that I do now.

So I look for reasons to justify it. I dig into who Jae Kim actually is beneath the exchange student routine.

The Kim family controls Crown and Throne Records. It’s a massive operation, and empires that size don’t stay clean. The math doesn’t work in an industry where success is measured in favors, leverage, and threats. Jae grew up inside that machine. He’s the heir to it. The alias, the student cover, the careful anonymity he maintained from the day he showed up at Blackthorn with a North Face backpack—it all looks different through the lens of someone who also lives behind a false front.

He has to be hiding something.

I know what hiding something looks like. I do it every day. The attention that never quite settles, the questions deflected with rehearsed precision, the persona built to be just believable enough. I recognize the craft the way a forger spots another forger’s work.

The vague justification in the file still bothers me. I keep pressing on it like a splinter, working the edge of it with my thumbnail. Clients at this level protect their reasoning because it's the kind of thing that indicts them. The thin language is just operational security. It is exactly what I would expect from someone wealthy enough to attach that number to a contract and paranoid enough to want it done quietly. But I've never accepted a hit unless it had a valid reason behind it.

By three in the morning, I’ve managed to convince myself, mostly.

It isn't a clean certainty. It just sits in my chest like lead. But I’ve built enough arguments in my life to know the difference between airtight and sufficient. This is sufficient. It has to be sufficient.

I have taken jobs before where I liked the target. Likability is not a disqualifier. Feelings are not a disqualifier. The work exists in a separate category from the person, the same way a surgical procedure exists in a separate category from the body on the table. I have spent ten years perfecting the architecture of that separation. I did not build those walls so they could collapse the first time someone with a sexy laugh and really good hair looked at me across a library table.

I have spent six hours building the justification. It is not airtight, but it is enough.

It has to be enough.

I set the untouched tea on the coffee table and walk back to the kitchen. The tablet screen is still dark, but I can still picture Kai Ryu’s surveillance photo frozen in high definition—that candid shot where he’s looking slightly off-camera, completely unaware that the woman staring at his image is the same woman who fell asleep with his voice in her ears twelve hours ago.

I push the thought of his hands away. I push away the way he kissed my forehead, the way he felt like something real in a life built entirely out of lies.

I look at the number. I look at what it buys.

With the cold precision that has kept me alive and free and out of a cell for the past ten years, I tap the screen, sign the intake, and decide that I am going to take the damn hit.

Chapter thirty-four

Jae

The 405 is a blood clot at six-thirty on a Wednesday. Red taillights stretch into a solid wall of brake glow, turning the freeway into an oven. I’m tucked into the right lane, crawling at eight miles an hour, watching the Glendon exit tick closer with the patience of a man whose only objective is to not die on a concrete ramp before he sees his girlfriend.

I blink at the dashboard display, my foot hovering over the brake.

Girlfriend.

The word sits there in my head, loud and unauthorized, and I actually have to pause for a second to let my brain catch up. We haven’t labeled it. We haven't had the talk about boundaries or titles or what the hell we are when we're not hiding behind sarcasm and library tables. But sitting here crawling toward her apartment, my chest tight with that stupid rush of anticipation, I realize I didn't even hesitate.

I ease off the brake as the traffic inches forward, a heavy realization settling into my ribs. Yeah. Whatever else we’re calling this, that’s what she is.

Fifteen minutes later, I pull into the curved drive of Amiyah’s building and kill the engine. My palms are damp against the leather. I scrub them down my joggers before climbing out, locking the car with a soft chirp that swallows the low hum of the pool filter cycling behind the hedges.

Six forty-eight. I’m two minutes early. By Amiyah Lane standards, two minutes early is a tactical anomaly. By Jae Kim standards, it’s a miracle of physics.

I knock. Three sharp raps against the wood.

The door swings open.

I just stand there, staring.

“Jesus, Amiyah,” I mutter under my breath.

“What?” she asks.

“It's just... you're—” I murmur, before my brain can catch up to my mouth. “You're the kind of beautiful that leaves scars.”