Page 105 of Lethal in Pink

She doesn’t look up. Her pen doesn’t pause. She turns a page with her free hand, smooth and uninterrupted, and her only tell is a fractional tightening of her breath.

I take it as the green light it is.

My hand slides up her inner thigh. Slow. Measured. Each inch a silent question. She doesn’t close her legs. Instead, her thighs part imperceptibly, a widening that makes it a miracle I keep my hands steady.

I keep my face flat and bored, the picture of a grad student slogging through required reading, while my fingers find the thin silk of her thong. I hook one finger under the elastic, sliding the fabric aside.

She is soaked.

The first direct brush of my fingertips against her draws a tiny, involuntary hitch from her lungs—a sound swallowed instantly by the room’s ambient noise. Her pen stops for half a second before resuming, her handwriting suddenly a fraction tighter.

I start working slow, patient circles. My thumb traces firm patterns against her clit while my index finger dips into the slick heat between her folds. Warm. Responsive. My cock aches hard against the zipper of my jeans, forcing me to shift my weight subtly.

Above the table, her absolute control begins to fray. Her brows draw together in a sharp, helpless line, and her lower lip disappears between her teeth as she fights for air. Beneath the thin knit of her blouse, the rise and fall of her chest turns fast and shallow, betraying every frantic pulse of her blood.

I keep my pen moving, occasionally jotting a meaningless note about drug half-lives with the steady hand of a man who is not finger-fucking a woman to orgasm in public.

Her breathing shifts—shorter, sharper, reined in by sheer force of will. Her thighs tighten around my hand, and the wet slide of my fingers is masked by the library's background noise. I bring her right to the edge, feeling the slight tremor in her muscle, the increasing pressure of her hips pushing into my palm. I slow down, drawing it out, watching her fight to hold the pieces together.

She breaks.

The sound is small—a choked, desperate exhale buried beneath the rustle of turning a page. Her body locks, her inner walls clenching rhythmically around my fingers, and a quiet, helpless whimper slips past her lips.

It's almost enough to make me bust in my pants.

A student two tables down—heavy over-ear headphones resting around their neck—shushes her without looking up.

Amiyah goes dead still. The pink flush instantly turns to a deep, mortified crimson burning all the way to her hairline. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. She stares unseeingly at the exact same paragraph of constitutional law.

I remove my hand with absolute calm. I wipe my fingers discreetly on the inside of my thigh, pick up my pen, and return to my notes.

My expression says everything: I engineered this. I executed it. And I will be thinking about this for the rest of my natural life.

She does not look at me. She does not speak.

For the next hour, Amiyah forces herself back into the text, turning pages and dragging her pen across the margin. But her composure is completely shot; every thirty seconds she shifts, adjusts her skirt, or tucks her hair behind her ear in a compulsive loop—each twitch a silent admission that her day has completely derailed.

I annotate another page of veterinary pharmacology, swallowing another sip of lukewarm, asphalt-tasting coffee. I do not smile where she can see it.

But inside, where it counts, I am winning so fucking hard it hurts.

Chapter thirty-eight

Amiyah

City lights press through the blinds in thin, horizontal lines, cutting the apartment floor into strips of gold and shadow. I’ve paced the same six-foot path until the hardwood feels bruised beneath my bare feet. On the desk, the secure tablet casts a harsh glare across my knuckles, illuminating Jae’s encrypted dossier for the seventh time in an hour.

I’ve memorized every byte of it. And that’s the fucking problem.

Clean.

Not sanitized-clean—not scrubbed down with the frantic, hollow desperate measures of a man trying to hide his tracks. Genuinely, structurally clean. The kind of legacy built by people who never needed to be dirty because they owned the board from the start.

I swipe through the Crown & Throne Records financials. No offshore shell companies routing through tax havens that don't ask questions. No unexplained cash injections, no hostile acquisitions, no rising competitors who mysteriously vanished the week before a distribution deal closed. The Kim family empire runs on talent scouting, rigorous distribution rights, and the cold calculus of people who know the music industry survives on leverage. But leverage, in their world, means airtight contracts, not unmarked graves.

The industry violence section is two paragraphs long and reads like a sanitized Wikipedia entry. A dispute over royalty splits in 2021. A copyright lawsuit over a mid-tier ballad. The occasional scuffle at an awards show caught on a fan’s phone and memed into oblivion. None of it justifies a seven-figure liquidation contract on the heir's head. None of it keeps a corporate board awake at night whispering about loose ends.

I drag the stylus down to Jae’s personal profile.