Page 121 of Lethal in Pink

Kennel 3. Post-op female Cocker Spaniel. Routine spay yesterday. Q4H vitals, IV line active, surgical site clean at 0600. Discharge at 1500.

I pull the clipboard from the rack and push through the swinging doors into the recovery ward.

The spaniel is awake. She’s curled tight on a blue fleece pad, weighed down by a hard plastic Elizabethan collar that makes her look like a bewildered satellite dish. Her liquid brown eyes lock onto me the second my boots hit the rubber flooring—wide, dark, and entirely unburdened by human bullshit.

I crouch beside the stainless-steel run, sliding the latch open with a soft metallic scrape.

“Hey, girl,” I murmur, keeping my voice low and level, pitching it below the hum of the overhead lights. “How are we holding up?”

Her tail gives one sluggish, heavy thump against the fleece—not the frantic helicopter spin of a fully recovered dog, but the groggy, trusting acknowledgment of someone who recognizes a safe variable in a confusing room. I slide my hand into the enclosure, letting her sniff my knuckles before resting my palm flat against her warm ribcage.

Her heart is hammering a little fast under my fingertips—twelve hours post-anesthesia, perfectly expected—but the rhythm is steady and strong. Her gums are a healthy, pale bubblegum pink. Respiration is even, shallow, unlabored.

With gloved fingers, I lift the edge of the surgical drape to inspect the incision. The line is clean. No weeping, no angry red inflammation at the margins, no swelling. The surrounding skin is warm, but free of fever heat. I tap the metrics onto my clipboard with sharp, blocky strokes of my pen—the exact handwriting my professors have spent three years complaining is too neat, too compressed, too guarded to read at a glance.

The spaniel blinks up at me, her gaze heavy with lingering sedatives. She doesn’t care that my phone is entombed in a locker forty meters away. She doesn't care that a dozen cameras are currently staking out the front lobby hoping to catch a glimpse of Kai Ryu’s profile. She cares only that my hand is warm, my voice doesn't shake, and I am not causing her pain.

It is the cleanest, most honest dynamic I have left in the world.

I finish the IV fluid rate check, scratch her gently behind the velvety fold of her left ear where the plastic cone can't reach, and watch her eyes drift half-shut again.

Back at the small desk in the charting alcove, I pull the rolling chair out and sit down. The plastic pen feels heavy and real between my fingers.

Respiratory rate: 22 breaths/min. Capillary refill: <2 seconds. Pain score: 1.

These are variables with absolute answers. These are problems that can be solved with arithmetic and patience, completely divorced from the digital conflagration raging outside these concrete walls.

I am not Kai Ryu today.

The fact settles heavy in my gut. I am Jae Kim. I have a post-op cocker spaniel going home at three o'clock, a stack of pharmacology flashcards waiting in my backpack, and an entire universe of noise that has absolutely no jurisdiction over this room.

The crack in the anonymity is there—I can feel it hairline-fracturing right down the middle of my life, wide enough now that I'll never quite seal it shut again. The video is out. The connection has been made. The algorithm has already fucking digested me.

I don't know how the hell I'm going to fix it when my shift ends.

But I know how to finish this row of numbers. I know how to keep my hands steady. I know how to sit in a quiet, sterile room with a pen in my fist and let the rest of the world burn itself out trying to find a ghost that isn't here anymore.

The pen moves. The numbers fall into their boxes. Outside, the noise keeps rising.

Let it.

I have a dog to check on.

Chapter forty-four

Amiyah

The alarm is the sound of a dying animal—high, sharp, and designed purely to ruin whatever pathetic illusion of peace sleep provided. I slap it silent with the instinctive brutality of a woman trained to treat her phone like a tripwire, and make the catastrophic mistake of unlocking the screen before my eyes have fully adjusted.

Forty-two notifications. All of them from ThornsUp.

My spine locks. I sit up so fast my temples throb, the morning light slicing across the glass at an acute, blinding angle.

Top of the feed, pinned by the algorithm like a dead body in a public square: a frame-grab from some random video someone took at the Sigma Chi frat party last month. The strobe lights cutting through the dark, my head thrown back in a laugh I never meant to let anyone outside our unit see, blonde hair catching the flash. Half-cropped beside me is his profile—the clean, arrogant line of his jaw, his dark hair falling across his forehead, looking entirely too reckless for a man hiding behind an alias.

His face is circled in red. Across a dozen campus gossip channels, his features are mapped out in digital ink, accompanied by headers written by people who treat human lives like reality TV: IS THIS KAI RYU?, BLACKTHORN’S SECRET STAR?, and, my personal nightmare, EXCHANGE STUDENT OR GLOBAL PHENOM? WE INVESTIGATE.

Below that, the student paper’s official account has dropped a teaser: Exchange Student or Global Star? The Mystery of Jae Kim. Entertainment blogs have already scraped it, reposting it with the breathless, predatory panic of people who need clicks to survive.