Page 122 of Lethal in Pink

I keep scrolling. The floor drops out.

A TikTok shot from the third floor of humanities, shaky and zoomed in on Jae crossing the quad this morning. The caption: That’s 1000% Kai Ryu from C&T. I stg my cousin saw him at a fan meet in 2018 and this is the same guy. The comments are a war zone—stans swearing it’s him, skeptics calling photoshop, and terrifyingly dedicated fans already planning stakeouts.

Three thousand miles away in Seoul, someone has pulled performance footage from his debut tour and layered it side-by-side with grainy campus stills. The match is airtight. The same tilt of the head when he listens, the same unconscious shift of weight—a tell so specific I could pick it out in a pitch-black room.

My thumb keeps dragging down. A livestream from six this morning, timestamp glowing in red digits: two independent reporters with long-lens rigs standing outside the veterinary clinic entrance, waiting in the weak L.A. haze like they're staking out a crime scene.

I fling the phone across the mattress. It hits the duvet and dies.

The sheets are still warm where Jae’s body was fourteen hours ago. The phantom weight of his hands on my hips, the raw, blooming ache on my left thigh where the taser prongs bit into denim—it all sits in my chest like a jagged stone.

I swing my legs over. The hardwood is freezing under my bare feet. My sleep shirt feels heavy and suffocating.

I need coffee before my brain processes the math.

Ten steps to the kitchen. All clean lines, cold marble, and sterile interior-designer glamour. I hit the espresso machine, listening to its aggressive grind while I prop my tablet against the fruit bowl and open the secure network.

The logistics unfold in real time, and they are catastrophic.

Every playbook we mapped was built on a single, immovable pillar: anonymity. A target who moves quietly. A private tragedy. That pillar is currently a smoking crater.

A hit on Jae right now, with professional press outside his workplace and half the student body archiving his life in real-time, isn't a quiet execution anymore. It’s an international incident. Every coffee at Beaned & Brew’d, every shared seat in Property Law, every lobby camera that caught us stepping into the elevator together—all of it is evidence waiting to be seized.

The machine finishes with a wet hiss. I pour the shot into a plain ceramic mug and leave it untouched.

On the tablet, the campus satellite feed shows the vet clinic entrance choked with tripods. The entire campus is now a fishbowl. Every interaction is witness-adjacent.

Chime.

The secure line tone cuts through the apartment’s dead quiet—a precise, military-grade ping designed to override everything else.

The message sits in the encrypted vault, stripped of all metadata:

They think you’ve gone soft. Clock’s ticking. If you don’t finish this soon, they’ll send someone else. And if they send someone else, they won’t just kill him.

My jaw locks so hard my molars ache. I set the tablet face-down on the cold marble and cross to the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The view is obscene. Perched on the eastern ridge of the Hollywood Hills, the canyon drops away in a green sweep of scrub oak before the city grid splays out—a glittering, flat geometry stretching toward a smudge of Pacific ocean.

My purse sits on the kitchen island. Inside, the Lullaby compound rests in its pink glass rollerball—two drops of calibrated neurotoxin, enough to drop a man in ninety seconds. I can picture the cool weight of it.

Next to that mental image sits the payout. The number that buys my father’s appeal, the investigators who might actually crack the corruption trial that put him away.

And right beside it, the memory of Jae, his skin, his eyes, his kiss.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

I wait three seconds before picking it up. Jae’s name glows on the screen:

Jae: I think it’s time we talk.

I stare at the letters. The city sprawls below me, indifferent and vast, while Jae is probably standing in a parking lot dodging flashbulbs, waiting for a reply.

My thumbs fly across the glass, burying my panic behind a wall of sharp, defensive sarcasm:

Me: Could it possibly be about the viral headlines declaring you a secret K-pop heir? Or the fact that half of Blackthorn is trying to crowdsource your fan club?

His reply hits instantly: