Page 143 of Lethal in Pink

The ceremony ended twenty minutes ago. Maybe thirty. Time has taken on that elastic, sickening stretch it gets when your brain is running a dozen tactical calculations at once, warping around the fixed points of a world that is about to catch fire.

Around me, Blackthorn’s quad is playing its graduation-day soundtrack with nauseating cheer. Families clustered in neat, smiling groups. Parents with proprietary arms slung over shoulders. Younger siblings sprinting through scattered gold confetti that some alum's overzealous aunt smuggled in a Ziploc bag. Near the fountain, a champagne bottle is being passed around, the cork long gone, plastic cups sloshing toasts that slur into each other as the afternoon wears on. Someone brought a dog in a miniature cap, blissfully ignorant of the fact that it is currently the only pure thing on this entire suffocating lawn.

The noise carries in waves—laughter, the shrill, triumphant pitch of parents who have poured four years and a quarter-million dollars into a piece of paper, the clink of plastic, the distant, droning dismantle of the sound system by facilities staff who look like they’d rather be digging graves.

None of it reaches me. It hits the air around my skin and dies. My ears have tuned to a different frequency. A lower, deadlier hum.

My custom pink satin graduation gown drags at the heels, its tailored silhouette fitted to a body built for shadows rather than academic pageantry. The matching pink cap sits slightly crooked on my dark waves, sliding against hair that has given up trying to look professional. A stray flake of gold confetti clings to my sleeve, stuck fast like a fleck of dried blood. I leave it there. Let it sparkle. Let the world think I’m just another girl celebrating a milestone in a monochromatic designer gown.

The diploma is heavy. Not physically—it’s maybe eight ounces of pressed pulp—but it weighs a ton because of what it actually represents. Three years. Fifteen floors down into the underground. The architectural mastery of a double life built on a fault line. Every all-nighter in Thornfield Hall, every case brief written in the clipped, lethal cadence of someone trying to masquerade as human. Every time I sat in a lecture hall calculating windage, elevation, and the cold, unyielding math of a kill contract I had already accepted.

It’s all rolled up inside this cardboard cylinder. My name printed in a generic registrar font by someone who processes eight hundred of these meat-sacks a semester and sees none of us.

I dig my thumb into the edge of the cardstock. Hard. The stiff paper gives, resisting with a sharp bite that borders on pain. Good. Pain is data. Pain proves my fingers are still attached to a living body, which is a fact I have to check periodically when my skull is splitting down the middle.

Then the secure line buzzes against my ribs.

It’s tucked into the inner pocket of my pink gown, wedged behind the lining where I ripped the seam with a razor blade and stitched it back together—a modification Penelope is going to bill me for in blood. The vibration is unmistakable. Two short pulses. Pause. Two more. Penelope’s signature mark. She set it up three years ago after I nearly answered an encrypted hit-spec in the middle of a torts lecture because the professor had a voice that sounded like a dead drop.

I answer before my brain catches up to my hand. A blind, numb press through the satin fabric, and then her voice is in my ear, sliding straight into my brainstem and turning my blood to ice water.

It’s Penelope, but the buoyancy is gone. The bubbly, energy-drink persona she uses as armor has been stripped away, leaving only the raw, clinical register she reserves for corpses and body counts.

“They’ve briefed the replacement.”

Four words. Dropped like stones down a well. No preamble. Just the cold arithmetic of a machine that has already run the numbers.

My jaw locks. My thumb bites deeper into the diploma, the cardstock folding under the pressure, leaving a permanent white crease.

“Twenty-four hours,” Penelope continues, her voice low, measured, the tone of someone reading a script written in ash. “If you don’t close tonight, the board pulls the contract. And Amiyah—” A heavy, suffocating pause. The weighted silence of a friend realizing she’s reading a death warrant. “This isn’t a professional courtesy. It’s a clean sweep. The replacement isn’t coming in quiet. They’re coming in dirty, and they are not stopping at Jae. The moment this flips, you’re a liability. They’ll put a bullet in your head, too.”

I listen the way Marcus trained me to. Body frozen. Breath controlled. The dead-eyed focus of an operative absorbing intel that dictates whether she survives the next sunrise. My thumb doesn’t move. The diploma buckles, tearing at the edge.

The quad goes on around me. Twenty feet away, a father adjusts a camera lens with frantic, desperate precision, desperate to freeze a moment that never really existed. A kid chases a piece of gold foil across the grass. Someone laughs—a bright, brittle sound of sheer relief.

None of it is real. Penelope’s voice is the only thing left in my skull, running calculations for a machine built only to kill.

When she stops talking, the silence has weight. I can hear her breathing through the encrypted channel—slow, even, waiting to see what kind of wreckage she just caused.

“It’ll be done tonight.” My voice comes out flat. Flawless. The exact clipped register of The Pink Precision, delivering data like a terminal. “By morning, the world will be crying over their golden boy.”

Not a tremor. Not a hitch. Just a flat, undeniable fact.

Penelope exhales slowly. The professional barrier dips, the warmth bleeding back in at the edges, useless and heartbreaking. “I’m sorry, Amiyah. I never wanted this to bleed into your personal life.”

“I was never supposed to fall in love, Pen.”

The words tear out of me, jagged and raw, cracking open a vault I kept welded shut for three years. My voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore; it sounds like a ghost screaming in an empty room.

“That was the one rule,” I mutter, my thumb shredding the edge of the diploma into white fuzz. “The only rule I didn’t have to force myself to keep, because it was so damn easy. I don’t get attached. I certainly don’t fall in love with the fucking target.”

A bitter, choking laugh rips out of my throat—hollow, broken, smelling of ash. “And here I am. Breaking every law I ever swore to. Breaking it for a boy who sings pop songs and holds my hand like it’s anchored to his soul.”

Penelope doesn’t interrupt. She just listens to me unravel, the quiet on the line heavy with a grief neither of us is allowed to name.

“I’m fine,” I snap, slamming the vault shut again, forcing the mask back onto my bleeding face with sheer force of will. “It’s a job. I know the difference between a mark and a life. I’ve always known.”

She buys the lie because she has to. “Be careful,” she whispers, and the line goes dead.