Page 5 of Lethal in Pink

The mirror reflects a girl who looks like she spent her morning scrolling TikTok and drinking matcha, not putting a bullet through someone’s skull. I swipe on a gloss, apply mascara, and spray myself with my favorite perfume. Finally, my bag gets packed with three highlighters, two notebooks, and the crushing weight of my student debt, which follows me everywhere like a ghost that’s really bad at haunting.

I check the time: 7:20.

The case goes into the hidden room behind the back wall in my bedroom walk-in closet. I close the panel and it shuts with a satisfying click, leaving behind nothing but the seamless join of the wall.

My phone chirps from the kitchen counter.

Your Brown Sugar Vanilla Latte is ready for pickup at Beaned & Brew’d!

Perfect timing.

I snatch my phone and keys, shoulder my bag, and head for the door. The elevator ride down is brief—just enough time to check my reflection in the polished brass interior and smooth a stray wave back into place. The doors open to the lobby, and I stride past the marble fountain, nodding at the morning concierge, who gives me a cheerful wave.

I make it to class at 7:52.

The front row is still available, of course. I slide into my seat, take a sip of my latte, unpack my notebook, and uncap a highlighter as Professor Halsey marches into the room with a stack of casebooks and the expression of a woman who has already decided today will be disappointing.

She hasn’t seen me yet. When she does, her face will soften into the particular smile reserved for students who make her job easier. The smile that says you, I like you, you are not the problem.

She has no idea.

None of them do.

That’s the point.

Chapter two

Jae

The last note of the song hangs in the air for maybe half a second before the entire arena swallows it whole. Twenty thousand voices do what twenty thousand voices do, which is become one enormous, stupid, beautiful wall of sound, and my body clocks out and autopilot clocks in, and I am already walking. The stage lights are hot enough to fry an egg on my forehead, which, honestly, would be more interesting than whatever my face is doing right now.

Smiling.

That’s the word.

I’m smiling the smile that is not exactly fake, but not exactly mine either. It’s Kai’s smile. Kai’s jaw, Kai’s dimples, Kai’s bright-eyed wonder at the screaming masses who love him because he’s perfect and uncomplicated and exactly what they paid for.

There is no gap, no moment where the performance ends and the person begins. The performance ends and the machinery takes over, and I am somewhere inside it, not quite driving.

I wave.

I bow.

I blow kisses.

I wonder if they’d still be screaming like that if they knew the real me.

As soon as I’m behind stage there are hands.

Hands everywhere—and I mean this in a literal fucking sense.

A stylist reaches for the microphone before my fingers have fully uncurled from it. My manager is suddenly at my left shoulder, Korean coming out of him at a velocity that stops being language somewhere around the second syllable. Someone shoves a water bottle against my chest and my hand closes around it by reflex, the plastic cold and slick with condensation.

The backstage corridor stretches ahead of us, narrow and poorly lit and vibrating with the aftershocks of the show—screams still bleeding through concrete, and the stage crew is already dismantling the riser behind me.

My manager’s mouth keeps moving.

Something about the after-party, something about the label executives who flew in from Seoul just to watch me exist under stage lights for two hours, something about tomorrow’s schedule, which to me, sounds like a problem for tomorrow me and now right now me.