Lethal in Pink (Blackthorn University #1)

1. Amiyah

Chapter one

Amiyah

The rooftop grit digs into my forearms through the willowy fabric of my hoodie, which is actually dark gray and not pink because I do have some situational awareness, thank you very much.

About four hundred and twelve meters across the gap, the target’s penthouse glows like a terrarium somebody forgot to turn off before bed.

Floor-to-ceiling windows, all that money buying you nothing but exposure.

Lucky me.

The city below us is a circuit board of orange streetlights and dead pixels, downtown Los Angeles holding its breath in the hour before dawn, which is one of my favorite times to work because absolutely no one is looking up.

My cheek presses against the rifle’s cold stock.

The bolt-action is suppressed, mounted on a carbon-fiber bipod that cost more than my first semester’s textbooks, and the whole setup looks, to anyone who might accidentally stumble onto this roof, like something a very serious landscape photographer would use.

Granted, I’m not a photographer. I’m a law student with a 4.0 GPA and a fucking body count that would get me disbarred before I’m even barred.

The digital reticle in my scope glows amber, a little halo of light that floats over the penthouse interior where a man in a bathrobe is doing his fourth lap around the living room in the last twenty minutes.

Same path every time too.

It’s the bar cart to window, the window to the bookshelf, then the bookshelf to bar cart. Suddenly, he stops and pours himself something the color of honey.

Scotch I think.

The amber in my scope, the amber in his glass. Poetry, almost, if I were the type to notice.

I’m not.

The wind flag I zip-tied to a nearby antenna flutters a couple of times before it settles. Two miles per hour from the northwest.

Negligible.

I adjust for it anyway because my father taught me that the difference between a perfect shot and a fuck-up is measured in millimeters, and millimeters are measured in habits.

There is fourteen inches of drop at this distance. The man weighs approximately one-eighty, give or take. I note the glass is tempered rather than laminated. The suppressor will eat the report down. Whatever sound survives won’t make it past the roofline.

The math is clean.

The other math…less clean.

It is now 4:47 in the morning. My Evidence Law lecture starts at 8:00 AM sharp, and Professor Halsey has a zero-tolerance policy for tardiness. She announced that on the first day of the semester with the type of satisfaction that gives a room full of future prosecutors a collective stress rash.

Which, frankly, feels targeted.

I exhale slowly through my nose and watch Bathrobe Man take another sip of scotch like he has not personally inconvenienced my morning routine by being alive at an ungodly hour.

Fortunately, I only live twenty minutes from campus without traffic, which is the one thing about 5 AM that actually goes hard.

The problem is the checklist.

I need a shower. I need to change. I need to swap out the dark gray hoodie for something pink and forgettable because that’s the uniform, that’s the camouflage, that’s the girl who sits in the front row and raises her hand too much and nobody looks at twice.

Also, I need this bastard to stop pacing.

He stops.

“Oh, thank fuck.” I mumble to myself.

He then lifts his glass, toasting his own reflection in the window, or maybe the city, or maybe nothing at all.

It gives me the ick, but I’ve also come to learn in my field of work that these particular types of men, with penthouses and the lack of decent human morals, develop these little rituals, these performances for an audience of no one.

I try my hardest not to roll my eyes.

I exhale half a breath. The kind of exhale that empties your lungs just enough to still your diaphragm without leaving you light-headed. My finger moves, finding the trigger. The pressure builds in increments so small they’re almost theoretical, and then—

Pop.

The suppressor turns the report into something domestic.

A staple gun in a library.

A heavy book dropped on carpet.

It’s the kind of sound that belongs in a world where violence is small and contained and nobody screams.

The penthouse window spiderwebs.

A delicate fracture pattern blooming outward from a hole no bigger than a dime.

Bathrobe man drops, his scotch splashing across the carpet in a sticky wet arc.

Crimson spreads on the designer rug where he fell, his brains looking awfully close to lasagna soup, probably—warm and messy and not my problem anymore.

The twins can have fun cleaning this one up.

I give it one second. One full Mississippi through the scope. The man does not move. The rest of the liquor from his unbroken glass has joined the darker pool of blood, and the whole tableau has the stillness of a painting that knows it’s finished.

I roll back from the bipod, pull the bolt, and the spent casing ejects with a soft metallic kiss against the rooftop. I snag it up because I’m not a messy gremlin and I actually kind of like my freedom.

The rifle comes apart in my hands with ease of someone who has performed the very same task a gross amount of times.

The barrel unscrews. The bolt assembly slides free.

The stock folds. Each component finds its foam-lined slot in the matte black case with the satisfying click of things returning to where they belong.

The case itself is unremarkable—the kind of hard-shell Pelican that every aspiring filmmaker in LA carries, stuffed with lenses they can’t afford and dreams they’re still paying off.

Nobody looks twice at camera equipment, and even better, nobody wonders why the petite blonde girl with the pink phone case is hauling it up a service stair at 4:OO in the morning.

I strip my gloves last and check my watch.

4:51.

Still doable.

I close the case, stand up, and my knees complain after forty-something minutes on concrete. I’m twenty-six, and my joints have the ambient dissatisfaction of a middle manager who didn’t get the promotion. I shoulder the case and make my way back across the rooftop.

The service door groans on hinges that haven’t seen oil since the Clinton administration. As my sneakers find each step, the case gently bumps against my hip in a steady rhythm.

The parking structure is three levels down. My car waits in the corner of P2, a sensible and sleek black Tesla Model S Plaid with a custom pink interior.

The driver’s seat welcomes me back like an old friend who knows all my worst secrets and has judiciously decided not to mention them. The engine turns over with a purr that cost the underground an astronomical amount of money, but was worth every penny in my opinion.

Not that they asked.

I back out of the space, navigate the spiral ramp down to street level, and pull onto a downtown avenue so empty it feels like the set of a movie about the end of the world.

Los Angeles at this time in the morning is a different city.

The streetlights hold their ground against a sky that’s still black but thinking about blue.

Storefronts dark. Traffic lights cycling through their colors for an audience of no one.

A homeless man sleeps in the bus shelter on the corner, curled around a shopping cart filled with what might be his entire life or might be things he found. I don’t slow down to look.

I am not a good person.

I am a person with an 8 AM lecture.

My phone sits in the cup holder. I tap the screen awake, open the coffee app, and queue a brown sugar vanilla latte for pickup for when I arrive at the university.

The Bean & Brew’d app confirms with a cheerful chime that feels obscenely out of place in the pre-dawn gloom.

I set the phone down and merge onto the 110 South, because even at this hour, surface streets are for the amateurs.

The freeway is a cathedral of concrete and emptiness.

Three lanes in each direction, and I have my pick.

I take the middle, set the FSD at seventy-two mph, and let my brain switch tracks fully.

The kill is already filed. Somewhere behind my eyes, in the cabinet labeled DONE. The drawer slides shut without a sound.

What remains now is the rest of my morning schedule: Penelope debrief, shower, hair, outfit, face, caffeine, campus smile.

Easy.

A normal person would probably need time to process the fact that less than twenty minutes ago they converted a living man into a tragic renovation problem.

I however, never said I was normal. If anything, one might consider me a little fucked up. But “a little fucked up” is such an ugly phrase, really.

So clinical.

So judgey.

So…cringe.

I prefer the term specialized.

My father used to say everyone has a trade.

Some people bake bread.

Some people fix engines.

Some people learn how to put a round through reinforced glass at four hundred and twelve meters before sunrise and still make it to Evidence Law with dewy skin.

Honestly? Inspirational.

My phone buzzes.

The screen lights up with Penelope’s name and a string of emojis that lets me know she is clearly not impressed that I didn’t use my com this morning for her extra added guidance.

I glance down.

Penelope: ??????????????

Then, immediately after…

Penelope: Do you hate me personally or just professionally?

I keep one hand on the wheel even though the car is doing the driving, because trusting technology completely is how people end up as cautionary tales in discovery exhibits.

I thumb the voice-to-text button.

“Neither. I hate redundancy.”

The transcription, naturally, reads: Neither I ate red onions.

“Great,” I mutter, stabbing delete with more force than necessary.

Penelope calls before I can retype my retaliation.

I let it ring twice because boundaries are important, especially with people who can remotely brick your car out of spite.

On the third ring, I answer.

“Good morning, my beloved and cherished nuisance.”