33. Amiyah
Chapter thirty-three
Amiyah
The restaurant is the kind of place where the bibimbap arrives in sizzling stone bowls and the waitstaff doesn’t flinch when you order wine with it.
A low wash of cognac-colored light clings to the edges of the room, banquettes upholstered in something expensive that doesn’t show stains, and a wine list I actually read before ordering.
I’m seated at a two-top by the window, alone by choice.
A glass of Burgundy sits half-empty to my right, the bowl catching the warm crescent of the room's low glow.My secure tablet is propped against the bread basket in front of me.
Thanks to the heavy privacy filter, the screen looks like a blank, dead piece of glass to anyone at the neighboring tables.
The table to my left erupts in a hiss of steam as a server sets down a dolsot bibimbap, the egg yolk trembling on top of the rice before someone jabs it with a metal spoon.
Two tables over, a group of four is speaking Korean with the rapid, overlapping cadence of people who’ve known each other long enough to stop being polite.
The sound fills the room in waves, punctuated by the sharp clatter of metal chopsticks against ceramic and the occasional burst of laughter that cuts through everything else.
My phone lights up with Penelope’s text:
Penelope: Hope you’re ready. File drop incoming so check your queue.
I feel my stomach drop the way it always does when a high-tier file lands. It’s fucking Pavlovian at this point. Ten years in, and my body still treats an encrypted notification like a starting gun.
A soft, two-tone chime sounds from the propped tablet, the encrypted ping vibrating slightly against the edge of the bread basket.
I press my thumb to the glass reader, the sensor flashing green as the secure server boots up.
The new contract sits at the top of the queue, flagged with the agency's highest priority red marker, with Penelope’s digital sign-off attached to the routing data.
I open it one-handed, fork in the other, scrolling through the header fields while I take another bite of the bread—sourdough, good crust, slightly too much salt.
Target name: Kai Ryu.
I pause mid-chew, swallowing hard before I reach for the wine.
K-pop artist. International reach. The demographic data scrolls past: age, market penetration, social media metrics that would make a brand manager weep with joy.
I skim the operational parameters—timeframe, suggested approach, recommended entry points—and then the payout figure loads.
My fork clatters against the plate hard enough that the couple across the aisle glances over. I set the fork down and stare at the digits.
It’s not a typo. It’s the kind of number that makes my chest go tight, the kind that flashes a single, heavy word across the back of my skull in my father’s flat, exhausted voice: retirement.
I force my eyes back to the screen and keep scrolling.
The reasoning section stops me.
It’s thin. Vague in a way that doesn’t match the size of the contract or the prominence of the target.
Broad language about “business interests” and “competitive threats” where there should be specifics—names, dates, actual reasons someone is paying a fortune to wipe out a human life.
I read it twice, looking for anything concrete, and find nothing.
Just corporate boilerplate dressed up to look like justification.
I move to the physical profile. The promotional photo loads first: height, build, sharp jawline, styled black hair with that deliberate, artfully disheveled quality that costs three hundred dollars to achieve.
I scan it with the same clinical attention I give every target—posture, visible identifying marks, the particular set of the shoulders that tells you how someone carries tension.
I take another bite of food. Chew. Swallow. Look again.
Absolutely fucking not. No. I seriously have to be tripping right now.
Something in the back of my skull sends up a low-grade alarm I don’t immediately act on. The specific wrongness of a face appearing in the wrong context, like hearing your ringtone in a stranger’s pocket.
I tell myself it’s a passing resemblance.
K-pop artists are styled to look a certain way—sharp features, careful lighting, the universal template of marketable beauty that turns individual humans into interchangeable units of consumption.
I’ve seen a hundred faces like this across a hundred dossiers. This one is just better lit.
I keep reading.
Known alias: Kai Ryu.
Legal name: Hyunjae Kim.
I read the legal name twice, a cold spike of suspicion hitting my gut so hard I inhale a stray crumb of sourdough. I choke, chest seizing as I cough into my fist, my vision blurring as I scramble blindly for the Burgundy glass to wash it down. My throat burns now. Great. Love that for me.
Panic claws its way up, sharp and frantic. There is no goddamn way in hell.
My hands shake as I swipe furiously across the tablet screen, bypassing the text, desperate for more images to prove the file is wrong.
I pull up the supplementary surveillance photos.
Candid shots, not promotional—the kind taken from distance with long lenses, the kind that catch people in the unguarded moments between performances.
A man crossing a parking lot, shoulders hunched against the cold, one hand shoved deep in a coat pocket.
A profile shot through a café window, the steam from a cup obscuring half his face.
A third image, taken from an elevated position, catching him looking slightly off-camera.
I know that look.
I’ve sat across from it at a library table in Thornfield Hall while a heavy veterinary anatomy textbook sat cracked open and unread between us.
I’ve watched it at Beaned & Brew’d when his dark eyes tracked the room with a slow, heavy focus.
I’ve felt it on a couch in the Hollywood Hills while his thumb traced slow circles against my bare knee.
My fork is on the plate. I don't remember putting it there. My hand is empty, fingers flat against the white tablecloth.
The restaurant noise crashes back in—dishes clattering, people talking, the low hum of the room. A server brushes past my chair. I don’t move. I just sit there and let the truth of it sink straight into my bones.
Jesus Christ.
Kai Ryu is Jae Kim.
My target is the exchange student with the black coffee and the good laugh, the one whose hand traces patterns on my thigh.
It’s the boy who drove me up Mulholland and kissed me against a fogged windshield while LA sprawled out below us.
The one who crouched on linoleum in a vet clinic, palm flat on the floor, waiting for a trembling dog to trust him.
The boy I fell asleep next to last night through a screen, eight thousand miles of ocean between us, listening to the soft static of an open line filling both our rooms.
I close the tablet. The screen goes dark, and the privacy filter turns it completely opaque, hiding my reflection entirely.
The server drops the check. I throw down enough cash to cover it, don't look at the total, and push through the glass doors into the Koreatown night.
My car is parked three levels up. I take the stairs instead of the elevator, my heels cracking against the concrete steps.
I sit in the driver’s seat and leave the engine off. The garage smells like stale exhaust and damp asphalt, completely empty except for my car. I just stare straight ahead through the steering wheel at the concrete wall.
The payout figure sits in the back of my mind, heavy and insistent. The vague reasoning sits next to it, worse—a hollow space where certainty should be, and I have been doing this long enough to know that hollow spaces are where the worst fucking truths live.
I start the car. The engine turns over with a low, smooth rumble, and I pull out of the structure into the neon wash of Western Avenue, heading west toward the Hills without thinking about where I’m going, because thinking is the one thing I cannot afford to do right now.
***
I don’t sleep.
The kitchen island is freezing under my forearms. My secure tablet is propped open in front of me, the contract file for Kai Ryu spread across the screen, and I’ve been sitting here long enough that my lower back is locked up tight.
My chest feels hollow. I force a breath down, locking the panic behind the wall I use for everything else. Because if I actually stop to process what this means, I am completely useless.
What I can't shake, what refuses to be filed away, is the payout.
I have read it enough times now that it has stopped looking like a number and started looking like a life.
No more contracts. No more coded messages arriving at three in the morning through channels that don’t exist on any server a subpoena could touch.
No more rotating fake IDs and weapons caches behind closet panels, no more lying awake calculating exit strategies for scenarios that haven’t happened yet.
Law school, the bar exam, a practice I actually control with my name on the door and clients who hire me for my brain instead of my trigger finger.
The resources to pry open my father's case file, hire the investigators he deserves, and tear apart the conviction that put him in Chino.
Freedom, the clean and permanent kind, bought and paid for with a single job.
I have never had a number like this attached to my name before. I am acutely, painfully aware of what it means that I do now.
So I look for reasons to justify it. I dig into who Jae Kim actually is beneath the exchange student routine.
The Kim family controls Crown and Throne Records.
It’s a massive operation, and empires that size don’t stay clean.
The math doesn’t work in an industry where success is measured in favors, leverage, and threats.
Jae grew up inside that machine. He’s the heir to it.
The alias, the student cover, the careful anonymity he maintained from the day he showed up at Blackthorn with a North Face backpack—it all looks different through the lens of someone who also lives behind a false front.
He has to be hiding something.
I know what hiding something looks like. I do it every day. The attention that never quite settles, the questions deflected with rehearsed precision, the persona built to be just believable enough. I recognize the craft the way a forger spots another forger’s work.
The vague justification in the file still bothers me.
I keep pressing on it like a splinter, working the edge of it with my thumbnail.
Clients at this level protect their reasoning because it's the kind of thing that indicts them.
The thin language is just operational security.
It is exactly what I would expect from someone wealthy enough to attach that number to a contract and paranoid enough to want it done quietly.
But I've never accepted a hit unless it had a valid reason behind it.
By three in the morning, I’ve managed to convince myself, mostly.
It isn't a clean certainty. It just sits in my chest like lead. But I’ve built enough arguments in my life to know the difference between airtight and sufficient. This is sufficient. It has to be sufficient.
I have taken jobs before where I liked the target.
Likability is not a disqualifier. Feelings are not a disqualifier.
The work exists in a separate category from the person, the same way a surgical procedure exists in a separate category from the body on the table.
I have spent ten years perfecting the architecture of that separation.
I did not build those walls so they could collapse the first time someone with a sexy laugh and really good hair looked at me across a library table.
I have spent six hours building the justification. It is not airtight, but it is enough.
It has to be enough.
I set the untouched tea on the coffee table and walk back to the kitchen.
The tablet screen is still dark, but I can still picture Kai Ryu’s surveillance photo frozen in high definition—that candid shot where he’s looking slightly off-camera, completely unaware that the woman staring at his image is the same woman who fell asleep with his voice in her ears twelve hours ago.
I push the thought of his hands away. I push away the way he kissed my forehead, the way he felt like something real in a life built entirely out of lies.
I look at the number. I look at what it buys.
With the cold precision that has kept me alive and free and out of a cell for the past ten years, I tap the screen, sign the intake, and decide that I am going to take the damn hit.