40. Amiyah
Chapter forty
Amiyah
Four-seventeen in the morning is not a real time. It is a fabricated construct invented solely to punish people who make poor life choices, like staring at a ceiling for four hours replaying the exact, excruciating frame where two red cups slid six inches across a laminate tabletop.
I do not blow assignments. I don't lose my head, and I certainly don't stand frozen in a crowd like a panicked rookie because somebody bumped my elbow.
Perfection isn't a goal in my line of work; it's the mandatory fee for staying alive. And yet, there it is on an endless, looping playback in my skull—the slide of the cups, the mixing of the drinks, the total, pathetic collapse of a protocol I’ve spent years executing blindfolded.
I’m already awake when a sharp, rapid rattle echoes down the hall—three quick raps against my door, followed by a fourth, heavier kick. I don’t even need to check my security camera to know who its is.
I pad across the apartment in bare feet and a sleep shirt that’s seen better decades, the hardwood freezing against my soles and pull the door open.
Penelope looks like she was dragged through a paper shredder and reassembled by someone with a severe grudge against symmetry.
Her dark hair is crammed under a beanie the exact shade of a gas station parking lot.
She’s wearing yesterday’s blazer over yesterday’s jeans, the purple highlights along her temples crushed flat against her skull.
She clutches a half-empty can of Alani Nu, the kind of pastel energy drink she treats like an oxygen supply.
“Let me in, bitch,” she says, sidestepping me before I can form a syllable. “We need to talk.”
Penelope drops onto my sectional with the graceless authority of someone who has sat on this exact cushion approximately nine hundred times and does not require an invitation.
She sets the energy drink on the coffee table with a dull clack and pulls her beanie off, running a hand through her flattened hair.
“They’re starting to ask why you haven’t pulled the trigger.”
The words land in the thick, still air of the apartment with the weight of something that’s been sitting in the room since I opened the door. I cross my arms over my chest, my sleep shirt riding up at the hem, feeling the heavy, trapped heat of the Los Angeles night clinging to my bare legs.
“You’re not known for taking this long,” Penelope continues, her voice stripped of its usual sardonic cushion. “That’s exactly why they’re suspicious.”
She doesn’t accuse me of anything. She doesn’t have to. Her eyes find mine in the half-dark and hold there, steady and warm and entirely fucking terrifying because Penelope Gardner does not show up at four in the morning to deliver good news.
I lean against the kitchen island, the smooth marble cool against my palms. “How suspicious?”
“Enough that they came straight to me to find out what’s going on.” She picks up the energy drink, takes a sip that looks more performative than thirsty, and sets it back down. “Which means they’re watching you. Which means they want answers.”
The math unfolds in my head without my permission. People at the top don't ask questions unless they're running out of patience. And in the underground, running out of patience is just one step away from cutting losses.
“I blew it,” I murmur, the words tasting like ash against my teeth.
Penelope freezes, her hand halting halfway to her flattened hair. “What?”
“At the frat house.” I push off the island, pacing two steps toward the window and back, the hardwood warm beneath my bare soles.
“I had the drinks. I sat them down on the table, and someone bumped right into me.
The cups slid right past each other. I couldn't tell which was which. In the panic, I grabbed them, handed him one, and then later dumped the other one into a potted fern while we were mingling. And then I watched him drink the whole thing, and nothing happened. I gave him the wrong fucking drink, Pen.”
Penelope stares at me, her chest stilling beneath the crumpled blazer. The sardonic edge completely vanishes from her face, replaced by a sharp, horrified comprehension.
“You lost track,” she whispers.
“I lost track,” I repeat, my voice cracking before I can lock it down. “I really fucked shit up, Pen.”
Penelope’s eyebrow arches. Just one. The left one. It’s her tell—the single, infinitesimal crack in her otherwise flawless poker face that means I see right through you and I’m choosing not to say it out loud.
“So you need a new approach,” she says, not a question, her voice dropping into something steady and grounding.
“I do.”
“And when are you planning to utilize this new approach?”
“This Friday, and I already have a plan.”
She studies me for a long beat, her head tilted slightly, the purple streak catching what little light there is.
Then she nods, once, decisive. “Good. Because the board’s patience has a shelf life, and we’re approaching the expiration date.”
Penelope’s warning doesn’t need to be underlined.
The Underground tolerates a lot of things. Excellence, discretion, creative problem-solving. What they do not tolerate is hesitation. And the excuse of being careful sounds increasingly hollow.
I push off the island. My arms are still crossed, and the plan I’’ve been turning over in my head through hours of brutal, sleepless quiet crystallizes into something cold and airtight.
She picks up her energy drink, drains the last of it with a grimace, and crushes the can one-handed. “I’ll run camera wipes along his route. The usual coverage. You focus on execution.”
She heads for the door, pulling the beanie back over her crushed hair. I follow her, the apartment still dark behind us, the city a smear of distant light beyond the windows.
At the threshold, she pauses, one hand on the doorframe. “Amiyah.”
I look at her.
“Don’t overthink it,” she says, and her voice is so gentle it almost breaks me. “Just do the job and get it over with.”
The door closes behind her with a soft, final click.
Scene 2
Friday comes quickly and I’m standing in my kitchen, staring at my phone like a madwoman before I actually type anything. The cursor blinks in the empty message field, accusing me with every pulse.
Me: Still on for Friday?
The reply comes faster than I expect.
Jae: Wouldn't miss it. Can't wait to see you. Seven-ish?
Me: Seven-ish. Don't forget the wine.
Jae: Already picked it up. The good stuff. Not the shit that comes with a twist-off cap and existential regret.
I stare at the screen, my thumb hovering over the keyboard. The Sparkle Shock Compact sits on my desk, its rhinestones catching the afternoon light with innocent, glittering precision. The plan is clean. The plan is simple. The plan holds.
Amiyah: High standards.
Jae: I have them where it counts.
I set the phone down without replying. The apartment is quiet, too quiet, and somewhere in the back of my skull, a very small, very quiet voice asks me what the hell I think I'm doing.
I’m doing what needs to be done. That’s what.
Ugh, this shouldn’t be so nerve-racking.
The chicken is marinating in a glass dish on the counter, the lemon and garlic scent cutting through the sweetness of the diffuser.
I stir the pasta sauce with a wooden spoon that cost more than most people’s dinner entrées, and the apartment around me is doing its best impression of a lifestyle magazine spread that has never once contemplated the concept of mortality.
The entire place smells like someone’s idea of a perfect Friday night, and absolutely nothing like a staged kill site, which is exactly the point and also exactly the problem.
Penelope’s voice hums in my earpiece. “Route’s clear,” she says.
“Building cameras are scrubbed. Garage footage loops at twenty-minute intervals. His building’s cameras will only show him coming home from the clinic.
You’ve got a clean window from the moment he steps off the elevator.
No one will ever know he even stepped foot in your apartment. ”
“Copy that.” I give the sauce another stir. It bubbles, thick and red, and the steam rises into my face with a warmth that feels obscenely normal. “Twins status?”
“Parked in the service alley behind your building. Engine off, lights dark. They’re running silent until you call.”
The plan is sequenced and clean. Sparkle Shock Compact to drop him fast—fifty thousand volts through the nervous system, immediate neuromuscular lockup.
Then a precise, microscopic dose of potassium chloride directly into a central vein to induce a fatal cardiac arrest. Because potassium naturally floods the bloodstream through post-mortem cell breakdown, any standard toxicology panel will write it off as a natural anomaly.
The twins handle the physical side: scrubbing my apartment of any trace he was ever here, then transporting his body back to stage it at his own apartment.
Penelope handles the digital end, wiping the feeds, leaving us with an airtight, natural-looking case within twenty-four hours.
I have run the logic seventeen times. It holds. The math is solid. The variables are controlled.
I am also marinating chicken for a man I am planning to murder in approximately ninety minutes, and the cognitive dissonance is so sharp it’s almost funny.
Almost.
“The compact’s charged?” Penelope asks, her voice careful in that particular way she gets when she’s holding something back.
“Fully. Tested it this morning.” I reach for the salt, sprinkle it into the sauce with the precision of someone who is absolutely not thinking about how a man’s body responds to a lethal micro-dose. “Battery’s at a hundred percent. It’ll drop him.”
“Good.” A pause. The sound of keys clicking on her end. “Route’s still clear. He left the clinic twelve minutes ago. Heading north on Westwood toward your apartment. ETA to your place... call it thirty-five, forty minutes.”
“He already told me he picked it up last night. The good stuff.”