46. Jae
Chapter forty-six
Jae
Evidence markers of a crime committed by people who really, really love Taco Bell currently litter Amiyah’s coffee table.
Fire sauce packets lay scattered about. Crumpled wrappers form a small, sad mountain range between my veterinary pharmacology notes and an abandoned Chalupa shell that, at some point, lost its structural integrity.
Color-coded Post-its cling to the edges of Amiyah’s Constitutional Law text, each neon tab labeled with the kind of precision that suggests she color-coordinates her breakfast cereal.
The entire surface has been colonized by the particular chaos of two people who started the night with finals prep and ended up letting the drive-thru win.
Amiyah sits cross-legged on the blush-pink sectional, her own casebook open in her lap, her blonde hair pulled into a messy bun that somehow still looks intentional. Her voice carries that specific melodic quality she adopts for study nights—warm, focused, each sentence measured and clear.
“The Court held that the zoning ordinance constituted an unconstitutional taking because—” She pauses, her pen hovering over a line of text. “Because it effectively deprived the owner of all economically viable use of his property.”
I nod like I’m absorbing every word. I am not.
Under my veterinary pharmacology text, which I have opened to the exact page describing drug interactions in canines, sits a well-loved volume of Attack on Titan that I am currently three chapters deep into.
My right hand turns a page of manga. My left hand makes a casual, well-practiced grab for the open bag of cinnamon twists sitting beside her hip.
Her hand intercepts mine without her eyes leaving the casebook. The swat is quick, precise, and utterly choreographed—the kind of muscle memory two people develop when they’ve spent enough evenings on this exact couch that the theft and the defense have their own rhythm.
“Mine,” she says, still reading.
“You got the last one.”
“You got the last four.”
“That’s not mathematically possible.”
“Finish your notes and maybe you’ll understand basic arithmetic.”
I retrieve my hand, grinning, and turn another page of manga.
My phone buzzes on the cushion beside me.
I glance at it with the laziness of someone expecting a meme from Kiho—probably a cat with a broken-English caption he thinks is hilarious. What I get instead is the digital equivalent of a fire alarm.
The screen fills with texts. Not one message. A rapid, breathless thread, each bubble arriving before I’ve finished the last, the frantic pace of a man who has finally decided that tonight, right now, is the moment it all comes out.
My fork goes still. Chalupa suspended halfway to my mouth, sauce dripping onto the wrapper in my lap.
Kiho: Did you ever figure out who that was on the roof?
I blink at it. We’d talked about this, briefly, a few weeks back—a figure I’d seen on a rooftop near my building one night, dismissed as nothing because Los Angeles is full of people doing weird things on rooftops.
The next message arrives.
Kiho: The taser. You told me about the taser. The pink compact with rhinestones.
My jaw tightens. I had told him about the taser. In excruciating, regrettable detail, because at the time it had been funny—a story about my girlfriend electrocuting me during foreplay and then having the best sex of my life afterward.
Another message.
Kiho: You said Amiyah’s been distant. Acting weird. You said it yourself on the call.
I did say that, but also, what the fuck does any of this have to do with anything.
I shake my head and scroll a little further.
The gut-punch arrives in all caps:
Kiho: I HIRED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO YOUR LAW STUDENT GIRLFREIND.
The Chalupa shell collapses in my fist, cheese and beef spilling onto the wrapper. I don’t move.
Kiho: There’s nothing. No records that go back more than ten years.
Her undergraduate degree checks out but the trail before that is—it’s not clean, it’s manufactured.
Her digital footprint is hollow. Social media that starts in college, nothing before.
No paper trail that connects. No family photos.
She basically doesn’t exist. THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
My thumb finds the keyboard, grease smudging the glass.
Me: What the fuck, bro? You’re insane.
Kiho’s reply arrives like artillery.
Kiho: She tased you. You said yourself she’s been acting weird. The rooftop thing was not nothing. And I want to be very clear about this, I am almost fucking certain she is the person Baek hired to kill you.
I stare at the screen. The words sit in their blue bubbles, arranged with the breathless conviction of a man who watches too much true crime.
I look up.
Amiyah is uncapping a fresh highlighter.
Pink, of course. The cap clicks off softly, and she sets it neatly beside her color-coded tabs, her fingers moving with the serene, unhurried precision of someone who has never once done anything worth hiding.
A strand of blonde hair has come loose from her bun and curves along her jaw.
She looks, in this exact moment, like the least suspicious person on earth.
I look back at my phone.
Me: You watch too much crime television. I really think you need to get your fucking brain checked, bro.
I put the phone face-down on the cushion. Screen against fabric. Messages buried. The apartment continues its gentle hum around us.
Amiyah glances up. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.” The word comes out smoother than it has any right to. “Kiho’s having a moment. Thinks he’s solved a cold case.”
“What case?”
“His own mental stability.”
She laughs, bright and easy, and returns to her notes. I watch her. The highlighter moves across the page in a clean yellow line. Her lips move slightly as she reads, forming each word with absolute focus.
I pick up my Chalupa. The cheese has congealed, but I eat it anyway because the alternative is sitting here with empty hands and loud thoughts.
The evening continues. Food dwindles. Notes accumulate.
My eyes drop to the phone, face-down on the cushion. Silent.
I reach for another cinnamon twist. Amiyah’s hand intercepts. The swat lands. The rhythm carries us forward, but beneath it, the floor has turned to glass.
Somewhere around eleven, my stomach registers a formal complaint about the volume and combination of industrial-grade fast food I’ve ingested.
I set my veterinary pharmacology text down with the measured calm of a man who is absolutely not about to have a panic attack.
“Bathroom. Be right back.”
Amiyah nods without looking up, highlighter still moving in its relentless yellow line. “Don’t die in there. I’m not explaining that to the coroner.”
“If I die, it’s Taco Bell’s fault, not mine.”
“Already drafting the complaint.”
I make it to the bathroom with my dignity mostly intact. What follows does not. Suffice to say that two Chalupas, fourteen fire sauce packets, and a reckless quantity of cinnamon twists produce chemical warfare.
When the worst has passed, I start rummaging through the cabinet under the sink for air freshener. Anything to transform this small, tiled room back into the pristine sanctuary it was when I walked in.
My hand brushes against the back of the cabinet. Behind a stack of folded pink towels, pushed slightly too far back to be casual, my fingers hit something that isn’t terrycloth.
It’s a panel. Smooth, finished, matching the cabinet interior. It gives under my fingertips with a soft, precise click—the kind of mechanism installed by someone who understood exactly what they were hiding.
I stare at it. Then I open it.
Inside: a matte handgun, clean and meticulously maintained, resting in a custom cutout.
Beside it, several passports fanned out like playing cards, each bearing Amiyah’s face under different names—Amiyah Lane, yes, but others I don't stop to read.
A birth certificate that matches none of them.
A thick envelope of cash in at least four currencies, bound with rubber bands, organized by denomination with the exact same meticulous logic she applies to her law notes.
I close the panel. The click is softer this time, almost apologetic.
I sit back down on the bathroom floor, my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the clinical white ceiling. Certain things rearrange themselves with a clarity that feels violent.
Kiho’s texts. The taser—not a kink, but a weapon that failed because denim is thicker than she calculated. The rooftop figure I dismissed. The moment months ago when a text came through on her phone and her body locked completely still.
I wash my hands. I lather twice. Rinse. Dry my hands on a pink towel that smells like her shampoo.
The mirror shows a face I recognize but suddenly don’t trust. Dark eyes. Sharp jaw. I look at myself until a single drop of water falls from the faucet, breaking the silence.
Then I open the door and walk back out.
Amiyah is still on the couch. Casebook open. Highlighter uncapped. The apartment is exactly as I left it.
“Everything okay?” she asks, not looking up.
“Fine.” My voice is an effortless, practiced lie. “Taco Bell and I had a disagreement. I won, but it was close.”
She laughs, warm and genuine, and it hits my chest like a physical blow.
I sit back down. I pick up my textbook. I do not look at the hallway. I look at the page in front of me, where a diagram of a canine cardiovascular system stares back with blank indifference.
My eyes track to the hallway—just a fraction—when she gets up to refill her water glass.
Small tells. The kind of cracks that only someone watching for them would notice, and Amiyah is not watching for them because Amiyah, I am suddenly certain, has never had to look for cracks in anyone. She makes them.
I steal another cinnamon twist. She swats my hand. The rhythm carries us forward, a dance we know by muscle memory, even as the floorboards beneath us turn to thin ice.
Somewhere past midnight, her responses slow down. The highlighter drifts. Mid-sentence—something about regulatory takings and public use—her voice trails off. Her head tips sideways against the armrest. Her fingers relax around the highlighter, the plastic cap still snug against the end.
I watch her. The steady rise and fall of her breathing. The strand of blonde hair curving across her cheek. The absolute, unguarded softness that takes over her face in sleep, all her meticulous precision momentarily surrendered.
I pull the heavy pink blanket from the back of the couch and tuck it carefully around her shoulders.
My hands don't shake. They have no business being steady—not when I have a contract on my head and a hidden matte pistol sitting ten feet away in the hall bathroom—but they move with practiced gentleness anyway.
I lean down and press a kiss to her forehead. Soft. Unhurried. The way I always do.
Then I grab a throw pillow, drop it on the cold hardwood beside the couch, and settle down on the floor.
My phone sits face-down on the cushion, silent and ignored.
And as I close my eyes against the polished concrete floor, caught between a looming death warrant and the woman sleeping five feet above me who might be the shadow pulling the trigger, I realize the most dangerous part of it all isn't the weapons she hides in the walls or whatever lies might be framing her past.
It’s that even with the suspicion clawing at my ribs, even knowing what she might be, I’d still take her over any safety the world has to offer.