54. Amiyah
Chapter fifty-four
Amiyah
The apartment doesn’t feel empty; it feels haunted.
My phone sits face-up on the blush sectional, screen dark, then lighting up with another push notification, then dark again.
The espresso machine went cold somewhere around ten this morning.
A full mug sits on the kitchen island, a gray film of skin hardening over the top—hours of nothing happening while I stay frozen in the exact same spot.
I don’t drink it. I don’t move it. I don’t do anything except sit with my legs pulled up and my pink oversized hoodie swallowing my hands and my hair loose against my shoulders in a way that would piss me off if I had the capacity for annoyance right now.
The hoodie smells like him. Like Jae—like…
Kai. The clean-cotton-cedar thing that clung to his clothes after laundry, which I noticed approximately months ago and have been pretending not to notice ever since, and now the hoodie smells like it because I slept in it last night, or the night before, or whenever the last time I changed clothes was, and at some point the boundary between his scent and mine dissolved completely, and now the hoodie just smells like both of us, which is a hell of a problem for a garment I am currently wearing in an apartment where one of those people is officially dead and the other one is officially losing her fucking mind while she tells herself she is fine. Everything is fine.
The TV over the fireplace loops the same five minutes of footage.
Seoul stage lights, purple and blinding.
A practice room mirror, sweat-dark hair, a laugh caught off-camera.
Then the internet grief: monochrome photos, white font lyrics slapped over sad piano tracks.
Candle emojis piling up by the thousands.
I’ve watched it long enough that my brain stopped registering it as language and just started treating it like wallpaper.
The montage stutters, the screen goes blue for half a second, and then his parents are there.
His father first. A man in a navy suit standing in what looks like a corporate lobby in Seoul, the Crown & Throne Records logo visible on a wall behind him, rendered in the minimalist geometry that costs more money than most people will ever see.
His voice is measured. Public. The careful register of a man who has been giving statements to cameras since before the invention of high-definition.
Our son lived courageously and loved deeply.
Each word placed with the precision of someone setting silverware.
He found purpose in service to others, and in his final years, he built something that belonged entirely to him.
Then his mother. She stands a half-step behind her husband’s shoulder, her hand on his arm, her eyes holding the camera with a warmth that cuts through the high-definition like something that wasn’t meant to be captured at this resolution.
He spent his final years exactly as he wished, she says, and her voice has a tremor in it that his father’s does not—small, controlled, the vibration of a woman who is holding something together through sheer force of maternal will.
Surrounded by people who made him happy.
My jaw tightens. The muscle works along the hinge, a slow, grinding pressure that travels up into my temple and settles there like a headache that’s decided to take up permanent residence.
My chest rises and falls in a rhythm so shallow it barely qualifies as breathing.
Inhale: one-two-three. Hold: one-two. Exhale: one-two-three-four.
The cadence Marcus taught me for situations where your autonomic nervous system has decided it no longer wishes to be autonomic, and you need to manually override the damn settings before you pass out.
My eyes don’t water. My hands don’t shake.
I have been sitting in this exact configuration for long enough that the sectional cushion has molded to the shape of my body, and the TV has cycled back to the promotional photo—the one where he’s mid-laugh, head tilted, looking at something off-camera with the bright focus of a man who has just been surprised by joy and is allowing himself to be surprised by it.
The photo is high-resolution. I can see the crease at the corner of his eye, the way his lower lip catches against his teeth when the laugh is real, the small shadow under his jaw where the stubble had started to come in that afternoon because he’d shaved that morning and then spent eight hours in whatever photo call produced this goddamned image.
I don’t cry. Crying would require a decision, and decisions require energy, and energy is a resource I allocated elsewhere approximately forty-eight hours ago and have not yet replenished.
So I sit. The mug goes colder. The TV cycles.
The phone buzzes, goes dark, buzzes again.
The world continues its indifferent rotation around an axis that no longer contains Jae Kim, and I am fine, I am completely fine, I am sitting on a blush sectional in a pink hoodie not crying, which is the textbook definition of fine, and if anyone were to walk through that door right now and ask me how I’m doing, I would say fine with such convincing certainty that they would believe me immediately, because fine is a performance I have been refining since approximately the age of twelve, and at twenty-six, I have achieved a level of technical proficiency that borders on art.
The door opens without a knock.
Penelope walks in with her own key, which she has had since approximately the third week I lived here, because friendship with Penelope Gardner involves a surrender of privacy that happens early and happens completely and is never discussed afterward.
She’s dressed like she came straight from a client meeting—dark blazer, charcoal trousers, the purple highlights in her dark brown hair pulled back in a knot so tight it looks like it hurts.
The beauty mark above her left lip is sharp against her skin, a period at the end of a sentence her face has been writing since birth.
She drops her bag on the entryway table—a leather tote that probably costs more than my monthly rent—and crosses the kitchen without looking at the TV, without looking at the cold espresso, without looking at me in the comprehensive way that would require her to acknowledge what the hell is happening in this room.
She doesn’t say I’m sorry. She doesn’t ask how I’m doing.
She opens her bag, pulls out a slim manila folder, and slides it across the kitchen island with two fingers.
The movement is precise—economical, unhurried, the efficient geometry of someone who has assessed a situation and identified the most direct way to rip a scab off.
The name on the tab: SEO-JIN BAEK.
I pick it up. The folder is warm from her bag, the manila slightly soft at the edges from handling.
Inside: a digital dossier printed clean on heavyweight paper.
Shell company diagrams rendered in the clinical clarity of someone who understands that financial architecture is just another kind of weapon.
A headshot of Baek at some industry gala—tailored charcoal suit, silver at the temples, the practiced smile that reaches his eyes just convincingly enough to make the cold behind it land harder when you notice it.
Financial routing maps tracing the path from Baek Sound Group through three layers of holding companies to a numbered account in Singapore that paid the contract fee.
The figure sits in the high six digits, printed in black Helvetica, and my brain does the conversion to won automatically, because that’s the kind of useless arithmetic my mind defaults to when the useful kind has become too heavy to carry.
Penelope leans against the counter, arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other.
Her expression is composed—the calibrated neutrality of someone who has delivered worse news in worse rooms and has developed a relationship with bad information that borders on professional.
Then the smile. Small. Precise. The upward tilt at one corner of her mouth that means she has thought about this moment, rehearsed it, and is now allowing herself the small luxury of enjoying it.
“Thought you might appreciate this one,” she says.
I read it. Line by line. The shell companies.
The routing. The cold architecture of a man who built his violence at such careful distance that he convinced himself it wasn’t violence at all—just business, just competition, the necessary arithmetic of an industry that treats people as assets and liabilities and nothing in between.
I read the contract timeline. The date the hit was commissioned.
The date the replacement was briefed. The grinding efficiency of a machine that was going to kill Jae with or without me, and the only difference my involvement made was that he got to choose how it happened, and I got to choose who paid for the damn thing.
Something shifts behind my eyes. A recalibration—the focus returning, the peripheral noise dropping away, the world narrowing to the page in my hands and the name at the top of it and the cold, clean arithmetic of a problem that has a solution I am qualified to execute.
For the first time in about a month, the hollow space behind my sternum fills with something that isn’t grief.
It’s older than grief. It’s more familiar.
It’s the warm pressure of a weapon settling into a hand that knows exactly what the fuck to do with it.
I look up at Penelope. She hasn’t moved. Her arms are still crossed, her weight still against the counter, her eyes holding mine with the steady attention of someone who has been waiting for this exact moment and is not surprised that it has arrived.
“Flight leaves at nine,” she says.