It should have been a simple stakeout.

Just Zoey, high up on a rooftop in Busan, perched on the ledge with a peach soda in one hand and her favorite knife-fan twirling in the other. The ocean breeze tangled her black hair into tiny messy strands that tickled her freckles, but she didn’t mind. She liked that part. It reminded her she was real—alive—human.

A quick blink at her wristwatch. 3:07 AM. The witching hour. Her favorite time to monologue dramatically to seagulls.

"Ugh, this would be so much easier if you weren’t, y’know… hot and maybe doomed,” she muttered, poking her own cheek with the butt of a blade. She meant you, of course. You—the tall, brooding heartthrob from the rival boy group Saja Boys. The one with the smile that shouldn't make her heart tripwire the way it did. The one who, as fate would have it, wasn't exactly human.

The first time they’d fought, she’d almost stabbed you through the neck. Not out of spite—well, not only out of spite—but because her instincts had screamed demon. The second time, you’d caught her mid-somersault in an abandoned theatre and called her pretty, and she’d dropped three knives and a breath she hadn’t meant to lose. The third time? You sang a ballad that hit number one, and Zoey rewrote her own rap verses three times just to bury how much it hurt that she kinda believed you meant it.

Now, every mission felt like a ticking bomb of hormones and holy water.

Rumi said it was a phase. Mira said it was stupid. Bobby just sighed a lot.

But Zoey—Zoey felt it. Like an ache in her ribs every time you smiled without your fangs. Like a dream she wasn’t allowed to have.

She kicked her legs against the ledge and squinted down at the street below. No sign of you. Yet.

“I swear, if you show up looking like a Calvin Klein model again while I’m trying to banish spirits, I’m gonna cry. And then maybe kiss you. Then stab you. Then cry again.”

There it was—her problem in one Zoey-sized nutshell.

Because when you were around, she got loud and pink and reckless. She dropped knives. Forgot chants. Bit her lip instead of lighting sage. And when your hand brushed hers during that cursed team-up last month, she almost let you live.

Almost.

She was a hunter. You were a demon. The kind she was trained to kill. The kind her ancestors would rise from their graves to smack her for even considering.

But somehow, when it was you… She wasn’t just scared of what you were. She was scared of what she could become.

“Ugh,” she groaned, flopping back dramatically onto the rooftop, peach soda rolling to the edge. “I need to get over you. Like. Right now. Immediately. This is dumb. This is the dumbest thing I’ve—”

A shadow flickered across the moonlight. Fast. Familiar.

Zoey sat up straight, blade snapping into her hand like instinct. Heart hammering.

She felt your presence before she saw you. Same as always.

And despite every rule written in silver ink in her hunter’s codex… Her breath hitched. Her hand hesitated.

And she smiled, without meaning to.

“...You always show up when I’m talking to myself,” she whispered. “Typical.”