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GOTHAM.
The Gotham Clock Tower pulsed with a steady, low current—part electricity, part memory. It wasn’t majestic; it was aged infrastructure held together by rust, legacy, and whatever else refused to break. Still, it held a presence that pressed into the bones, the kind that made Wonwoo instinctively lower her voice. The space behind the clock face was dense with hanging cables, half-disassembled panels, overstuffed toolboxes, and a sprawl of monitors blinking with security feeds, data scrolls, and chopped-up lines of code. A flickering canopy of artificial light covered everything in a pale, unsettled glow.
And beneath it all—beneath the blinking lights and the quiet breath of machines—was the weight of Jihoon’s presence. Even now, even seated calmly at the center of the room, she radiated the kind of sharp confidence that made Wonwoo’s skin crawl with nerves. Jihoon had been Batgirl before Wonwoo, before the city turned her into something else—Oracle now, mythic, untouchable. And Wonwoo, with her too-new suit and restless hands, felt the itch of inadequacy clawing just beneath her ribs. Being here felt like standing in a test she hadn’t studied for, one she still desperately wanted to pass. The ticking of the clock wasn’t just time—it was pressure. And it never stopped.
Next to Jihoon, stood Seungcheol—the Bat himself—arms crossed, barely illuminated by the blue tint from the monitors. He didn’t move. He watched her the way he always did—measured, thoughtful, heavy with things he didn’t say. It wasn’t the kind of gaze that sought answers. It was the kind that silently waited to see who would flinch first. Wonwoo had learned not to.
Wonwoo cleared her throat. “You said it was urgent.”
Jihoon didn’t turn around. She looked like she’d been there for hours, fingers a blur as they navigated three screens worth of corrupted footage and live grid feedback. Her glasses were fogged slightly from the drizzle. Her mouth moved constantly—not always out loud. Sometimes just mumbling to herself.
Seungcheol turned to her. “It is.”
Jihoon exhaled slowly, the glow of the monitors painting her face in soft blue. “We’ve been tracing the pattern for weeks now. Still no direct footage of the suspect—whoever they are, they know how to slip the nets. But the signature’s consistent. Chest cavity ruptured. A bloom left where the heart used to be. Every time.”
She paused, narrowing her eyes at one of the screens before continuing. “All the victims were tied to the same sector—government-sanctioned contractors. They pushed through development orders that cleared protected land up north, dumped industrial waste into the river system like it didn’t matter. High-level clearances. No oversight. They left scars on the ground that won’t heal anytime soon.”
Her gaze flicked to Wonwoo, unreadable. “Whoever’s doing this… they’ve got an affinity for the natural world. It bothered them enough to start pulling hearts from chests. And that’s not ideology. That’s grief. That’s fury.”
Wonwoo stepped closer, studying the feed. The images were brutal. Frozen moments of violence with something delicate seeded into them—a flower bloomed where the heart should’ve been. Petals curled around bone. Vines rooted in collapsed lungs. The death was silent, clean, efficient.
Seungcheol finally stepped forward. His presence, always larger than life, seemed to draw heat from the room. When he handed Wonwoo the encrypted drive, she felt the shape of it long after it left his palm.
“You’re the only one I trust with this,” he said, voice low. “I don’t need this resolved quickly. I need it resolved cleanly.”
For the first time in a long while, Wonwoo let herself feel something like pride. It curled uncomfortably in her chest, too close to her ribs. They didn’t give her cases like this unless it mattered. Unless Batman thought she could handle it.
She knew the city was scared. People whispered the killer’s name like an urban myth. Poison Ivy. No backstory. Just a murderer who moved like a shadow and left gardens where bodies should’ve been. The media called them a serial killer. Underground networks called them a revolutionary. Some even called them a prophet.
Wonwoo just called it a problem.
She nodded. “I’ll take it.”
Seungcheol laid a hand on her shoulder. Heavy. Steady. Wonwoo tried not to buckle under the weight of his expectations.
“Report back when you hear something,” he said. “I trust you on this.”
Wonwoo nodded.
The drive was still warm when she tucked it into her utility belt. It felt like more than a data slug—it felt like a baton being passed in a race she didn’t know the distance of. Wonwoo stood there a second longer after Seungcheol turned away and left into the night, the weight of his hand lingering in phantom pressure on her shoulder. It didn’t comfort her. Not really. Seungcheol’s approval was a rare thing, but it came with its own kind of gravity. When he trusted you, he expected you to deliver.
“You really think they’re doing this alone?” Wonwoo asked, her voice quieter now.
Jihoon shrugged. “They might be. They’re not using tech. No drones, no AI. Everything organic. Everything… responsive.”
“Responsive?”
“They’re not controlling the plants,” Jihoon said, now fully turning around to face Wonwoo. “They’re part of them. Like an extension of her nervous system. That’s what these crime scenes say. When they move, the vines move. It doesn’t seem like we’re dealing with a human.”
She nodded. A beat passed.
“Be safe,” Jihoon added, searching her face.
Wonwoo looked out over the city, her fingers tightening around her grapple gun. “I’m always careful.”
Jihoon sighed as Wonwoo turned to walk away, muttering, “That’s not the same as being safe.”
The alley behind the textile mill was narrower than Wonwoo expected, pinched between two buildings that hadn’t seen renovation since before she was born. The walls sweated rust and runoff, cracked brickwork sagging under the weight of age and condensation. A single industrial light buzzed above the scene, casting the whole thing in a sickly yellow light. The corpse hadn’t been moved yet. It sat slumped beside a loading door, arms outstretched in a posture that felt too deliberate to be the result of death alone. Blood soaked into the fractured concrete beneath him, spider webbing in red arcs beneath a bloom of white petals unfurling from his sternum. The flower was ghostly, too clean for the city it existed in, its stem dark, almost black. It looked like it had grown there.
Wonwoo knelt slowly as she examined the edges of the bloom. No signs of adhesive. No surgical incision. Just a clean puncture, and inside—organic material rooted where a heart had been. She made mental notes: same floral signature as the last victims, same targeted placement. Only difference this time was that she had arrived before the site was entirely overrun. Police scanners hadn’t caught up yet. No yellow tape. No news drones. Just her and a death she couldn’t prevent staring back at her.
She leaned closer, noting red scarring along the corpse’s jaw. It wasn’t decomposition—it was chemical, etched in a faint shape. A mouth. Ivy’s lips, it seemed, did more than wound. Wonwoo reached for her recorder, flicking it on with a thumb.
“Victim is male, mid-forties, ID pending,” she muttered. “Puncture wound center mass, flora emerging from primary cavity. No defensive wounds. No external trauma aside from…” She paused, squinting at the burn mark. “Branding. Possibly a kiss. Same as prior cases. Time of death… less than an hour ago.”
“You always talk to yourself like that?”
Wonwoo didn’t jump. She just looked up, already recognizing the voice.
Soonyoung—Robin, Batman’s partner—stood a few feet behind her, posture relaxed, one foot braced against the wall as if they were loitering outside a bar and not standing over the remains of a man recently murdered by an eco-terrorist. The bright colours of his outfit stood starkly against the pale lightning in the alley.
“Helps me remember things,” Wonwoo replied, standing up. “Not all of us are good with casual banter while staring down a corpse.”
Soonyoung chuckled, stepping forward and tilting his head toward the body. “You get used to it after a while.”
Wonwoo didn’t laugh. She glanced at the flower again. “That’s the part I’m trying to avoid.”
The silence that followed was thick but not uncomfortable. Soonyoung crouched beside her, scanning the scene with a practiced eye. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t need to. Wonwoo could feel his quiet respect in the way he didn’t challenge her observations, didn’t undercut her process. And still, there was something about him that pressed on her nerves—an ease, a fluidity in how he moved through this work. She envied it. Envied the way Batman trusted him without the same weight of expectation.
Soonyoung didn’t look at her when he spoke. “It’s not about prevention. Not really.”
Wonwoo exhaled slowly through her nose. “I know.”
“No, I mean—” He paused, then turned, finally meeting her eyes. “She’s not stopping anyone. These men, the ones she’s targeting—they’ve already done it. Already signed the contracts, dumped the waste, cleared the land. She’s not cutting the cord before it snaps. She’s showing up after, dragging the body into the light.”
Wonwoo stared at the thin stream of blood dripping sluggishly from the man’s chest. “It’s revenge.”
Soonyoung nodded. “Calculated. Surgical. It feels personal—this brutality.”
There was a long silence after that. Just the quiet hum of the fan struggling overhead and the distant groan of pipes.
“She’s punishing them,” Wonwoo said, almost to herself. “Not for what they might do. For what they already did.”
Soonyoung got up and away from the corpse. “Which means she’s not going to stop. Not until she thinks it’s balanced.”
Wonwoo didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the floor, jaw tight, like the word balanced was something that tasted wrong in her mouth.
“First one since you took the case, right?” Soonyoung asked finally, steering the conversation towards a safer territory.
“Yeah,” she said. “Still fresh. Maybe I’ll catch Ivy’s trail.”
Soonyoung’s expression didn’t shift, but his voice lowered just slightly. “That’s the plan. But don’t run yourself flat trying to win something that was already yours.”
Wonwoo shot him a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You think Batman gave you this case because you had something to prove,” Soonyoung said, rising to his feet. Wonwoo wondered if her desperation was that obvious. “But that’s not it. He gave it to you because you were the only one who could see it through. You’re sharper than the rest of us. Hungrier.”
She didn’t reply right away. Pride and suspicion warred in her throat. Soonyoung’s compliment felt real, but she didn’t know how to hold it. Didn’t know how to hear those words without bracing for the next blow.
He stepped back toward the alley mouth, pausing in the dim wash of the streetlight. “Oh. Almost forgot.” He reached into his utility belt and pulled out a slip of paper, passing it to her like it meant nothing.
“What’s this?” Wonwoo asked, frowning.
“Oracle’s been digging. She cracked the database Ivy breached during her second hit. Followed a trail.” Soonyoung paused, watching her reaction. “Her name’s Minghao.”
The word settled into her chest like a stone. Wonwoo folded the paper, tucked it away.
“Thought you’d want to know,” Soonyoung said, already turning to grapple away from the scene.
By the time the thirteenth corpse was pulled from the basement of a condemned library, Wonwoo had stopped counting. The pattern had carved itself into her retinas: chest cavity split like a rotten fruit, a bloom of waxy petals erupting from where the heart should have been. She knew the stench of it now, could summon the metallic rot and sap-thick perfume at will. Each crime scene was a mirror, and each reflection revealed a little more of her own failure.
She had followed the signal to the Amusement Mile, a dead amusement park that hadn’t seen a civilian in over a decade. The earth had tried to swallow it—mold crawling down the walls, tree roots pressing through the cracks like veins through thin skin. The air was warm with rot and heavy with silence. Her boots echoed in shallow, irregular taps as she moved through the dark, each one louder than it should have been. This was the quiet of something waiting to breathe.
The moment the signal spiked, she knew. She didn't need the thermal ping to confirm it. The presence was unmistakable.
Poison Ivy.
Wonwoo ducked into a tunnel still damp from the rain earlier that morning. Water beaded down the walls, fed into little rivulets on the ground. Her hand hovered near the grip of her sidearm. She kept her shoulders squared, her stance ready. Fear scratched at the edges of her throat like smoke.
Poison Ivy stood over the man like a surgeon. Her silhouette was framed by the sputtering overhead light—leaves clung to her like armor, each curve deliberate, her long black hair draped like a shroud. A smattering of flowers hung from the strands. Vines twisted gently at her feet, pulsing in rhythm with something unseen. She didn’t look up.
For a moment, Wonwoo hesitated. She'd come prepared to stop something monstrous—not someone so eerily calm. But, the man was still breathing, faintly. His eyes blinked in slow confusion, his lips mouthing something soundless. He was still alive. She had time.
"Step away from him," Wonwoo said, voice steady but taut.
Poison Ivy—Minghao—didn’t flinch. She turned slowly, like she was too bored to be surprised. Her skin held a faint green tint, as if the earth had claimed her for its own. Black hair spilled down her back, tangled with pale flowers that looked like they’d bloomed there. Leaves layered over her body in careful arrangements. But it was her lips, black as ink, that held Wonwoo’s gaze. She’d seen the burns they left behind. Kiss-shaped, and lethal.
Her eyes met Wonwoo’s, unreadable. Her voice was soft. "You made it."
Wonwoo raised her weapon. She wasn’t here for a conversation.
"I won’t let you do this again."
Minghao studied her for a long, excruciating beat. "Then stop me."
Wonwoo fired.
The rubber bullet exploded from the barrel with force—her aim trained on the chest, non-lethal, incapacitating. But before it reached her, a vine lashed out from the ground with unnatural precision, knocking it off course. Another shot forward, wrapping around Wonwoo’s wrist like a lasso, twisting until her fingers spasmed and dropped the gun. It clattered out of reach, metal skidding into shadow.
Wonwoo didn’t think. She lunged, her boots slipping across the wet stone. She tackled Minghao bodily, slamming them both to the ground. There was a moment, a brief second of weight and friction, where she thought she had her. She gripped at her shoulders, tried to press a zip tie against her wrist, but the vines moved again.
They didn’t just react. They anticipated.
Two of them wrapped her torso, one around her leg. The next second she was airborne—lifted, twisted, and slammed into the wall with a force that rattled her teeth. Her head snapped back, helmet jarring. The pain was immediate and white-hot.
She dangled there, held like an insect in a web. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs. Minghao rose to her feet, brushing dirt from her knees.
“You’re loud,” she said.
“Let him go,” Wonwoo hissed. The effort to speak made her ribs scream.
“He’s already gone.”
“No, he’s not—”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t get to.
The vine that had been resting idly against the man’s chest pierced forward in a flash—no build-up, no fanfare. Just one brutal, practiced motion. The sound was obscene. A wet, cracking bloom. His body jolted once, then stilled. A dark spot spread through his shirt. Petals followed.
Wonwoo stopped struggling. Her eyes burned. Her vision blurred. She wasn’t even sure if she was blinking anymore. Her limbs trembled from restraint and futility and exhaustion and rage. The man was gone. She had been there, and it still wasn’t enough.
Minghao approached slowly, her bare feet silent against the floor. The vines adjusted, shifting Wonwoo’s position as she came closer, lifting her chin with gentle precision. She reached up and gently touched her cheek through the mask.
“Always hiding,” she murmured, almost to herself.
Wonwoo tried to pull away. The vines tightened slightly. She was helpless.
Minghao peeled the mask back and off with a careful hand. Her fingers were cold. Once uncovered, she studied Wonwoo’s face, steady and quiet, like she was something worth studying. All at once, she looked unbearably human. Wonwoo should’ve felt fear. Should’ve moved. But she couldn’t remember if she had ever been touched with such gentleness, and she didn’t know what to do with the ache it left behind.
“Your eyes,” Minghao whispered, her breath ghosting against Wonwoo’s lips. “It’s like looking into a mirror.”
Then, without asking, without warning, Minghao leaned in and pressed her lips to the swell of Wonwoo’s cheek.
The burn was immediate. The sting flared out like a match catching fire, sharp and painful, blossoming against her skin in the same obscene tenderness Wonwoo had seen on the faces of the dead.
She gasped, biting back a half-choked sound.
Minghao didn’t smile. She stepped away like she hadn’t just branded her. The vines lowered Wonwoo to the floor.
She landed on her knees and clutched at her face.
The body was still beside her, the flower blooming through his chest like an accusation.
When she looked away from the man, Poison Ivy had disappeared into the green like she had never been there at all.
Wonwoo had never learned the soft shape of a hand until long after it stopped mattering. In her earliest memories, hands were always fists—blunt tools for correction. Her father had been a killer before he was anything else, and by the time she was old enough to speak, he was already molding her into a weapon he could aim. There were no bedtime stories. No lullabies. No warm meals unless earned. Just bruises in the shape of discipline and praise that landed with a closed palm.
An approaching hand meant impact. It was muscle memory, the way she flinched. The way she didn’t cry, not because she was brave, but because she had learned that pain drew more of the same.
The first time he handed her a blade, she was eleven. He didn’t say much. Just told her to do it. There was a man tied to a chair in the cellar, eyes bloodied, breath rattling like a dying engine. Her father said the man had stolen something, betrayed someone—details that didn’t matter. The lesson wasn’t about him. It was about her. About what she was supposed to become.
She did it.
Not quickly. Not cleanly.
Afterward, she vomited behind the furnace and didn’t speak for three days.
She remembered the man’s eyes, not because of the fear in them, but because of the moment it changed. Because in the seconds before she struck, he had looked at her—not with hate, not even pleading—but with something close to pity. He saw what she was. Or what she was about to become. And she carried that look with her long after she forgot the man’s name.
That was the first time she understood what life was—not just a flame to be snuffed, but something owned. Something sacred. Not because it was good, but because once taken, it could never be undone. Her father called it growing up. Wonwoo called it the moment she stopped being anything clean.
That guilt became a part of her architecture. A secret shrine in the marrow of her bones. Every time she stepped onto the street in armor, every time she fought to stop someone else from crossing that line, she carried it. Not as penance—penance implied atonement. No, she carried it like a weight she deserved. Like a reminder of what she was capable of becoming again.
So when Seungcheol pulled her under his care—when he looked at her with worry instead of reprimand—she didn’t feel grateful. She felt exposed. Because mercy said more about the one offering it than the one receiving it. It suggested she was worth saving.
She didn’t believe that.
The safehouse was barely more than a room and a sink. Concrete walls, exposed piping, one flickering bulb overhead that buzzed like an insect dying in slow motion. The window was bricked up. The only sign that someone lived here at all was the dented metal cabinet in the corner with half a first-aid kit and two clean shirts that didn’t fit right. Wonwoo walked up the stairs like a ghost, shoulders hunched, blood still drying in a sticky arc beneath her ribs.
By the time she locked the door behind her, her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t get the gloves off. She ripped at the seams instead. Peeled the suit off her body piece by piece like dead skin. Her shirt stuck to the blood on her ribs. She dropped it without looking. Her pants followed. Her knees hit the concrete hard, and she let them. There was no one here to pretend for. No one was watching to decide what was strength and what was collapse.
Her fingers fumbled with the edge of the gauze roll, unspooling too much, trying to hold the tape with trembling knuckles. She cleaned the wounds in silence. The scrape on her hip was deep—the kind that pulsed and wept, the kind that would turn to infection if she wasn’t careful. But she wasn’t careful tonight. Not really. Her ribs were the worst. Deep purple already, the kind of swelling that would take days to breathe through. She pressed against them and felt the tremor in her teeth.
Still, she didn’t cry.
She never did.
She grabbed the cracked mirror off the side of the sink and sat down hard against the back wall, folding her knees. The mirror tilted in her lap, catching the yellow edge of her face in that sick light. There was blood on her neck. The mark was clear now, not fresh—seared. Raised.
Wonwoo reached up and touched it, just barely. Her fingers came away red.
She told herself this was fine. That this was physical. That it was something she could treat, catalog, file away. But she was lying. Because the pain wasn’t just from the wound. It was deeper than that. She could still feel the breath behind it. Still feel the lips pressed against her skin, soft despite the intent.
She could still hear her voice as she looked at Wonwoo with not malice, but recognition. It’s like looking into a mirror, she had said. Not mockery. Just certainty.
Wonwoo curled tighter, her forehead resting against her knee. Her breath caught there. For a second she wasn’t sure she’d exhale. Her eyes burned, but nothing came out. The tears didn’t fall. They never did.
She had lost him. The man in the tunnel. Just like the others. But this one had been different. This one had been present. He had seen her. She had been there. She had fought. And it hadn’t mattered.
She pulled a tablet from the cabinet tucked under the sink with one hand, the other still clutching the gauze roll like it was a lifeline. Her thumb smeared blood across the screen when she powered it on. The surveillance feed from her suit had been uploaded to the local cache. It sat there waiting, like evidence from a crime she hadn’t stopped.
She played the video.
The tunnel flickered to life. The resolution was grainy. She saw herself move in from the right side of the frame, saw the man on the ground twitch, saw Poison Ivy rise. She watched herself fire. Watched the vine lash out. Watched herself fall.
Then the kiss.
She paused the feed there. Just before it made contact. Her own face visible, half-turned. Her mouth open slightly. A split second of recognition. Of fear.
She slammed the tablet down, and the screen cracked down the center.
The silence that followed the sound of shattering glass felt like a judgment. It rang longer than the crack itself, echoing in the pit of her stomach where guilt had pooled like water in a well too deep to drain. Wonwoo sat motionless, her fingers still resting against the broken edges of the screen, the image distorted into a blur of static and bleeding color. The tunnel scene remained frozen behind the crack—her body pinned, her face open, her failure recorded from three angles.
She stared at the warped display for too long. Long enough for the blood from her hand to drip into the circuitry and short the tablet completely. The light blinked once, then went black.
Without thinking, she wiped her palm on the wall beside her, leaving a long smear. Then she brought the same hand to her mouth. Not to cry into. Not to hold in a scream. Just to remind herself she was real. That this body, this pain, this shaking breath—it all still existed.
The mark on her cheek pulsed with heat.
She could feel her pulse under it—rapid, inconsistent. Her mind kept trying to loop through the sequence of events like it might find a version where she had been faster. Smarter. Stronger. But there wasn’t one. There was only the truth: she had been there. She had done everything right. And it hadn’t made a difference.
She was failing.
No. She had failed.
This wasn’t theoretical anymore. It wasn’t just another string of crimes that she was meant to solve. Poison Ivy wasn’t just a killer—Wonwoo had been trusted with her. And she couldn’t even stop her with a gun in her hand and a body on the ground.
The kiss. That was the part she couldn’t shake. The absurdity of it. The cruelty. Or maybe it wasn’t cruel—maybe that was worse. Maybe it had been merciful. Maybe it had been a kindness offered in a moment of absolute weakness.
The thought made her stomach turn.
She pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the sink. The water sputtered, cold and metallic, before flowing steadily. She splashed it against her face again and again, hoping to rinse off the image burned into her skull. The flower blooming from a corpse. The vine wrapping around her wrist. The quiet press of lips against her skin.
She gripped the edge of the sink with both hands, bent over it like the porcelain might collapse if she let go.
“You’re not like her,” she whispered. “You’re not. You’re a…”
But the words didn’t finish.
What was she? Not a hero. Not anymore. Heroes saved people. They showed up in time. They didn’t keep score on how many bodies were lost beneath their watch.
She thought of Seungcheol. Of the weight in his voice when he handed her the case. Of Jihoon’s glance as she told her, be safe. She thought of the unspoken tension in the way they had all looked at her—like they’d already known what she was walking into, and had decided to let her anyway.
She had no right to blame them.
She looked at her reflection in the broken mirror, fractured in five places. Her face was pale, smeared with grime and blood. Her lips were cracked. Her hair hung damp around her jaw, curled from sweat and weather. The mark on her cheek had darkened—no longer just red, but tinged at the edges with the purplish black of something chemical. It looked like rot. It looked like a bruise that had been kissed into permanence.
She covered it with gauze and tape. Not because it helped. Just because she couldn’t bear to look at it anymore.
When she sank back to the ground, her limbs moved automatically. She reached for her gear. She slid into pieces of her suit she hadn’t bothered to clean. She strapped her utility belt around her waist. Checked her pulse—still too fast.
But she wasn’t going to sleep. She knew that already. Sleep would be the worst thing she could do. If she slept, she’d dream of vines. Of flowers growing through ribcages. Of lips like fire.
She had another name to add to the list. Another report to send. Another dead man whose family she would never meet, whose guilt she would carry until the next failure stacked on top of him.
And still—even now—a part of her was asking the question she refused to say out loud.
What if she’s right?
What if I am like her?
What if Wonwoo was never going to win this?
She didn’t know. She only knew one thing.
She was going to try again.
The storm had been going on for hours. It had shifted sideways, rolling across the skyline in dense, slow-moving sheets, the kind that swallowed whole districts in minutes and left the streets choking in silver runoff. Wonwoo moved through it like she was immune, the rain slicking over her suit without resistance, her boots slapping through water that had already begun to flood the gutters.
The warehouse had once been a packaging center. Now, it was a corpse of architecture, ribbed with fractured beams. A patchwork of graffiti and mold had overtaken the old sign above the entry bay, and somewhere in the rafters, birds had nested where surveillance cameras used to hang. Wonwoo moved through the space with purpose, each step sharpened by the voice still echoing in her earpiece. Jihoon’s message had crackled through the static just ten minutes ago: “Caught her near Crime Alley. Camera fourteen picked up a flash—could be her. You’re the closest. Go.”
The scent hit her before the silence did—blood laced with the sweet smell of something floral, something alive and rotting in tandem. It was always the same. Always floral, always wrong. She didn’t have to check to know the body was there. Her boots scraped faintly across concrete as she entered the space. It was cavernous, unlit, everything cast in that purgatory gray between moonlight and ruin. There, by the northern wall, the figure lay crumpled—a man in his fifties by the look of him, collapsed under a bloom of white-veined petals erupting from his chest cavity. The wound was fresh, slick around the edges. Wonwoo clenched her jaw, her knuckles bone-white around the grip of her pistol.
She didn’t allow herself the pause. Didn’t let herself grieve, or scream, or even curse. Instead, she stepped forward and raised her weapon. She knew the pattern. She knew what came next. Her heartbeat slowed to that kind of still-focus rhythm only adrenaline knew how to summon.
The vines moved like they’d been waiting for her. They coiled from the shadows in a fluid rush, one of them slapping her pistol from her hands with sharp, stunning precision. Another looped around her ankle before she could adjust, yanking her leg out from under her and slamming her into a support beam with a force that rattled her vision. Her breath left her in a hard wheeze, and before she could recover, more vines followed—snaring her wrists, her waist, her thighs, binding her in place against the cold, corroded steel. She struggled because her body demanded it, not because she thought it would do any good.
Minghao emerged like a ghost walking out of a dream—barefoot, hair loose and black as the night, her skin almost green in the dim light and clothed only in the cascade of leaves that rustled softly with her movement. She walked like she wasn’t afraid of anything. Like she never had to be. There was nothing triumphant in her gaze. Nothing angry. Just that disarming calm that made Wonwoo feel like she was always five steps behind.
“You’re late,” Minghao said, voice soft, deliberate. “You always get here after the damage is done.”
Wonwoo’s teeth clenched. Her chest was tight—not just from the vines. “Don’t start.”
Minghao didn’t react. She stepped closer. Her hands were empty, but Wonwoo still felt as though every inch of her was armed. “I’m not mocking you,” she said. “I’m observing. You get here when it’s too late to change anything. When the screaming has already stopped.”
“You think that makes us the same?” Wonwoo spat. “I don’t kill people.”
“I didn’t say it made us the same,” Minghao replied, her voice still maddeningly calm. “But you carry the aftermath too, don’t you?”
That sentence hit her harder than any vine. Because it wasn’t about the body on the ground. It wasn’t about the case. It was about the weight she walked with. The nights where she cleaned blood from her hands and told herself she was still on the right side. The quiet that came after every failed rescue. The guilt she never gave voice to.
And Minghao was the same, wasn’t she? Reaching for a wound that had already festered, trying to stitch something back together long after it had rotted through. She wasn’t stopping the damage—just punishing what was left behind. And maybe that was the part Wonwoo understood too well. The part she didn’t want to admit lived in her, too.
Being seen in that—not accused, not condemned, just seen—made Wonwoo’s stomach twist. And it was her. Minghao. The last person Wonwoo wanted to understand her. And yet, a part of her had craved it all the same.
The moment lingered thick and unwanted. Minghao stood only inches away now, and the dim light caught in the curve of her cheek, in the faint glimmer of green across her collarbone. She smelled of earth and copper and something sharper underneath, like cut flowers left too long in the water. Wonwoo tried to pull her focus back, to remember why she came, but the vines around her chest had grown tighter, almost like they were responding to her breath. Her heart beat so hard she swore the pressure would bruise her ribs.
“I don’t want to be like you,” Wonwoo said finally. Her voice cracked in the middle, and she hated it—hated how weak it sounded.
“You already aren’t,” Minghao replied, and her tone wasn’t patronizing. It was almost soft. “You still think the world can be changed. You still show up.”
“That doesn’t matter if I’m always late.”
Minghao looked at her with something akin to pity.
The vines shifted then, loosening—not enough to free her, but enough to allow her body to sag slightly. Wonwoo couldn’t tell if it was mercy or strategy. Maybe both. Minghao’s hand brushed Wonwoo’s cheek, slow and cool before she pulled off her mask. Her touch wasn’t cruel. It was careful, the way one might handle something fragile, or something sacred. And Wonwoo, despite everything—despite the kill, the loss, the sting in her throat—didn’t flinch.
The kiss to her neck was deliberate, just at the edge of the jaw where the blood ran closest to the skin. It didn’t burn as sharply as the others had. Maybe her body was used to it now. Maybe it wanted it. The heat was slower this time, warmer, like it had chosen to linger.
Wonwoo closed her eyes for half a breath—and hated herself for it. Hated how her heart leaned into it, how her spine didn’t stiffen in rejection. And then, above them, a crash.
Someone dropped in from the rafters—a heavy thud followed by a low grunt. Wonwoo opened her eyes just in time to see Soonyoung in motion, throwing batarangs that sliced through the vines with mechanical precision. He didn’t shout. Didn’t demand answers. He just moved, and things began to fall apart.
Minghao stepped back as if she’d been expecting it. She met Soonyoung’s eyes only briefly before she simply turned and walked into the mass of vines behind her. Wonwoo watched, breath caught, as the wall of green shifted—parting gently to let her pass, then closing behind her like a mouth swallowing a secret. The warehouse grew still again, save for Wonwoo’s heaving breath and the sound of vines retracting into the floor.
Soonyoung crouched beside her, reaching for the bindings. “Are you alright?”
Wonwoo nodded, but didn’t speak. The vines around her wrists fell slack. He helped her stand, hands firm under her elbows. But she didn’t move when she was fully upright. She didn’t turn to leave.
“She could’ve killed me,” she said quietly.
“I know,” Soonyoung said.
“She didn’t.”
“I know.”
And still, Wonwoo stayed there, staring into the shadows where Minghao had vanished, body still burning faintly where her lips had landed.
She could leave. She should. But her feet didn’t move.
Because part of her hadn’t left yet.
Seungcheol didn’t turn when she approached. He stood near the edge of the rooftop—though here, “rooftop” was generous. It was more a slab of concrete built for rust and silence, hemmed in by half-collapsed HVAC units and a corroded railing that looked like it could shear loose with one hard gust. The city stretched below them, unkind and restless, all gray corners and flickering neon, like it couldn’t decide whether to die or keep going out of spite. From here, the city was a body mid-collapse, all smoke and bone and stubborn heartbeat.
Wonwoo said nothing at first. She moved to stand beside him, her steps heavy with exhaustion she hadn’t let herself acknowledge. There was no mask tonight. No armor. Just the dark clothes she hadn’t changed out of in two days and the faint scent of blood still crusted under her sleeves. Her knuckles were raw again. She didn’t remember when she last slept, but the world had started to feel like it was tilting at angles that no longer obeyed gravity. And still, she looked out over the city like she belonged in the wreckage.
“You look like shit,” Seungcheol said after a long moment. It wasn’t cruel. It was fact. His voice didn’t hold judgment—just a worn-out sort of worry that had stopped pretending to be anything else.
“Feel worse,” she muttered.
He glanced over at her, just briefly. It was enough to confirm what he already knew. The dark circles under her eyes weren’t just from the lack of sleep—they were the kind that came from fighting something internal too long. Her jaw was locked. Her spine rigid. The kiss-marks on her cheek and neck were out in full display.
She knew that Soonyoung must’ve gone to Seungcheol after he walked into Minghao pressing a kiss to Wonwoo’s neck while Wonwoo stood there, almost willing. So, she braced herself. For the scolding. For the disappointment. But Seungcheol didn’t move. He just stood with her in the quiet, letting the wind pick at the silence.
“You’re off the case.”
The words landed like a brick to the sternum. Not surprising. Not undeserved. But heavy. Final. She didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. She’d taken worse hits. Still, something behind her ribs folded in, like part of her had already known this was coming and had been trying not to collapse under the wait for it.
“Why?” she asked. Not because she didn’t know the answer, but because she needed to hear it. Needed it stated. Out loud. Like confession.
Seungcheol stepped closer, his voice lowering. “You’re not the only one who sees what this case is doing to you. You look like hell. You haven’t checked in with Jihoon, haven’t submitted your surveillance logs, haven’t filed recovery reports. You’re chasing her with no plan, no backup, no reinforcements. What exactly are you trying to do out there?”
“I’m trying to be fast enough,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I’m trying to get there before she kills again.”
Seungcheol’s expression was unreadable for a long moment. Then he sighed and looked away. “I didn’t put you out there to martyr yourself.”
“You put me out there because no one else wanted the job.”
“I put you out there because I believed you could handle it.” His voice cracked—not from weakness, but weight. “Because you used to know the difference between holding the line and stepping into the fire.”
There was a pause. Wonwoo finally turned to look at him, eyes hollow.
“And now?”
Seungcheol met her gaze. “Now, She’s in your head.”
She turned away, as if the skyline could offer her anything better than this. Guilt coiled in her gut, low and corrosive. It had always lived there. She knew its shape too well. That twisted, bitter knot of knowing she wasn’t built clean, wasn’t built right. Not when her father’s voice still echoed inside her, not when her first kill still played like static behind her eyes. Maybe Seungcheol was trying to protect her. Maybe this was his version of care. But Wonwoo didn’t see it like that.
She saw a verdict.
To her, this wasn’t mercy. It was punishment. It was confirmation that Seungcheol had finally seen her for what she was—damaged, broken at the root, incapable of being anything other than the violence she was raised in. This wasn’t a pause. This was exile. And somewhere inside, that part of her that still believed in consequence accepted it. Welcomed it.
“I thought you trusted me,” she said, and the words came out quieter than she meant them to. Not pleading. Just hollow.
“I do,” Seungcheol said. “Which is why I’m doing this. You’re not expendable, Wonwoo. But right now, you’re trying to prove you are.”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She stood in the silence he left behind as he turned and walked away. He didn’t offer a hand. Didn’t say anything else. His steps echoed across the concrete like the tick of a clock, counting down the time she no longer had.
She didn’t follow.
Wonwoo had nothing left. Not the mask. Not the mission. Not even the illusion of purpose. What she did have, curled in the hollow of her chest like something both sacred and toxic, was the certainty that everything in her life had now narrowed to a single point. There was no more system to report to, no rooftop rendezvous with Seungcheol, no tether to anyone or anything resembling a team. She had burned through every lie she’d told herself to keep going. All that remained was Minghao.
She should’ve gone home. Should’ve disappeared somewhere quiet and untraceable, should’ve curled around the weight of the guilt and let it rot inside her in peace. Instead, she walked, driven by a momentum that didn’t come from logic or duty but from something closer to gravity. She knew where she was going long before her feet brought her there. And every step closer felt like the drag of a tide she’d never learned how to resist.
The greenhouse wasn’t a secret. Not to her. Not anymore. She had seen it too often, imagined it too clearly. It lived in the corners of her mind like a bruise she couldn’t stop pressing on. She didn’t come armed. Didn’t wear the suit. The Kevlar, the mask, even the comms—she had left all of it behind like a skin that didn’t fit anymore. All that remained was the body underneath: tired, bruised, and bare in a way that had nothing to do with skin.
She walked without calling out, because there was no need to announce herself. Minghao had always known she would come. It had been written into each crime scene. Etched into every mark left on Wonwoo’s body. The corner of her mouth. Her cheek. Her neck. Not just warnings. Not threats. Invitations.
She stood beneath the warped remains of the trellis, hair curling down her back, black and tangled with flowers. Her skin was the same pale green it had always been, but in the filtered light, it looked softer. Less like armor. And her lips—still black, still damning—tilted into a smile when she saw her.
“You finally stopped hiding,” Minghao said.
Wonwoo didn’t answer right away. Her mouth felt dry. Her body was suddenly too aware of every place it had broken and healed wrong. She took a few steps closer, until the distance between them stopped feeling safe.
“You left me alive,” she said, and the words felt heavier than they should have.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“You already know,” Minghao said.
“I don’t.” Wonwoo’s voice was quiet. “Not really.”
Minghao didn’t step forward, didn’t reach out. She just looked at her the way she always had—like Wonwoo was something she recognized. “Because I see myself in you. Because you try. Even when it’s already too late. Because your guilt is louder than your anger.”
Wonwoo’s shoulders tensed. She looked away. “That’s not a reason.”
“It’s the only one I had.”
The words settled between them and Wonwoo found herself studying Minghao the way one might study a crime scene—trying to pick out what was real from what was projection. She wanted to believe it was manipulation. Wanted to believe this was just another form of control. That she’d been kept alive not out of recognition but out of sadism, to be toyed with, studied.
But standing here, bare of everything she used to define herself, she knew Minghao wasn’t lying. And that truth felt more dangerous than any of the others she’d buried.
“I’m not like you,” Wonwoo said finally, but it came out weaker than she meant it to. It didn’t land with conviction. Just the tired echo of someone who had said it too many times and no longer believed it.
Minghao didn’t press. “Maybe not. But I think you understand me in ways that matter.”
Wonwoo dragged a hand through her hair, suddenly restless. “Understanding you doesn’t mean forgiving you.”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness.”
That stopped her. She looked up, met Minghao’s gaze, and saw something there she hadn’t expected—something like sorrow, tempered by something worse: acceptance. “Then what do you want?”
Minghao’s answer didn’t come right away. Her eyes traced Wonwoo’s neck, lingered there like she was cataloging the mark she had seared onto her skin. “I don’t want anything,” she said at last. “But I think you do.”
And there it was. The buried truth Wonwoo hadn’t let herself think too long about. She didn’t come here for closure. She didn’t come for answers. She came because she had nothing else. Because even in the most brutal moments, Minghao had looked at her like she was real. Like she was more than the role she was failing to uphold. She’d come because being seen—truly seen—was addictive, even when it hurt.
The worst part was that it wasn’t a weakness. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t some twisted trauma bond. It was the need to be understood without having to explain. And Minghao had given her that, wordlessly, ruthlessly, again and again.
“I thought if I saw you again,” Wonwoo said, her voice slow, “I could make sense of why I didn’t resist. Not really.”
Minghao said nothing. She stepped closer. Not enough to close the space entirely, but enough that Wonwoo could feel the shift in air between them. Enough to know she wouldn’t move unless Wonwoo did.
“I was trained to stop people like you,” Wonwoo continued, her hands curling into fists at her sides. “I built my whole identity around the idea that I could draw a line in the sand and never cross it.”
Minghao’s voice, when it came, was soft. “And now?”
“I don’t know where the line is anymore.”
Minghao didn’t answer right away. She looked at Wonwoo with a softness that hurt more than cruelty ever could, and in that silence, Wonwoo realized she didn’t need an answer. Not really. The line she was speaking of had been redrawn so many times she could no longer tell if she was on the right side of it. Or if there even was one anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the reason she hadn’t been able to stop Minghao was because somewhere inside, some buried part of her had started to believe there were things worth breaking the rules for. Things worth stepping across for.
Wonwoo closed the distance between them in one slow step, her breath catching on the weight of it. She looked at Minghao’s mouth. Black. Still. Fatal. A line painted in ink and warning. And still, she leaned in.
“You’re not going to stop me?” she asked, voice low.
Minghao’s reply was just as soft. “Would it matter if I did?”
Wonwoo didn’t answer. She reached up, fingertips brushing against Minghao’s cheek. Her skin was cool, impossibly smooth beneath the pads of her fingers, and when Minghao leaned ever so slightly into the touch, Wonwoo felt something in her chest twist violently. Not desire. Not quite. Something heavier. Something like understanding.
She kissed her.
Not hard. Not desperate. Just a slow press of lips, full of everything they hadn’t said. The moment lasted a breath. Maybe two. Long enough for Wonwoo to feel the heat start to spread from the place their mouths met. Long enough to taste the danger. And when the sting came—sharp, electric, blooming like fire beneath her skin—she didn’t pull away.
The pain was quiet. It was warm. It was strangely kind. And then it burned.