Sundown Riptide

"I'm Jungkook," I said, offering a nervous grin, the words feeling unfamiliar on my tongue.

Her gaze shifted, sharp as the horizon. There was something unsettling in the way she looked at me, like staring into a deep, endless ocean. Her dark eyeliner only made her eyes stand out more, fierce and unreadable.

"Rumi," she replied, voice smooth, with a quiet edge.

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The ocean was never a place of escape-only a mirror, pulling secrets from the depths with every wave. Rumi Avana Sterling knows this truth better than anyone, yet she still surrenders to its pull, retreating to her family's secluded resort in South Korea, where wealth and power fade into the quiet hum of the sea. For once, she isn't running-she's simply drifting, untethered, relishing a rare moment untouched by expectation.

But peace is an illusion, and the storm comes in the form of Jeon Jungkook. His presence shatters the stillness she's cocooned herself in, turning distance into tension, detachment into something dangerously magnetic. Rumi doesn't believe in fleeting connections, but Jungkook is relentless-his gaze intense, as if he already knows how their story ends.

As Jungkook unravels the layers of the enigmatic girl she hides behind, he finds himself falling into something he never anticipated. What begins beneath the stars soon buckles beneath the weight of the world, where every glance is captured, every whisper amplified. In a life defined by power and consequence, love isn't a promise-it's a reckoning, a riptide. And some will drown long before they ever see the shore.