The coffee grinder downstairs starts buzzing at exactly 3:47 AM. Like always.
I know because I've been listening to that same grinding sound for the past... let me think... eight hundred and forty-seven mornings. Yeah. Eight hundred and forty-seven times I've woken up to Maria Santos making her first batch of Colombian roast in the little café below my crappy apartment.
My eyes snap open before the sound even starts. That's what happens when you live the same day over and over again. Your body just knows.
The ceiling has the same water stain shaped like a dead fish. The radiator makes the same rattling noise. The street light outside flickers through my broken blinds in the exact same pattern. Even the smell is identical – stale coffee mixing with car exhaust and that weird sweet scent that always drifts up from the alley. Probably someone's garbage, but I stopped caring about mysteries like that around loop number two hundred.
I stretch my arms above my head and feel my joints pop. At least the soreness is real. Some days I wonder if anything else is.
"Good morning, Tuesday, October thirteenth," I mutter to the ceiling. "Time to kill my boyfriend. Again."
But when I roll over to check my phone, something's wrong.
Adrian is already here.
Not knocking at my door like he should be. Not bringing me a overpriced latte with a heart drawn in the foam like he will in exactly thirteen minutes. He's lying next to me in my bed, and he's very, very dead.
The silver blade sticks out of his chest like some kind of twisted joke. My silver blade. The one I usually keep hidden in my sock drawer, the one with "Property of Luna Martinez" engraved on the handle because I'm apparently the kind of person who personalizes her murder weapons.
Blood soaks through his black t-shirt, spreading across my sheets in a dark stain that definitely wasn't there when I went to sleep. His skin has that waxy pale look that comes after... well, after someone drives a knife through their heart.
I should be screaming. Or throwing up. Or calling 911.
Instead, I just stare.
Because here's the thing about killing the same person eight hundred and forty-seven times – you get used to seeing them dead. What you don't get used to is not remembering how they got that way.
I lift my hands and examine them in the dim light filtering through the blinds. My palms are sticky with dried blood. It's under my fingernails too, dark red crescents that prove I was here for whatever happened. But my memory is completely blank. The last thing I remember is falling asleep around midnight, same as always.
"Adrian?" I whisper, even though I know he can't hear me.
His dark hair falls across his forehead the way it always does when he sleeps. Except he's not sleeping. His chest isn't moving. Those gray eyes that usually look at me like I'm the most interesting thing in the world are empty and staring at nothing.
I reach out to touch his cheek, then stop myself. What's the point? In about twenty hours, everything will reset anyway. The blood will disappear, his body will vanish, and he'll show up at my door tomorrow morning with coffee and that crooked smile that makes my heart do stupid things.
That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.
So why does this feel different?
I slide out of bed carefully, trying not to look at the mess. My bare feet hit the cold hardwood floor with a soft thud. The oversized UCLA t-shirt I sleep in hangs to my knees, and I realize there are bloodstains on it too. Great. More evidence of a crime I don't remember committing.
The apartment looks exactly the same as it did yesterday. And the day before that. And every day for the past two years and four months. Dishes in the sink from a dinner I never finished. Laundry pile in the corner that never gets smaller. Books scattered across the coffee table – mostly about time travel and theoretical physics, because apparently I'm the kind of girl who reads Stephen Hawking for fun now.
But something feels off. Like when you move a picture frame just slightly to the left and everything looks wrong even though you can't pinpoint why.
I walk to the window and peek through the blinds. The street is empty except for a few parked cars and the usual scatter of trash blowing around in the October wind. Nothing unusual. No cops, no ambulances, no mysterious figures lurking in the shadows.
Which is weird, because usually when someone gets murdered, there's at least a little bit of drama involved.
I check my phone. 3:52 AM. In eight minutes, Adrian should knock on my door. Except he can't, because he's currently bleeding out on my mattress.
This doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense.
The loop always follows the same pattern. I wake up at 3:47. Adrian shows up at 4:00 with coffee and that stupid charming smile. We talk. We laugh. Sometimes we kiss. And then, at exactly 11:59 PM, I kill him to save the city from whatever disaster is supposed to happen at midnight.
I know it sounds crazy. Trust me, I thought I was losing my mind for the first fifty loops or so. But after you watch the same news reports and experience the same conversations enough times, you start to accept that reality has some serious glitches.
The killing part took longer to get used to.
Adrian is... was... is a vampire. Unregistered, which means his existence violates about six different federal laws. And me? I'm a werewolf with a government license and a moral obligation to report supernatural criminals.
Except I love him.
So instead of turning him in, I figured out that his death at 11:59 PM somehow prevents the city-wide catastrophe that's supposed to happen at midnight. Don't ask me how I know this – I just do. Some kind of werewolf instinct, maybe. Or maybe I'm just really good at pattern recognition after doing the same thing eight hundred and forty-seven times.
The point is, killing Adrian saves everyone. And then the day resets, he comes back to life, and I get to fall in love with him all over again.
It's the worst kind of Groundhog Day situation you can imagine.
But this... this is different. I've never woken up to find him already dead. I've never lost time like this. And I've definitely never felt this cold knot of fear sitting in my stomach like a rock.
I need to think. I need coffee. I need to figure out what the hell is going on.
I grab a pair of jeans from the floor and pull them on under my t-shirt. The fabric is stiff with old blood – apparently I haven't changed clothes in a while. Another mystery for the pile.
As I'm reaching for my jacket, I hear something that makes my blood freeze.
Footsteps in the hallway.
Slow, measured footsteps that definitely don't belong to any of my neighbors. Mrs. Kim from 3B shuffles when she walks. The college kids in 3A stomp around like baby elephants. These footsteps are different. Purposeful.
They stop right outside my door.
Three soft knocks. The same rhythm Adrian always uses.
But Adrian is dead in my bed with a knife through his heart.
The knocks come again. Patient. Like whoever's out there has all the time in the world.
I creep to the door and look through the peephole. The hallway is dark, but I can make out a figure standing in front of my apartment. Same height as Adrian. Same build. Same dark hair.
But something's wrong with the face. It's too sharp. Too cold. And the eyes...
The eyes are looking directly at the peephole. Like they know I'm watching.
"Hello, Luna," says a voice that sounds exactly like Adrian's, except it doesn't. There's something off about the tone. Something mechanical.
"I think we need to talk."
My hand hovers over the deadbolt. Every instinct I have is screaming at me not to open that door. But I've been trapped in this nightmare for two years, and this is the first thing that's been different.
Maybe different is exactly what I need.
I take a deep breath and turn the lock.
The hallway is empty.
But taped to my door is a small white envelope with my name written in Adrian's handwriting. Inside is a single photograph: me, standing over Adrian's body with the bloody knife in my hand. My face is completely blank. Like I'm sleepwalking.
On the back, someone has written a message in red ink:
"Reset #847 failed. You have 72 hours to find the anchor before all timelines collapse. We'll be in touch. - The Bureau"
I stare at the photo until my hands start shaking.
Because if there's one thing I know for absolute certain, it's that I didn't take this picture.
Which means someone else was in my apartment tonight.
Someone who watched me kill Adrian and decided to document it.
Someone who knows about the loops.
And now they want to talk.
End of Chapter 1