Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for my Vampire Captain : Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

Franklin’s POVThe clinic was on the ground floor of the main building, past the administrative offices and through a door that always stuck slightly at the bottom. I held it open for Vivian and she walked through ahead of me, one hand pressed to her side, her steps smaller than usual.I pulled a chair out and she lowered herself into it slowly, and I sat in the one beside her and said nothing for a moment. The room smelled like antiseptic and the particular artificial warmth of buildings that run their heating too high. A clock on the wall ticked audibly.Then she started crying.Not the careful performance I had half expected from the version of her I had watched in the changing room… this was different. Quieter. The kind that doesn’t announce itself, that comes in without permission and sits there. Her shoulders curved and she pressed her fingers to her mouth and I felt the pull of years of reflex, of being the person beside her when things fell apart.I put my arm around her shoul

Rydan’s POVI put the phone back exactly where it had been.Same angle, same position on the cushion, screen facing up. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at the television and watched nothing on it. The water was still running in the bathroom. Steam had drifted faintly under the door gap into the hallway.I had read the message once. That was enough.*I hope you haven’t told him yet.*Told him what. That was the question sitting in the middle of everything, quiet and patient, waiting for an answer I didn’t have. Whatever it referred to… whatever Vivian was holding that Franklin either knew or didn’t know… it was something she and Rydan were apparently both supposed to be aware of. Except I wasn’t. Which meant the conversation that message belonged to had never included me.Franklin came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, hair damp, looking more like himself than he had all morning. He picked up his phone from the sofa without glancing at the screen, slid it into his pocket

Rydan’s POVI went to the door first.The hallway was empty, the lift at the far end just closing, the stairwell door still slightly trembling on its hinges. I stood there for a moment with the unknown number’s message still open on my phone and made myself breathe through the thing that wanted to move fast and break something.Then I went back inside, got my jacket, and left.I called the only person I trusted with anything logistical… a contact I had maintained for decades, someone who knew how to find people without asking why. I gave him Vivian’s name and the approximate area and told him I needed an address in under ten minutes. He had it to me in seven.The building was a twenty-minute walk across the quieter part of the city, a mid-rise with a broken intercom that let me in without announcement. I took the stairs to the third floor and knocked.She opened the door in a robe, hair down, expression shifting through surprise and then something more composed when she saw it was me.

Franklin’s POVWe didn’t sleep.Not properly. We sat with the photographs spread on the table between us and worked through every name, every face, every interaction from the past weeks that might attach to something like this. I went through it methodically, the way I approached most problems… start with what you know, eliminate what doesn’t fit, follow what remains. Rydan was quieter than usual, which meant he was thinking harder than usual. The cigarette he lit around two in the morning burned down mostly untouched.By the time the sky outside shifted from black to the grey that preceded dawn, we had nothing solid. Possibilities, maybe. The unknown number. The message on his phone. Whoever had planted the ring, whoever had been outside this building with a camera at an angle that required planning. The threads existed but they didn’t connect into anything we could hold.I pushed the photographs into a pile face down. I didn’t want to look at them anymore.“Stay home tomorrow,” I sa

Rydan’s POVThree hundred years of existing had taught me to recognise when my body was telling me something my mind hadn’t caught up with yet.I had been on the ice for nearly two hours, running the team through a sequence that demanded full attention, and I had given it fully… until I hadn’t. Until somewhere in the second half of the session, something began pulling at the edge of my awareness the way a sound does when it’s just below the threshold of hearing. Not loud enough to identify. Present enough to be impossible to ignore.I pulled myself off the drill and sat on the bench.I told myself it was fatigue. Three centuries and the body still needed its concessions sometimes, particularly when I had been running on less than I needed to sustain the kind of output the past few weeks had demanded. I sat and let the cold air move through my lungs and watched the team continue without me.Then something moved at the edge of my vision.Behind the building. Past the maintenance path wh