Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for my Vampire Captain : Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

Rydan’s POVI didn’t think. I acted.My arm went around Franklin before he had registered what was happening, and then we were moving… not at the speed I was capable of in open space, but fast enough that the street blurred at the edges and the woman with the sharpened nails became a shape receding behind us before she had completed her first step toward us.Franklin made a sound that was half question and half alarm and gripped my jacket with both hands.I turned off the main street, then again, then through a gap between two buildings that opened into a service alley, and from there into the first unlocked door I found… a heavy thing that swung inward to reveal a dark interior that smelled of damp and disuse. Old stone floors. A staircase ascending into shadow. The particular silence of a building that had been emptied of people for long enough to forget what they sounded like.I set Franklin down on the bottom stair.He sat, and for a moment he just breathed. Then he looked up at m

Rydan’s POVThe door closed behind her and the apartment settled back into its nighttime quiet, and I stood in the middle of the room and could not make myself move on from what I had just smelled.Fresh blood. On a bag belonging to a woman who had given a perfectly reasonable explanation for every suspicious thing about her presence tonight, and whose explanation I could not disprove, and whose smile had been warm enough that Franklin had relaxed completely in her company.I turned the scent over in my mind the way you turn evidence over… looking for the interpretation that made it innocent. Someone could carry blood for many reasons. A cut inside the bag. Something wrapped poorly from a butcher. Medical supplies. Three centuries had taught me not to construct certainties from single data points.But I couldn’t stop replaying her eyes either.Not the warmth of them… the other thing. The thing that had sat underneath the warmth like a foundation made of different material. Something o

Rydan’s POVI checked every room.Not because I expected to find him in the bathroom or on the balcony after seeing his shoes gone… I checked because standing still wasn’t something I was capable of in that moment, and moving through the apartment gave my body something to do while my mind worked through the options.His phone charger was still plugged into the wall beside the bed. His jacket… the heavier one he wore when it was genuinely cold… was gone from the hook by the door. The lighter one was still there. I stood looking at the remaining jacket for a moment, reading what it told me about his state of mind when he left. He had dressed for outside. He had taken his phone. He had left without a word and without waking me, which was the precise mirror of what I had done the night before.I understood the message even if it hadn’t been intentionally sent.I called him.Three rings and then the flat, unhurried tone of voicemail. His voice on the recording, brief and businesslike. I d

Franklin’s POVI didn’t stop to think.My legs were already moving before my brain had assembled a full sentence about why, and I was through the bathroom door and back into the hallway in seconds, heart doing something it had no reason to do at that pace. The two men inside had looked at me with the specific kind of anger that isn’t surprised by your presence… the kind that was already there before you arrived, waiting.I didn’t wait to find out what they were waiting for.I came back into the sitting room fast and Rydan was already on his feet, reading my face before I spoke.“Bathroom,” I said. “Two men.”He moved toward the hallway immediately.“They’re gone,” I said, catching his arm. “I ran. They didn’t follow.”He stopped. He looked at me, then at the hallway, then back at me, and I watched him calculate the options.“We’re leaving,” he said.We did.The cinema was a ten-minute walk from the apartment and we had walked it easily earlier in the evening without any of this weight

Rydan’s POVI moved toward the bag.Not fast, not yet… the kind of deliberate approach you use when you don’t know what you’re approaching and speed might make it worse. The bag sat on the chair with the particular wrongness of an object behaving outside its nature, the fabric shifting from within in small, irregular pulses.The zip began to open.Not all at once. Slowly, the way it would if someone were pulling it from inside, the teeth separating one by one with small metallic sounds that were somehow louder than they should have been in the quiet of the room.Franklin hadn’t moved from the wall beside the door. I could hear his breathing from across the room… controlled, the deliberate management of someone who was scared and had decided not to show all of it.The zip reached its end.The bag gaped open.Whatever was inside caught the light for one second before it began to fall, and in that second I registered the shape of it… small, dense, dark, trailing something behind it as it