Semua Bab Falling for my Vampire Captain : Bab 111 - Bab 120

Rydan’s POVFranklin moved first.“Hey.” He leaned forward and knocked his knuckles against the partition. “What are you doing? Drive.”The driver’s eyes found us in the mirror. Just for a second. They were flat in the way eyes go flat when the person behind them is no longer fully the person behind them… a quality I recognised with the particular clarity of someone who had spent centuries learning to identify it.“Hey,” Franklin said again, louder.The driver opened his door and got out.He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look back. He simply stepped out of the cab, left the door open, and walked away down the middle of the road with the unhurried pace of someone following an instruction that had nothing to do with us.Franklin and I looked at each other.The road ahead was empty. The road behind us was empty. The engine was still running, the meter still ticking, the radio murmuring something low from the front speaker. Outside, the driver was already at the far edge of the headlight

Franklin’s POVI didn’t answer her straight away.The room was dark and she was standing in the doorway and the question was sitting in the air between us with the weight of something that had been building toward being asked for a long time. I looked at her silhouette and thought about the several versions of this conversation I could choose… the deflection, the technical non-answer, the redirect back to the lateness of the hour.Then I thought about what she had seen. About the fact that she was going to reach her own conclusion regardless of what I said, and that the conclusion she reached without the truth would likely be worse than the truth itself.“Sit down,” I said.She crossed the room and sat on the end of the bed. Rydan was still beside me, saying nothing, leaving the space for me to fill however I chose to fill it.I told her.Not everything. Not the things that weren’t mine to tell, not the parts of Rydan’s story that belonged to him and that I had been trusted with. But

Rydan’s POVI was already moving when his knees buckled.Franklin’s hand was on his chest and his face had gone the colour it went when the thing inside him tightened, and I crossed the room and got my arm under him before he could go down. He was conscious this time… his eyes open, tracking, but his breathing had reduced to something shallow and laboured that I could hear was not going to sustain itself without help.Vivian was on his other side immediately. Whatever her faults and whatever the complications of the past weeks, her response to Franklin in distress was immediate and without calculation. She was holding his arm and repeating his name and saying, in a voice that was losing its steadiness, that she didn’t know what was happening, that she hadn’t done anything, that she was sorry, that she was right here.I didn’t address her. I moved to the table.The drugs I had bought from the pharmacy were still in the bag where I had left them the night we came back from the hotel. I

Rydan’s POVI looked at the bag in Joel’s hands.He was holding it out with the easy patience of someone waiting for a simple handoff, his expression carrying nothing more than the mild helpfulness of a person returning a misplaced item. Franklin reached for it before I could redirect and took it from Joel’s outstretched hands with a brief thank you.Joel nodded, turned, and went back through the gate.I watched him go and turned my awareness toward the bag in Franklin’s hand. The read I got back was unclear… not clean the way ordinary objects were clean, but not specific enough to name either. Something about the bag sat slightly wrong in the same way that a note played slightly off pitch sits wrong… you feel it before you can articulate it.“Open it here,” I said.“It’s our training stuff,” Franklin said, already walking. “Joel said we left it.”“Franklin…”“If I stopped and opened everything someone handed me we would never get anywhere.” He shifted the bag to his other hand. “Come

Rydan’s POVI set the phone down carefully, keeping the movement small enough not to disturb Franklin.The corner of the window where the shadow pooled was four metres away. I looked at it directly now, which I hadn’t done a moment ago, giving it the full attention I had been managing from the periphery. I extended my awareness toward it and read what came back.Nothing.The shadow was a shadow. The window was a window. The corner held nothing that shouldn’t have been there… no signature, no trace, no warmth of a recently vacated presence. The glass was clean. The ledge outside was empty.I sat with it for a moment longer than was probably necessary, then picked up my phone and returned to the group thread.I finished the message. Read it through once, which I always did before sending anything to the full team because corrections after the fact undermined the composed authority a captain was supposed to project. It said what it needed to say. I sent it and watched the confirmations a