Beranda / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Bab 121 - Bab 130

Semua Bab Falling for my Vampire Captain : Bab 121 - Bab 130

166 Bab

121

Franklin’s POVThe sound came out before I could stop it.Not a scream exactly… the involuntary noise that comes when your body processes something before your mind has caught up with it. I heard myself make it and immediately felt slightly embarrassed by it, which was a strange thing to feel while staring at a footprint beside your bed that you hadn’t put there.Rydan was in the doorway in the next second.He looked at me, then at where I was looking, and I watched his face do the thing it did when it was receiving information it didn’t like… the slight setting of the jaw, the eyes going a shade more focused.“There,” I said, pointing down. Unnecessary, since he was already looking at it, but I needed to say something.He crouched and examined it without touching it. The print was partial… the front half of a foot, pressed into the dust at the edge of the rug where the floorboard was exposed. The size was neither large nor small, which told us nothing useful. It was simply there, in

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122

Rydan’s POVI didn’t stop moving long enough to answer him.Franklin’s wrist was in my hand and I was walking fast toward the academy gate and he was keeping up because he had learned, over weeks of this, that when I moved with this particular quality of urgency the questions could come later and the moving needed to happen now. He asked once more as we came through the gate and I gave him nothing and he stopped asking.We flagged a cab on the first block.The journey back was silent. Not the uncomfortable silence of two people withholding from each other… the focused silence of two people in the same situation managing it the same way. I watched the route through the back window. Franklin watched the route through his window. The cab driver had the radio on low and the city moved past us and I tracked the cars behind us for four blocks before I was satisfied enough to look forward again.We were out of the cab before it had fully stopped.I went up the stairs at the speed I used when

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123

Franklin’s POVI was off the bed before I had processed what I was moving away from.My back hit the wardrobe and I stood there with my heart doing something unreasonable while the thing that had come through the door oriented itself in the room and then made a sound that was, objectively, very small and very unthreatening.A dog. Small enough to carry in one hand, the kind with ears that were too large for its head and paws that it hadn’t quite grown into. It stood in the middle of the bedroom floor and looked between Rydan and me with the bright, uncomplicated energy of something that had absolutely no concept of the effect it had just produced.Rydan was looking at me.“That’s Bruno,” he said.I looked at the dog. Then at Rydan. “You have a dog.”“I’ve had him for six years.” There was something in his expression that I didn’t see there often… the very edge of amusement, restrained but present. “He lives here. He’s been staying with the groundskeeper on the other property while the

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124

Rydan’s POVFranklin’s arms came around my back before Bruno’s second bark had finished, and I felt the grip of him… not panicked, but the specific hold of someone whose body has decided that closeness is the appropriate response to an unknown threat and hasn’t consulted the rational mind about it.“Stay here,” I said.His grip tightened fractionally before releasing.I crossed the garden to the gate. Bruno had stopped barking but remained planted at the edge of the path, still oriented toward the gate, his attention unwavering in the way that animals maintain when they’ve identified something that hasn’t left yet.The gate was still closed. I opened it and stepped through onto the road beyond.The street was empty in both directions. No retreating figure, no vehicle pulling away, nothing in the hedgerow on the opposite side that was shaped like a person. I extended my awareness outward as far as I could manage at this hour, reading the air in a slow sweep from left to right.There we

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125

Rydan’s POVI stepped onto the bed.Not carefully… deliberately, standing on the surface of it and using the height to change the angle of my vision across the room. I activated the ability I used rarely because it cost something and because using it in enclosed spaces had a particular intensity… the night vision that stripped the room of shadow and presented it in the flat, detailed clarity of something between a photograph and a blueprint.Every surface. Every corner. The space behind the wardrobe, which was twelve centimetres of gap that nothing larger than a cat could occupy. The ceiling, which was smooth and undisturbed. The space under the bed, which I had checked before but checked again, seeing it now in the detail that ordinary vision couldn’t reach.Nothing.The room was exactly what it appeared to be. A bedroom in a house, containing the things a bedroom contained, with a footprint on the bed covers that was already fading, the impression slowly releasing back into the fabr

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126

Franklin’s POVIt came through the window.Not through the glass… through the gap where Rydan had pulled the curtain back, the window coming open in the same instant the shape resolved into something that moved with direction and intention. I didn’t have time to process the sequence. One moment I was standing behind Rydan watching something form in the garden, and the next something had crossed the room and hit me.The impact knocked the air out of me. My back found the wall and I went down it, and the thing was on me… heavy, cold, not the weight of a person but the weight of something wearing the shape of one. I got my arms up between us and pushed and it didn’t move the way a person moves when pushed. It absorbed the force and pressed back and its face was close to mine and its eyes were red in the specific way that I had now seen enough times to know what it meant.I heard myself make a sound that was not a word.Then the weight came off me.Rydan had it by the back of its jacket a

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027

Rydan’s POVMorning arrived with the particular clarity that match days always carried.I had been awake when the light changed, which was not unusual, but the quality of my wakefulness was different from the hours before it… less vigilant, more oriented. The night had passed without further incident, Bruno had slept through the remainder of it, and Franklin’s breathing beside me had been the even rhythm of someone genuinely resting.I let him sleep until the alarm.He came awake the way he did on important mornings… not gradually, not the slow surfacing of ordinary days, but quickly, with the immediate awareness of someone whose mind had already been running through the day before his eyes opened. He sat up and looked at the window and I could see him assembling the shape of the hours ahead.“Match day,” he said.“Match day,” I confirmed.He showered and dressed with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided how the morning was going to go and was executing that decision. I w

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028

Franklin’s POVI called his name once.He didn’t slow.I called it again, louder, trying to cut through the crowd noise and the medical team movement and the general controlled chaos of a player down on the ice. Rydan’s back was to me and he was moving with the particular directness of someone who has stopped filtering their movement through the consideration of how it looks.I went after him.The ice under my skates was the same ice it had been sixty seconds ago and my legs were working as hard as they could work and the gap between us was still closing too slowly. Rydan moved the way he moved when he wasn’t managing it for human observation, and I was human, and the math of that was not in my favour.He reached the player.I watched it happen from eight feet away and I couldn’t stop it. He went down, and the player’s eyes went wide, and the sound the player made was not about the arm anymore. The arena around us was doing several things at once… the medical staff stopping, the nearb

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129

Franklin’s POVThe rival captain was not a small man.He filled the doorway in the practical sense, broad through the shoulders, still in his match kit, and his expression was the particular expression of someone who has seen something they intend to get an explanation for and are not going to be redirected from that intention.Rydan and I both stood.The captain looked between us. Then he said, “Sit down.”It was the kind of voice that expected to be listened to. We sat.He came into the room and let the door close behind him and stood in front of us with his arms loosely crossed and his eyes moving between our faces with the methodical attention of someone conducting an assessment.“What just happened out there?” he said.The question sat in the air. I looked at Rydan. Rydan was looking at the floor in the specific way of someone who is searching for words and not finding ones they can use.I spoke.“He has anxiety,” I said. “It’s been managed, he’s on treatment for it, but the matc

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130

Rydan’s POVThe crowd caught it and spread it the way crowds spread things… one voice becoming several becoming a section, the particular momentum of people who have found a target and discovered they share it. The rival fans’ section had a direction now and the direction was me, and the noise coming from it had the quality of something that had been waiting for permission and had just received it.Franklin moved before I did.He stepped in front of me, which was the instinct of someone who had decided that his body was a relevant variable in the situation, and then his hand closed around my arm and he pulled me sideways toward the boards away from the section’s direct line of sight.The things being shouted were specific in the way that crowd anger gets specific when it wants to demonstrate that it knows something. Not just general hostility… particular words that were about what had happened on the ice earlier, the incident with their player, distorted through the particular lens of

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