Semua Bab Falling for my Vampire Captain : Bab 131 - Bab 140

Rydan’s POVI scanned the crowd the way I scanned things when I needed the answer quickly… not the full extended awareness I used in open spaces, but the visual narrowing that came with focus, my eyes moving through the dispersing crowd in sectors, eliminating faces, looking for the thing that had called my name with that specific intention.The crowd was thinning fast. Families moving toward exits, groups breaking into individual trajectories. The noise was still present but reconfiguring itself, the match energy converting into the ordinary noise of people leaving a place rather than occupying it.Then I found him.Seated still, which was the thing that made him visible against the flow of everyone else leaving. In the upper section, midway along, a man who had not moved while every row around him emptied. A hood pulled forward far enough that his face was in shadow from where I stood, which at this distance meant either the hood was substantial or he was something that shadow adher

Rydan’s POVI moved to the window first.The engine sound was coming from the direction of the road we had turned off, which meant whoever was driving it had found the track. Not stumbled onto it… found it, which meant they had either followed us more carefully than I had believed or had a different means of locating us than headlights and road sense.I went to Franklin and put my hand on his shoulder.“Franklin.” Firm, not gentle. “Wake up.”He made the sound of someone leaving sleep reluctantly, which under other circumstances I would have let him have. Not now.“Franklin.” I squeezed his shoulder. “Now.”He came up blinking, taking in the dark of the cabin and my face and the expression on it and moving through the stages of orientation faster than most people managed. “What…”“Car,” I said. “On the road. Get up.”He was on his feet.I told him quickly… the engine sound, the direction, the conclusion. He listened and nodded and we moved toward the cabin door and the car beyond it,

Rydan’s POVI went to the window first.The property beyond the glass was dark and still, the security lights casting their fixed pools across the driveway and the gate and the stretch of path between them. Nothing moved within any of the illuminated areas. I extended my awareness through the glass and into the cold air beyond it and followed the scent that had pulled me forward.It was there. Close enough to be deliberate, faint enough to be deniable.Then it moved.Not toward the house… away, laterally, along the outside of the property wall, and then gone, the way these things went, between one moment of tracking it and the next of losing it.I looked at Franklin.He was asleep. Genuinely, deeply, his face turned slightly away from me, completely absent from the present situation in the way that people are when their body has taken the decision out of their hands.I went downstairs.The grounds were cold and the security were at their positions and nothing was out of order in any v

Rydan’s POVI didn’t say anything about the mark.I looked at it in the lamplight and registered it with the part of me that catalogued things requiring attention, and then Franklin shifted and the collar of his shirt moved and it was covered again, and I made the decision I had been making more frequently than was good for either of us… to hold the information until I had something useful to do with it rather than introduce it into an evening that had already been enough.He needed rest. He needed to be treated like a person rather than a situation. I sat with the mark in the back of my awareness and let the evening be the evening.Morning arrived and with it the specific weight of a match day, which had its own gravity regardless of what else was happening.Franklin moved through the preparation with the focused quiet of someone who had decided what the day required of him and was aligning himself to it. I watched him from the edge of the room and continued not mentioning the mark,

Franklin’s POVI walked out before the coach finished the sentence.Not because I hadn’t heard it… I had heard every word, including the ones between the words, the implication that months of work and a season of training were now sitting on a surface that could tilt in any direction. I walked out because staying in that office one more second with that specific information settling into me required a composure I didn’t currently have access to.The corridor outside was empty and I walked it fast, not looking back.“Franklin.” Rydan’s voice behind me, closer than I expected.“Don’t,” I said, without turning. “Just… don’t. Not right now.”“Let me explain…”I stopped. Turned. Looked at him directly.“There’s nothing to explain,” I said. “I know what happened. I know why it happened. I’ve been standing next to all of it for months.” I kept my voice low because the corridor didn’t need to be involved in this. “But I told you in the back of the building. I told you clearly. And then we wal