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Beranda / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Bab 151 - Bab 160

Semua Bab Falling for my Vampire Captain : Bab 151 - Bab 160

166 Bab

151

Rydan’s POVI called her immediately.The line rang twice and then produced nothing… not voicemail, not a busy signal, not the standard recorded message of a number that couldn’t be reached. Just the absence of connection, the particular dead quality of a call that hadn’t been declined but hadn’t been answered either.I tried again. The same nothing.Franklin was sitting up when I came back to where he was on the floor. He was still moving with the careful quality of someone whose body had been through something and was filing a full report, but his eyes were clear and he was present in the way that mattered.I showed him the screen. He read the message and then looked at me.“We have to go,” he said.“You need to rest.”“Rydan.” He put his hand on the floor and pushed himself up slowly, accepting the assistance of the wall without acknowledging it. “We have to go.”I looked at him standing there, pale and not fully steady, with the specific determination on his face of someone who ha
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152

Vivian’s POVThe laughing was the worst part.Not the rope around my wrists, not the chair, not the state of my flat which I had watched them turn inside out while I sat tied to the chair and told myself that staying calm was the useful thing and mostly failed at staying calm. The laughing was the worst part because it communicated something that the rest of it only implied… that whoever this was had no concern about being interrupted, no anxiety about time, no sense that what they were doing required any particular hurry.They were comfortable.I was not comfortable.I had been tied to the chair for what felt like an hour and had probably been less than that, and the rope was the kind that responded to pulling by getting more certain of itself, and the man who had done the tying was currently standing at the far side of the room looking at the things he had pulled from my shelves with the browsing attention of someone at a market.I screamed again.He laughed again.I screamed louder
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153

Vivian’s POVThe grip on my hair was the kind that communicated very clearly that the person applying it had no concern about whether it hurt, which it did, considerably.I grabbed at his wrist and got nowhere. His hands were the size of things that shouldn’t have belonged to a person, wide and certain, and pulling against them produced nothing except more pain from the angle the pulling created.He said something I didn’t catch and then the grip released and I went sideways and the floor came up and I hit it with my shoulder and the side of my face in the same moment that the impact from the slap arrived, which meant my system was receiving too much information at once and defaulted to the floor and staying there for a second while it sorted itself out.Rydan was there before I had decided to get up.He hit the man from the side and the force of it moved both of them across the narrow ground floor corridor and into the wall, and the wall registered the impact in the plaster. They cam
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154

Chapter 75Franklin’s POVI walked through the door and found two people looking at me like I had come back from somewhere significantly further than the ground floor of a building.Vivian’s face had the specific quality of someone who has been through something and is still inside the aftermath of it… her cheek was marked, her posture was the posture of a person held together by will rather than ease. Rydan was beside her and the look on his face when he saw me was the look he reserved for moments when something had genuinely frightened him and he was converting the fright into something more actionable.“Where were you?” Vivian said.“Outside,” I said. “I saw movement through the window while you two were gone and went to check. There was nothing there.” I looked between them. “Why are you both looking at me like that?”Rydan crossed the corridor in four steps and had me against the wall before the sentence had finished.Not hurting me. Just the specific hold of someone who needs to
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155

Rydan’s POVVivian stood in the parlour doorway breathing like she had run a distance significantly longer than one flight of stairs, her face carrying the specific expression of someone who has encountered something and is still inside their first reaction to it.I was on my feet before the question had fully formed.“What happened?”She didn’t answer immediately. She was holding something behind her back with both hands in the way of someone who has picked up an object and then immediately regretted picking it up but hasn’t yet decided to put it down.“Vivian.” Franklin was up beside me. “What is that?”She hesitated. Then she brought it around from behind her.It was a toy.A stuffed animal of some kind, the sort that had been designed to be alarming in the way that a particular generation of horror-adjacent children’s toys had been designed… exaggerated features, button eyes that caught the light in a specific way, a mouth stitched into an expression that sat ambiguously between f
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156

Franklin’s POVThe number hit me before I was fully awake.7:45.I was out of the bed before the full implication had assembled itself, which was the body’s correct response to a number that meant we were already behind on a day that had a fixed, non-negotiable structure. The knee reminded me of its existence in the way it had been reminding me of its existence every morning since the match, and I acknowledged it and kept moving.“Rydan.” I said it toward the other side of the bed, which was empty.I said it again toward the bathroom, which was also empty.I stood in the middle of the bedroom in the specific confusion of someone who has woken up late and cannot locate the other person who should also be late, and then I went through the rapid calculation of whether Rydan could have already left, which seemed unlikely, or whether he was somewhere in the mansion, which was a large building to search in the twelve minutes I had available.I found my clothes. I found my kit. I moved throu
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157

Franklin’s POVThe ice was cold against my cheek and I was aware of that with more clarity than I was aware of most other things happening around me.The crowd noise had changed in the way it changed when something went wrong in the middle of a match… the collective shift from engaged to concerned, the particular quality of thousands of people recalibrating their attention toward the same point simultaneously.I tried to push myself up.My arms had the information but something between the information and the execution wasn’t cooperating. Not the knee, not an injury from the fall… something that was happening at a different level, the same pressure I had felt in the moment before I went down, still present, sitting on me in a way that had nothing to do with physical weight.“Franklin.”Rydan was beside me before I had registered him moving. He was crouched at my level, his hand on my shoulder, reading my face with the specific attention he gave to things he needed to assess quickly.“
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158

Rydan’s POVI was mid-sequence when Franklin appeared at the boards.Not at the player entrance, not in kit… in his ordinary clothes, without skates, stepping onto the ice surface with the specific urgency of someone who had stopped calculating whether this was a reasonable thing to do and had simply done it.“Get off the ice,” I said, crossing toward him immediately.“You need to leave,” he said. “Right now. Come off the ice.”“Franklin…”“Please.” His voice had the quality I had learned to read as distinct from his ordinary urgency… this was the specific register of something that had genuinely frightened him, and Franklin’s threshold for genuine fear was not low. “Just come off. I’ll explain everything. Just leave the ice.”The crowd had found us by then.Not hostile exactly… the frustrated noise of people who had paid for something and were watching it become something else. Individual voices carrying over the general noise, the particular sharpness of displeasure that crowds prod
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159

Franklin’s POVThe message came through and I read it and grabbed my bag and was out of the changing room in under a minute.The corridor outside was the standard post-match dispersal… people moving with purpose in various directions, the organised loosening of an event winding down. I scanned for Rydan in both directions and found neither him nor the woman he had mentioned implicitly in the quality of the text, which had felt clipped in the specific way his messages felt when he was managing something while writing them.I went toward the main exit.He wasn’t at the main exit.I went back through the corridor and tried the secondary route toward the ice entrance and found the same absence of him and checked my phone and the message was still the last thing in the thread and I sent a follow-up and waited twelve seconds and nothing came back.Then I remembered the eyeglasses.I had left them in my locker that morning in the specific rush of getting to the ice, and they were prescriptio
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160

Franklin’s POVThe thing in the doorway was a cat.A stray, thin and grey, sitting in the precise centre of the bar entrance with the composed authority of something that had decided this threshold belonged to it. It looked at me with the flat indifference that cats directed at everything.I had been bracing for something considerably worse.The relief and the leftover adrenaline arrived simultaneously and the sound I made was too loud for the street. Two people near the entrance looked at me with the mild alarm of witnesses to someone having a disproportionate response to a small animal.“It’s a cat,” one of them said, helpfully.“I know what it is,” I said, stepping around it and going inside.The bar was the kind of place that existed without ambition. Functional lighting, a long counter, a television nobody was watching. I sat at the counter and pointed at whatever the person beside me had ordered.It was stronger than I expected. I drank it anyway.My phone buzzed.Rydan.A pictu
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