บททั้งหมดของ Falling for my Vampire Captain : บทที่ 161 - บทที่ 170

Franklin’s POVThe door came open before I had gotten off the bed.Not unlocked, not knocked… opened, with the force of something that had decided the door’s opinion of the situation was irrelevant. I was still holding my phone and still processing the messages on it when the room changed and the air changed and my neck was in a grip that I recognised before I saw the face attached to it.The wall met my back.“Rydan…” His name came out compressed, the grip making proper volume difficult. “Rydan, stop.”His eyes were not the eyes I knew. They were in the territory I had seen before, the territory that meant the person I knew was present somewhere behind what I was looking at but was not currently in charge of the decisions being made.“Let go,” I said. “Please. Let go.”He didn’t let go.I stopped pulling against it because pulling against it made it worse and I had learned that lesson before. I went still and kept my eyes on his face and waited, which was the only thing available.Af

Rydan’s POVI don’t know exactly when he stopped moving.It wasn’t a moment I can point to cleanly… there was no specific punch that was different from the others, no line I was aware of crossing. It was more that at some point the thing I was responding to stopped responding, and the absence of response reached me in a way that the previous several minutes hadn’t.I pulled back.Franklin was on the floor.He wasn’t moving. His face had the particular stillness of someone who was not choosing to be still, and the blood was from his nose and from a cut above his eyebrow and it was on the floor beside him and on my hands and the room was very quiet.Something arrived in my chest that I had not felt in a very long time.“Franklin.” I was on my knees beside him before I had decided to move. “Franklin, wake up.”Nothing.“Franklin.” I put my hands on his face, careful now, catastrophically careful given what those same hands had been doing sixty seconds ago. “Open your eyes. Please.”Nothi

Franklin’s POVI watched Rydan’s face change the moment he answered.He had the phone to his ear and his eyes on the road but the road wasn’t what he was seeing… his jaw had set in the specific way it set when information was arriving that required him to immediately begin managing it rather than simply receiving it. I had learned to read that jaw.He said very little on the call. “Yes.” A pause. “I understand.” Another pause, longer. “I’ll be there.”He ended it and put the phone in the holder and drove for a moment without saying anything, which was the version of him that was buying time to assemble the delivery.“What?” I said.“The coach,” he said. “The article reached him. He’s calling it a serious situation and wants me at the academy.” He paused. “Immediately.”I looked at my hands in my lap. The ice bag had lost most of its usefulness and was now just cold water in a bag, which I was still holding against my face out of habit.“Vivian,” I said.“I know.”“Someone needs to get

Rydan’s POVThe academy was wrong from the moment I stepped through the gate.Not wrong in any visible, specific way. The buildings were where they always were. The car park had the usual arrangement of vehicles. The path to the main entrance was clear and empty in the way it was clear and empty on any ordinary morning. But the quality of the silence was off, the particular silence that a place produced when the people inside it had agreed, without discussing it, to behave differently than they normally would.I had lived long enough to recognise that kind of silence by texture alone.I went to the main corridor first. Empty. The administrative office had its door closed, which was unusual for this hour. The equipment room was dark through the window beside it. I moved through the building the way I moved through spaces that were giving me nothing useful, checking each one quickly and moving to the next, and the building returned nothing except its own closed, careful quiet.The train

Rydan’s POVThe phone woke me before I had fully decided I was asleep.I was on the sofa, which was where I had ended up after Franklin had gone to the bedroom and closed the door with the specific finality of someone who needed a wall between themselves and the rest of the night. I hadn’t followed him. The things he had said were still sitting in me in the way that certain things sat, not loudly, just present and persistent, and I had stayed on the sofa with Bruno and the lamp and let the hours pass.The notifications were stacked in a way I had not seen before.Not the team channel, not any of my usual contacts. Multiple platforms, multiple sources, all of them pointing at the same thing. I opened the first one and the image loaded and I sat forward on the sofa cushion and felt the morning rearrange itself around what I was looking at.The picture was different from the video.The video had been twelve seconds of something real, taken through glass. This was a photograph, but not a