All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Rydan’s POVThe woman left the way people left when they had delivered something and wanted to be somewhere else before the delivery landed.I watched her go and then I looked at Franklin and the look on his face was not the look of someone who had just received ordinary information. Something had shifted in the few seconds of that whispered exchange, a quality I had learned to read in him over months of reading him, and what I was reading now was the particular tightness of someone who was processing something they hadn’t expected.I crossed the corridor.My hand found his jacket and his back met the wall and the movement was faster than I had intended, which was becoming a pattern I was aware of and not proud of. I held him there and looked at his face and kept my voice low because the corridor had ears in the form of cameras and personnel and I was not going to give anyone in this building more than they already had.“What did she say to you?” I said.“Let go of me,” he said.“What

Rydan’s POVOne week was not a long time by any reasonable measure.I had lived through centuries of things and one week was nothing, an increment so small it barely registered against that kind of scale. I knew this. I held it as a fact in the part of my mind that dealt in facts and timelines and the rational organisation of experience.The rest of me was not consulting that part.The gym had been my solution to the particular problem of having too much in my body with nowhere to put it. Not the academy gym, obviously. A commercial place three streets from the mansion, the kind with enough members that one more unfamiliar face didn’t produce questions. I had been coming every morning for four days, arriving early enough that the crowd was thin and leaving before it thickened, and it had been working in the limited way that physical effort worked on things that were not physical problems.I was mid-set when I felt the shift in the room.Not a sound exactly. The quality of attention ch

Franklin’s POVThe knock came at seven-fifteen and pulled me out of a sleep that had not been doing me any particular favours anyway.I had been somewhere between properly asleep and the frustrating shallow version that left you more tired than when you closed your eyes, and the knock was almost a relief in the sense that it gave me permission to stop pretending the night was going to improve. I pulled on a shirt and went to the door.Mr Okafor from next door was standing in the hallway with a covered plate in both hands and the expression of a man who had decided that his neighbour looked like someone who needed feeding and had acted on that decision before consulting the neighbour.He was seventy-something, retired, with the particular energy of a person who had more warmth than he had people to direct it at. He had introduced himself three days ago when I arrived at this building with one bag and the general appearance of someone who had recently made a series of large decisions an

Franklin’s POVMr Colby opened his door before Daniel had finished knocking, which told me he had either heard us on the stairs or had been expecting his grandson in the way that grandparents expected people, through some mechanism that had nothing to do with prior notice.His face when he saw Daniel was the face of someone receiving something good. The kind of uncomplicated joy that older people sometimes wore without self-consciousness, the happiness of a man who loved his grandson and didn’t see any reason to moderate that.Then he saw me standing behind Daniel and the warmth expanded without shifting register.“My neighbour,” he said, with the satisfied tone of someone whose worlds had just arranged themselves pleasingly. “Come in, both of you. My wife has been cooking since this morning and there is far too much food for two people.”The flat was the mirror of mine in layout and the opposite of mine in character. It had the accumulated personality of people who had been living an

Franklin’s POVI grabbed my phone from the counter and went downstairs.The decision to go outside rather than ignore the message was not a brave one. It was the practical calculation of someone who had just found a blood-smeared box on their doormat and understood that whatever was waiting downstairs already knew where I lived, and that the difference between engaging with it in the open and waiting for it to come through my door was a difference worth controlling.The entrance hall was ordinary.The street through the glass door was ordinary.I pushed through and the cold hit me and the ordinary dissolved immediately.Ethan Wilson was standing on the pavement with the relaxed authority of someone who had arrived at a place they owned without owning it, hands in his coat pockets, the specific quality of stillness that people had when they were accustomed to other people adjusting themselves to their presence rather than the other way around. Behind him, spread across the pavement and