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Home / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

Lahat ng Kabanata ng Falling for my Vampire Captain : Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

243 Kabanata

181

Rydan’s POVThe gate was the first wrong thing.Not unlocked, not swinging on its hinges… standing open in the specific way of something that had been left rather than forgotten, the kind of open that communicated that whoever had gone through it last had not been thinking about closing it behind them. I sat in the car for two seconds looking at it and then I was out of the car and through the gate before I had assembled a complete thought about why.I had driven here on the kind of instinct that didn’t explain itself until after the fact. Three months of nothing and then Daniel’s voice through the phone that afternoon, something in the background of what he was saying that wasn’t quite right, something that had sat in me for the two-hour drive and gotten louder the closer I got.The entrance to the building was open the same way the gate was open.I took the stairs.The door to Franklin’s flat was not fully closed and the sounds coming through the gap were the sounds of more than one

182

Rydan’s POVThree men in the doorway and four still in the room behind me.I did the calculation the way I had been doing calculations in tight spaces for three centuries, which was quickly and without sentiment. The doorway was the problem because the doorway was the exit, and three bodies in a doorframe meant the exit was currently a negotiation rather than a route.I stopped negotiating.The first one came off his feet before he had processed that I had decided to move, and the second caught the wall hard enough that the plaster made a sound about it. The third was smarter than his colleagues and had repositioned by the time I reached him, but smarter and sufficient were not the same thing, and the gap in the doorframe that opened when I redirected him was enough.I came through it.The corridor outside was empty and I moved down it fast, checking both ends with the specific sweep of someone who understood that cleared rooms did not always stay cleared. The stairwell. The landing.

183

Rydan’s POVI sat in the car and looked at the open door and made myself think rather than react.Fleeing was the obvious impulse and the wrong decision. Whatever had opened that door had done so while I was gone, which meant it had already had access to everything inside, and leaving now would not undo whatever had happened in there. It would only delay my understanding of it, which was the one thing I could not afford to delay.I got out of the car.My hand extended the way it extended when I was moving toward something uncertain, the nails lengthening in the specific way of something the body did before the mind had finished giving its permission. Three centuries had built certain automatic preparations into me and I had stopped fighting them because they had kept me alive and they were not wrong.I went through the door.The entrance hall looked ordinary. The coat hooks. The side table. The runner on the floor undisturbed.Then the parlour.The sofa had been opened along its back

184

Rydan’s POVThe phone buzz pulled me toward the table before I had made a conscious decision to move toward it.Unknown number. No message, just the single buzz of something that had been sent and delivered and was now sitting on the screen waiting. I stared at the notification for a moment and then looked at the door and then back at the screen, and the knocking from beyond the door had stopped entirely and the silence it left was the kind that didn’t feel empty.I went outside anyway.The corridor was what corridors were at this hour, dim and still, the building’s nighttime sounds the only population. I checked both ends and the stairwell and found nothing that explained the knocking or the cold or the quality of the air that had preceded both. Whatever had been at the door was not at the door anymore.I went back inside.I locked the door with both mechanisms and put the chain on and sat on the damaged sofa with Bruno at my feet and looked at the entrance and waited for it to give

185

Rydan’s POVI left the bin bag on the path and walked back inside at the speed of someone who had not seen anything worth mentioning, which was the speed that mattered given that the man in the car was watching the entrance and any change in my pace would communicate that I had clocked him.I closed the door behind me and locked it.Franklin was in the kitchen and he came through to the hallway when he heard me come in, reading my face before I had said a word.“What happened?” he said.“Man in a car outside the gate,” I said. “Dark vehicle, forty metres left of the entrance. Axe across his lap.”Franklin looked at the door. Then back at me. “The organisation?”“Possible. Or something else entirely.” I moved to the parlour window. “There’s been enough traffic through our lives recently that narrowing it down on sight isn’t straightforward.”I crouched below the window ledge and moved the curtain edge a fraction, enough to create a sightline to the street without creating a visible gap

186

Rydan’s POVI turned from the window and moved toward the gate.The man from the street was faster than the distance between us should have allowed. He was on me before I had cleared the path, his weight hitting me from behind with the full momentum of something that had been built for exactly this kind of impact, and the ground came up again for the second time in ten minutes and my face reacquainted itself with the pavement at close range.His grip was around both my arms this time, pinning them, and the axe was somewhere I couldn’t see it, which was the part that required immediate attention.I worked against the hold.Not with panic, not with the blind thrashing of someone overwhelmed. With the methodical, incremental pressure of someone who understood leverage and had three centuries of understanding where to apply it. I found the angle where his grip was weakest and I drove into it and the hold broke in stages, first one arm and then the other, and I was upright before he had co

187

Rydan’s POV“Neither,” I said.The word sat in the room and Ethan’s voice received it with a pause that communicated he had not expected it as the first response.“Neither option,” I said again, in case the first time hadn’t been sufficiently clear.The laugh came through the device with the specific quality of genuine amusement rather than performed dismissal. Not the short, sharp laugh of someone covering discomfort. The real kind, the kind that came from a person who found something unexpectedly entertaining and wasn’t bothering to manage it.“You understand what that means for him,” Ethan said, when the laugh had run its course.“I understand what you’ve said it means,” I said. “Those are different things.”“Rydan.” His voice dropped the amusement and found something more direct underneath it. “I have been doing this for a long time. I have sat across from things considerably older and more capable than you and watched them make the same calculation you’re making right now. The ca

188

Franklin’s POVThe first thing I registered was the chair.Not the room, not the light, not the specific situation I was in. The chair, because the chair was what my body was communicating most urgently about, the way my wrists were positioned behind me and what the positioning was doing to my shoulders, the particular deep ache of someone who had been in the same constrained posture for long enough that the muscles had stopped protesting individually and had started protesting as a collective.I opened my eyes.The room was the kind of room that didn’t want to be identified. No windows, or none that were uncovered. A single light source from above, the harsh flat kind that didn’t flatter anything and wasn’t trying to. Concrete walls that had been painted once and hadn’t been painted since. The smell of a space that was used for purposes rather than inhabited, the particular institutional smell of somewhere that only mattered for what happened in it.I pulled at the rope on my wrists.

189

Franklin’s POVThe rod made a specific sound before it landed.A short displacement of air, barely a fraction of a second of warning, and then the impact arrived and the warning became irrelevant. Ethan swung it with the casual force of someone who had done this enough times that effort wasn’t required, the way you used a tool you were comfortable with. He wasn’t angry. That was the part that made it worse. He was composed throughout, his face carrying the mild concentration of someone completing a task on a list, and he laughed between the hits at things that had no obvious humour in them, which was the laugh of someone enjoying a situation rather than responding to anything specific within it.I stopped making sounds after the third hit.Not because I had decided to. Because the body made that decision when it understood that the sounds were producing nothing except satisfaction in the person causing the reason for them. I bit down on the inside of my cheek and fixed my eyes on the

190

Rydan’s POVI drove until the driving stopped producing anything useful.That took longer than it should have, because the alternative to driving was returning to the mansion and the mansion was the place where Franklin’s phone was sitting on the bedroom floor and where the damaged sofa and the broken window were and where everything that had happened today would be waiting to be sat with, and I was not ready to sit with any of it.So I drove.I extended my awareness outward the way I had been extending it since I found the phone, pushing it in every direction from the moving car, searching for the specific signal of him. Not a general search, not the broad sweep I used when I was monitoring a perimeter. The targeted, concentrated reach of something looking for one specific thing among everything else, the particular quality of Franklin that I had spent months learning and could have identified in a crowded room with my eyes closed.Nothing came back.Block after block, street after s

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