All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Rydan’s POVI played it again from the beginning.The figure was there in the first clip, which I had missed on the initial watch because my attention had been on Franklin in the foreground, which was where my attention went by default when Franklin was in a frame. But the second time through, knowing where to look, the figure resolved itself from background noise into something deliberate.Same position across the clips. Not exactly the same physical location, the academy was a large space and the footage came from different areas of it across different days. But the same quality of presence. The same stillness against the movement of everything else. Always at the edge of frame, always positioned where Franklin was positioned, always with that specific orientation that had nothing to do with the activity happening between them.He had been there the whole season.I went through every clip we had. Eleven of them, different dates, different locations within the academy grounds. He was

Rydan’s POVThe impact came from behind before I had fully turned toward the window.Not a punch, something broader and harder, the flat force of something swung with two hands and enough weight behind it to produce the specific result of the floor arriving in my vision without the intermediate stages between upright and horizontal. I registered the back of my skull meeting the dormitory floor and then I registered nothing for what felt like a short time but may have been longer.The ceiling was the first thing.Not the dormitory ceiling, which had been the standard institutional white of student accommodation. This ceiling was lower and had exposed beams and the particular quality of a space that had been built for something practical rather than inhabited. Wherever I was, it was not the dormitory room.The chair was the second thing.Wood, heavy, the kind built for durability rather than comfort, and I was in it with my wrists behind me and my ankles at the legs and the rope doing t

Ethan’s POVI watched him come down the street from the window.The particular quality of his movement told me everything I needed to know about the afternoon he had experienced. Not broken, not defeated, but the movement of someone who had been running hard and had stopped running and was now operating on the specific determination of someone who had nowhere left to go except forward. He didn’t see the car. He didn’t see the men I had positioned at the building’s entrance with the casual visibility of people who were simply there.He never looked up.That was the thing about Rydan Millie. Three hundred years and he still moved through the world with the specific blind spot of someone who believed their own capability was sufficient for whatever was in front of them. It was not arrogance exactly. It was the particular confidence of something that had survived long enough to stop expecting to be caught off guard.I found that quality interesting. I also found it useful.I nodded at the

Franklin’s POVThe door opened before I had time to process that Ethan’s voice had come from inside the room with me rather than outside it.Two men. The broad, purposeful kind that existed specifically to make other people’s options very small very quickly. They crossed the floor to me before I had done anything useful with the half-second of warning, and the chair went over sideways and I went with it and the floor received me for what felt like the hundredth time in however many days this had been.They held me down with the efficient, impersonal quality of people completing a task, and pulled out what I registered a moment later as leather straps rather than the wipes I had initially processed them as in the shock of the arrival. They worked through me with those straps in the specific methodical sequence of something practiced, and the sounds I made were the sounds I had stopped being embarrassed about making because embarrassment required a resource I was no longer allocating to

Ethan’s POVThe face stayed with me through the night.I worked the problem the way I worked all problems, methodically and without the distraction of emotion, pulling every thread of documentation I had access to and following each one to whatever it connected to. The image was from a specific decade and the woman in it had the specific quality of someone positioned deliberately rather than incidentally beside the subject, not a background figure, not an accidental inclusion in the frame.She had been important to him.By two in the morning I had enough to confirm the direction. By three I had a name that matched the face and a history that attached to the name. By four I had the shape of what she was and what she had been and what her connection to Rydan meant in the context of everything currently in motion.Sera.The name surfaced through the documentation with the specific weight of someone who had been operating quietly and for a long time in spaces that didn’t produce much docu