All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

Rydan’s POVThe new apartment was the kind of place that existed without distinguishing itself from any other place in the building or on the street. Standard furniture, standard layout, the particular anonymity of somewhere that had housed many different people and had absorbed nothing specific from any of them. I had taken it for exactly that quality, the quality of a space that nobody who was looking for me would think to look for me in.I slept with one eye on the door, which was not a metaphor. Three centuries had produced the ability to maintain a monitoring awareness even in sleep, and I used it because the alternative was waking up to something I hadn’t heard coming.Nothing came.In the morning I sat in the apartment for an hour and found that the apartment was not a productive environment for thinking. It was too contained, too close to the specific feeling of the past weeks, the walls at the wrong distance. I needed space with ordinary life happening around me, the kind of

Ethan’s POVThe van was still burning when I reached it.Not the contained, manageable burning of something that had caught from a mechanical fault, the comprehensive burning of something that had been made to burn, the specific quality of a fire that had been started with intention rather than accident. The vehicle was in the service area behind the warehouse’s eastern wall, where it had been parked in the same position for the past four days, and the fire had reached the stage where what was left of the structure was more absence than vehicle.My men were standing at a distance that told me the fire had surprised them rather than been anticipated. The specific distance of people who had heard something and come toward it rather than people who had been watching something develop.I walked to the nearest one.“Who was in the area,” I said.He looked at the fire and then at me with the expression of someone who genuinely didn’t know, which I found less useful than an expression that w

Sera’s POVRydan arrived at my door at seven in the morning with the specific energy of someone who had received a text at five and had spent the intervening two hours deciding whether to wait for a reasonable hour or simply come.He had not waited for a reasonable hour.I let him in and gestured toward the kitchen and the kettle, which was the specific hospitality of someone who understood that the gesture mattered more than whether it was accepted.“I’m fine,” he said. “What’s the idea?”Three centuries of existence and he still moved through rooms the way he had moved through rooms when I first knew him, with the contained, forward-leaning quality of someone whose mind was always slightly ahead of their body. I had watched that quality be an asset and a liability in roughly equal measure over the years, and this morning it was an asset because we didn’t have time for him to settle into anything.I sat at the table and he sat across from it without fully settling into the chair.“Tw

Franklin’s POVThe first thing I registered when I came back to myself was that I wasn’t alone.Ethan was standing on the other side of the room with the specific quality of someone who had been standing there for a while and had been doing nothing except looking at me, and the looking had a different character from the usual assessments he conducted when he came into the room. Those had the quality of inventory checks, the flat professional attention of someone monitoring a resource. This was something else. More concentrated. More personal.I yelled at him because yelling was the response my body produced when it woke up to find someone staring at it from across a room in the dark.He didn’t move.He didn’t answer, didn’t react to the sound, didn’t produce the mild irritation or the composed dismissal that he usually produced when I said anything he found inconvenient. He just stood with his eyes on me in the way they had been when I woke, and the quality of the standing was startin

Rydan’s POVThe message came through while I was sitting in the car outside a petrol station with a coffee I had bought more for something to do with my hands than because I wanted it.Sera’s name, and beneath it a single sentence that had the specific quality of information delivered without softening because softening would have been a waste of the time the information was trying to save.Ethan had moved Franklin again.I sat with the coffee in my hand and the screen in my other hand and felt the specific, grinding frustration of a situation that kept moving its pieces every time we got close enough to the board to see the arrangement clearly. The coffee went cold in the cup while I sat there working through what the move meant for what we had been building.It meant Sera’s insider had either been compromised or had been deliberately fed false location information, which meant Ethan knew or suspected the insider existed. Or it meant the move was operational rather than reactive, par