All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 211 - Chapter 220

Rydan’s POV“No,” I said.Sera looked at me with the patience of someone who had anticipated this response and had already prepared for the conversation that followed it.“The process is straightforward,” she said. “A specific draw, a controlled amount, done by someone who understands the chemistry involved. There is no meaningful risk to you.”“You’re asking me to give you my blood,” I said. “In a house full of vampires I met three days ago, to be used in a process I don’t fully understand, for a result that you’re describing but that I have no way to independently verify.”“That’s an accurate summary of the situation,” she said.“Then you understand why the answer is no.”Vivian was looking at me with the expression of someone who had something to say and was deciding whether this was the moment to say it. I looked back at her and she decided against it, which was the correct decision.“I’m not saying never,” I said to Sera. “I’m saying not tonight and not without more than your ass

Rydan’s POVThe ground arrived the way ground arrived when the body had made a unilateral decision about the relationship between standing and not standing, without consulting the person inhabiting it.I was on my knees and then I was on my side and the forest floor was cold against my face and the specific, deep wrongness of the golden stick in my spine was producing a cascade of things that I had enough experience to identify as serious without needing to conduct a detailed internal inventory. Gold worked on vampires the way certain things worked on certain biological systems, not through magic or mythology but through specific chemistry, the particular interference it caused in the processes that made us what we were.Five of them closed the remaining distance.I registered them with the part of me that was still registering things, which was not all of me, and I understood the geometry of the circle and what the geometry meant, and the understanding produced the specific quality o

Rydan’s POVThe sixth arrived the way days arrived when you had been counting toward them with the specific dread of knowing what they contained.We moved at eleven-forty, which was the timing Sera had calculated gave us the window between Ethan’s preparation phase and the ritual’s commencement, the gap where his attention would be divided between managing the logistics and managing the ceremonial requirements of what he was attempting to do. Twenty minutes of potential advantage in a situation where every minute was a different kind of variable.The cave was not difficult to find.That was the first thing that sat wrong. A location this significant should have been harder to locate, should have had the layers of misdirection and counter-surveillance that Ethan had applied to everything else throughout the past weeks. It was findable in the way that something was findable when the person who owned it had decided that being found at the right moment was acceptable.I pushed the thought

Rydan’s POVThe decision arrived in the half-second between watching Ethan disappear through the wall passage and turning back toward the inner chamber where Franklin was.The half-second was enough.If I went to Franklin now and Ethan escaped with the gem, whatever the gem was and whatever it was for, the ritual that was already running had a completion mechanism that we didn’t understand and couldn’t interrupt without understanding. Ethan getting clear with the gem was the version of this night that produced a longer, worse version of the same problem. Ethan not getting clear was the version where tonight was the end of it.I went after Ethan.The passage he had taken connected to the cave system’s outer structure and then to the forest, which was the specific route of someone who had mapped their exit in advance and had chosen it for the cover it provided rather than the speed. I came through the passage and out through the cave’s secondary exit into the cold air of the tree line a

Sera’s POVThe moment Rydan’s footsteps disappeared through the passage I turned back to the chamber and made the assessment that the situation required.Vivian was at my shoulder before I had completed the turn, which was the thing about Vivian that I had been watching develop since the night she had come to me three years ago with the specific, determined energy of someone who had decided they needed to understand something and was not going to stop until they did. She had not become what she had become out of impulse. She had thought it through the way she thought everything through, which was thoroughly and in private, and had arrived at the decision with the kind of certainty that didn’t require external validation.“Rydan has him,” she said.“I know,” I said. “Which means this is ours to finish.”We looked at each other for the specific second of two people confirming that they are in agreement about what comes next, and then we moved.The main chamber still had the activity of