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Home / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 231 - Chapter 240

243 Chapters

231

Rydan’s POVI pulled her inside before she had finished arriving at the door.She came through and I closed it and turned to her and she was already talking, the words coming with the compressed urgency of someone who had been holding them for the length of the corridor and needed them out now.Sera had come in without acknowledging anyone. Straight through the entrance, past the maids, past the dining room where the lunch things were still being cleared, directly to her office with the specific, closed-off quality of someone who was moving through the house rather than being in it. The office door had closed and had not opened since.“She knows,” Vivian said.“She might not,” I said.“She walked past everyone without looking at a single person,” Vivian said. “Sera always looks at people. It’s the thing she does. She reads rooms. She was not reading the room.”I sat on the edge of the bed.“It could be something unrelated,” I said. “She has an operation. She has people spread across m

232

Sera’s POVThe file was not where it should have been.Not missing entirely, not taken. Returned, but with the specific quality of something that had been handled and replaced rather than something that had simply been sitting where it had always sat. The dust line on the shelf edge was interrupted in a way that dust lines were interrupted when something had been lifted and set back down at a fractionally different angle.I stood in the office and looked at the shelf and felt the particular quality of understanding arriving before I was ready to act on it.I picked up the Franklin research file from the desk, the one I had been looking for when I came in, and carried it to the living room.They were both there.The specific quality of two people occupying a shared space with slightly too much attention paid to what they were individually doing was the quality that told me what I needed to know before either of them looked up. Vivian was reading something on her phone with the focused

233

Sera’s POVI was down the corridor before the call had fully ended.The lab had the specific quality of a room that had changed its register since I last left it, the particular atmosphere of people who were managing something that had shifted from stable to unstable and were working to contain the shift without losing composure. Two nurses at the monitors, one beside the bed, and beside the bed, Rydan and Vivian.Rydan looked up when I came through the door.His face was the face he had been wearing for days, the accumulated quality of someone who had been sitting at the edge of a situation they couldn’t fix and had been sitting there long enough that the sitting had become its own kind of damage. He looked at me and didn’t say anything, which told me the nurses had already told him enough that there was nothing left to ask.I went to the nearest nurse.She walked me through it in the specific, careful language of someone who understood that the information they were delivering had w

234

Rydan’s POVI was already at the car door when Vivian’s hand closed around my arm.Not gently. The specific, firm grip of someone who had decided that the next thirty seconds required physical intervention rather than words, and who had positioned themselves accordingly before I had registered they were moving. She pulled me back from the door with the particular force of someone whose new capabilities still surprised her when she used them, and we ended up on the pavement beside the car with her facing me and her expression carrying everything she had apparently been holding since we left Sera’s house.She told me I was acting without sense.She said it in the specific, direct way of someone who had known me long enough to have earned the directness, which in Vivian’s case was measured in months rather than years but had been months dense enough to cover the ground that years usually covered. She said it without raising her voice because raising her voice was not how Vivian made her

235

Vivian’s POVThe old lady’s words from the previous visit were still sitting in me when Rydan pulled me back through her door.She was already at the table when we entered, which told me she had known we were coming back before we had decided to come back, the specific, unsurprised quality of someone who received visitors the way other people received expected deliveries. She looked at us with the flat assessment of someone taking inventory and finding the inventory roughly what she had anticipated.Rydan asked her directly what she and Sera had discussed.She looked at him and then at me and then back at him, and the looking had the quality of someone deciding how much of what they knew was going to serve the people in front of them and how much was going to complicate things unnecessarily.“Sera came here the day after you did,” she said. “She told me not to contact you. Not to help you.” She folded her hands on the table. “She said the sacrifice was the part that couldn’t be risked

236

Rydan’s POVI was still talking when I noticed she wasn’t there anymore.Not physically, she was in the seat beside me, her hands in her lap and her face turned toward the passenger window. But the quality of her presence had changed in the specific way it changed when a person’s attention had gone somewhere that the body hadn’t followed, the particular absence of someone who was sitting beside you and was also somewhere else entirely.“Vivian,” I said.Nothing.I reached over and touched her arm and she came back the way people came back from wherever they had been, the specific blinking return of someone whose mind had been somewhere with more traction than the current conversation.“What?” she said.“You weren’t listening,” I said.She looked at the mirror she had been holding and then set it face down on her knee and turned toward me with the expression of someone who had been found doing something and was deciding what to do about having been found.Then she cried.Not the contai

237

Vivian’s POVI was halfway through a video when I heard the sound from the bathroom.Not dramatic, not a crash. The specific, quiet sound of someone dealing with something they were trying to handle without making it a larger event than it needed to be. I pulled out one earbud and listened and heard it again and got up.Rydan was at the sink with a cloth pressed to his face and the specific, careful posture of someone managing something messy with the minimum of fuss. The cloth had the evidence of what had been happening before I got there, and the mirror showed me the rest of it, the trail that had made it to his shirt before he had caught it.I went in without asking for permission and took over in the specific, practical way of someone who had decided that the situation required hands rather than questions. I got him clean and dealt with the cloth and ran the cold water and stood beside him while the bleeding finished doing what it was doing and stopped.When it was done he straigh

238

Rydan’s POVVivian asked the same question three different ways across the drive, which was what Vivian did when she was anxious and didn’t have enough information to direct the anxiety productively.“Do you think she knows about Betty?” she said, for what was effectively the fourth version of the same question.“I think she knew before we left,” I said.“So she knows everything.”“She probably knew when we pulled out of her driveway,” I said.Vivian sat with that and looked at the road and stopped asking, which was the specific silence of someone who had run out of variations and was now just sitting inside the uncertainty.Sera was at the entrance to the lab when we arrived, not the main house entrance, the lab specifically, which told me the morning had already produced things that had changed the order of priorities. She looked at us with the expression of someone who had been waiting and had used the waiting to arrive at a very specific temperature.She asked us directly why we h

239

Rydan’s POVI heard Vivian's warning and I made my choice anyway.I turned back to Franklin and did what needed to be done, and the everyone present understood it was significant and nobody spoke.I stepped back when it was done and stood beside the bed and waited.The waiting was the hardest part. Hard because waiting required doing nothing, and doing nothing when Franklin was lying there with that pale look in his face and that stillness, sustained effort of someone holding themselves in place through will alone.Sera stood near the monitors. Vivian was at the far wall. The nurses moved with the careful, quiet efficiency of people completing their functions in a room that had asked for silence.Nothing happened.Twenty minutes. Forty. The hour mark approached with the flat, indifferent pace of time that doesn’t care what you need from it.I sat on the edge of the chair beside the bed and felt the exhaustion of weeks settling into my joints, the accumulated weight of everything comin

240

Rydan’s POV“He wants to see you,” Vivian said.I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bed and a half-empty bottle beside me, and those five words hit differently than anything else had hit all evening. I sat there for a second just holding them.Then I got up.I washed my face and changed my shirt and walked down the corridor faster than I meant to, not running but close enough that it probably looked like running to anyone watching.Franklin was sitting up in the bed when I came through the door.Sitting up. Actually upright, with his eyes open and his colour back and his face the face I had been trying to get back to for weeks. I stopped in the doorway because my legs just stopped.Then I crossed the room and went to my knees beside the bed.“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a decision you didn’t get to make. I turned you without asking you and I know what that costs and I’m sorry, Franklin, I’m so sorry.”He looked at me for a moment.“Are you hurt?” he said. “Are you okay

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