บททั้งหมดของ Falling for my Vampire Captain : บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

Calen’s POVI knew it was wrong.Knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop on Karl’s private conversation. But the doubt eating at me was too strong to ignore.I moved quietly to the glass door, standing just close enough to hear without being obvious about it.Karl’s voice was low, tense. “…can’t keep doing this. It’s getting too complicated.”A pause while the other person responded.“I know. I know that. But we need to finish this today. No more delays.” Another pause. “Fine. Same place. I’ll be there.”My heart cracked right down the middle.‘Finish this today.’ The words echoed in my head, taking on meanings I desperately didn’t want to consider.He was meeting someone. Someone he’d been texting all morning. Someone he was hiding from me.This was it. Karl was cheating on me.All those declarations of love. All the promises. The way he’d held me last night and told me I was his… it had all been lies.I backed away from the door before Karl could turn around and see me standing there. My chest f

Calen’s POVThe professor was talking about coastal erosion patterns, drawing diagrams on the board with a yellow chalk he always used, and I hadn’t heard a single word he’d said in the last twenty minutes.My notebook sat open in front of me, blank except for the date I’d written at the top out of habit. The pen was still in my hand, but it hadn’t moved. I was staring at the front of the room without actually seeing it, my jaw tight and my knee bouncing under the desk.Karl was cheating on me.The thought kept circling back, relentless, no matter how hard I tried to push it away. The secretive texting this morning. Hiding his phone screen when he heard me wake up. Walking out to the balcony for a call he didn’t want me to hear. And those words, clear and damning through the glass. ‘We need to finish this today. No more delays.’The worst part wasn’t even the possibility that he was with someone else. The worst part was how stupid I felt. How completely, embarrassingly stupid. I’d sto

Calen’s POVThe needle went in and I felt it.Not just the physical sting of it, though that was there too, sharp and immediate along the inside of my arm. What I felt deeper than that was something harder to name. A kind of violation that settled into my bones the second Morrison’s face broke into something satisfied, something almost reverent, like he’d just received a gift he’d been waiting a very long time for.That expression broke something open in me.I’d been scared since the moment I walked through that door. Scared when Rowan grabbed me. Scared watching Karl slumped and bloodied across the room. Scared in that small, animal way that locks your muscles and steals your breath and makes you feel like the only option is to go still and survive it.But watching Morrison look at my blood in that needle like it was something precious, something he’d earned, while Karl took hits across the room just for trying to warn me… the fear burned off completely. What replaced it wasn’t coura

Karl’s POVThe discharge papers took forty minutes longer than they should have because the nurse kept finding reasons to come back into the room and check things that had already been checked. I signed everything they put in front of me with my left hand because my right side was still pulling painfully every time I reached across my body, and I didn’t complain about any of it because complaining would have added another twenty minutes.What I was thinking about the entire time had nothing to do with the wound in my side.The council’s decision sat in my chest like a stone I couldn’t shift. The role that came with authority and responsibility and a very specific set of rules about how its holder was supposed to conduct themselves in the human world.Rules that included maintaining clear distance from human relationships.I’d read the council’s documentation once, years ago, when Morrison had first taken the position and made a point of circulating it to every vampire in the region. T

Calen’s POVThe venue looked nothing like our school gymnasium.Whoever had been in charge of decorations had clearly taken the brief seriously. String lights covered the ceiling so densely it looked like the inside of a clear night sky. Round tables with white linen. A proper dance floor with a DJ setup at one end and a small stage at the other. It was the kind of thing that made you forget, just briefly, that three weeks ago people you knew had been in genuine danger.I was glad for the forgetting.Karl looked unreasonably good in his suit. Dark navy, fitted in the way that suggested it had been made for him specifically, which knowing Karl it probably had. He’d done something minimal with his hair that somehow made everything worse for my ability to think clearly. I’d been ready before him and had spent ten minutes sitting on his couch pretending to check my phone while actually just watching him get ready, which was an embarrassing use of ten minutes that I was not going to admit