All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

Rydan’s POVThe gate was the first wrong thing.Not unlocked, not swinging on its hinges… standing open in the specific way of something that had been left rather than forgotten, the kind of open that communicated that whoever had gone through it last had not been thinking about closing it behind them. I sat in the car for two seconds looking at it and then I was out of the car and through the gate before I had assembled a complete thought about why.I had driven here on the kind of instinct that didn’t explain itself until after the fact. Three months of nothing and then Daniel’s voice through the phone that afternoon, something in the background of what he was saying that wasn’t quite right, something that had sat in me for the two-hour drive and gotten louder the closer I got.The entrance to the building was open the same way the gate was open.I took the stairs.The door to Franklin’s flat was not fully closed and the sounds coming through the gap were the sounds of more than one

Rydan’s POVI sat in the car and looked at the open door and made myself think rather than react.Fleeing was the obvious impulse and the wrong decision. Whatever had opened that door had done so while I was gone, which meant it had already had access to everything inside, and leaving now would not undo whatever had happened in there. It would only delay my understanding of it, which was the one thing I could not afford to delay.I got out of the car.My hand extended the way it extended when I was moving toward something uncertain, the nails lengthening in the specific way of something the body did before the mind had finished giving its permission. Three centuries had built certain automatic preparations into me and I had stopped fighting them because they had kept me alive and they were not wrong.I went through the door.The entrance hall looked ordinary. The coat hooks. The side table. The runner on the floor undisturbed.Then the parlour.The sofa had been opened along its back

Rydan’s POVI left the bin bag on the path and walked back inside at the speed of someone who had not seen anything worth mentioning, which was the speed that mattered given that the man in the car was watching the entrance and any change in my pace would communicate that I had clocked him.I closed the door behind me and locked it.Franklin was in the kitchen and he came through to the hallway when he heard me come in, reading my face before I had said a word.“What happened?” he said.“Man in a car outside the gate,” I said. “Dark vehicle, forty metres left of the entrance. Axe across his lap.”Franklin looked at the door. Then back at me. “The organisation?”“Possible. Or something else entirely.” I moved to the parlour window. “There’s been enough traffic through our lives recently that narrowing it down on sight isn’t straightforward.”I crouched below the window ledge and moved the curtain edge a fraction, enough to create a sightline to the street without creating a visible gap

Rydan’s POV“Neither,” I said.The word sat in the room and Ethan’s voice received it with a pause that communicated he had not expected it as the first response.“Neither option,” I said again, in case the first time hadn’t been sufficiently clear.The laugh came through the device with the specific quality of genuine amusement rather than performed dismissal. Not the short, sharp laugh of someone covering discomfort. The real kind, the kind that came from a person who found something unexpectedly entertaining and wasn’t bothering to manage it.“You understand what that means for him,” Ethan said, when the laugh had run its course.“I understand what you’ve said it means,” I said. “Those are different things.”“Rydan.” His voice dropped the amusement and found something more direct underneath it. “I have been doing this for a long time. I have sat across from things considerably older and more capable than you and watched them make the same calculation you’re making right now. The ca

Franklin’s POVThe rod made a specific sound before it landed.A short displacement of air, barely a fraction of a second of warning, and then the impact arrived and the warning became irrelevant. Ethan swung it with the casual force of someone who had done this enough times that effort wasn’t required, the way you used a tool you were comfortable with. He wasn’t angry. That was the part that made it worse. He was composed throughout, his face carrying the mild concentration of someone completing a task on a list, and he laughed between the hits at things that had no obvious humour in them, which was the laugh of someone enjoying a situation rather than responding to anything specific within it.I stopped making sounds after the third hit.Not because I had decided to. Because the body made that decision when it understood that the sounds were producing nothing except satisfaction in the person causing the reason for them. I bit down on the inside of my cheek and fixed my eyes on the