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Home / MM Romance / Falling for my Vampire Captain / Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

All Chapters of Falling for my Vampire Captain : Chapter 221 - Chapter 230

237 Chapters

221

Sera’s POVI read the message twice.Not because the meaning was unclear. Because the specific quality of those four words required a moment of being held before being acted on, the weight of them in the context of everything I knew about Rydan and everything I knew about what the past hours had contained for him.“Faster,” I said.The driver looked at the road and found what the road had to offer in terms of speed and used it, and I sat in the front seat with the phone in my hand and the city moving past the windows and felt the specific quality of urgency that had a direction and a destination attached to it.Vivian was in the back seat and she had heard the word and had seen my face and she didn’t ask questions, which was the version of her I had come to appreciate most.I tried to reach Rydan through the channel I used when I needed to know the quality of someone’s state rather than their location, the specific extension of awareness toward a person I knew well enough to have thei

222

Rydan’s POVAn hour later, Sera’s house received us with the specific warmth of somewhere that had been kept ready rather than left to cool.The maids moved with the practiced efficiency of people who had been given instructions in advance and were executing them without requiring further direction. One of them walked me to my room and another had the bath already running by the time I reached the bathroom doorway, the steam coming out into the cooler air of the corridor with the particular quality of something that had been prepared for a specific person’s specific state.I stood in the bath for longer than bathing required.Not thinking, not planning, not running through anything that had happened across the night. Just standing in the hot water with my hands at my sides and the steam around me and the specific, suspended quality of a body that had been through too much and needed the water to be the only thing for a few minutes.When I got out and stood at the mirror, something mad

223

Rydan’s POVThe trainee’s words sat in me the way words sat when they had been placed rather than said, the specific quality of something delivered with intention rather than casual mention.I turned to ask him what he meant.He was already moving away, called back by the others at the far end of the training space with the urgency of someone being retrieved before they had finished saying something they had perhaps not been supposed to say. The calling-back had the quality of intervention, the specific energy of people who had watched something happen and had decided the something had gone far enough.I looked at the space where he had been standing.Then at the others, who were doing the thing people did when they had collectively decided the best response to an awkward moment was to be very focused on whatever they were doing, the pointed attention of people who were not going to look at me because looking at me would require acknowledging the exchange.I asked the one nearest to m

224

Rydan’s POV“Who is she hiding from?” I said.Vivian looked at me for the specific second of someone who had decided what they were going to offer before they came through the door and had reached the edge of it.“Goodnight, Rydan,” she said.“Vivian…”She was already moving, the specific unhurried speed of someone who had made the decision that the conversation was finished and had the capability to make that decision stick, and then she was through the door and the door was closed and the corridor beyond it was silent in the way that corridors were silent when someone had moved through them too quickly to leave any trace of their passing.I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and held the question she had left me with.Franklin’s aunt. Alive, hiding, being looked for. The specific shape of that was a shape I had been trying to assemble from pieces across weeks and the piece Vivian had just placed was not the last piece but it was a significant one, and the significant ones always

225

Sera’s POVThe blood draw required the specific, careful attention of someone who understood that the quantity mattered as much as the quality, that taking too much produced a result that defeated the purpose of the taking.I worked with the precision I had developed across decades of this kind of work, the specific focus of someone who had learned that biological systems had tolerances and that tolerances were the variable that determined whether an intervention helped or simply added another problem to the existing ones.Franklin’s aunt had stopped screaming.Not because the discomfort had stopped but because people reached the point where the energy required for screaming exceeded what they had available, and she had reached that point. She sat in the chair with the resigned quality of someone who had understood that the situation was what it was and that the understanding changed nothing about the situation.I was almost done when the presence at the door registered.I looked up.

226

Vivian’s POVThe man was at the entrance of the car park when I first noticed him.Not doing anything specific, not moving toward me or away from me. Just standing with his face oriented in my direction in the specific way of someone whose attention had found a target and had decided to stay on it. I registered it the way I had been registering things differently since the change, the specific heightened awareness of someone whose perceptual range had expanded beyond what they had been born with.I went into the mall.The mall was busy in the mid-morning way of a weekday, the specific population of people who had the kind of schedules that put them in shopping centres before noon, mothers with pushchairs and older people and the occasional person in work clothes moving quickly between errands. I moved through it and found the first thing on my list and then the second, and by the third I had almost convinced myself that the man in the car park had been nothing.He was at the end of th

227

Rydan’s POVSera’s office had the settled quality of a room that had held many difficult conversations and had absorbed all of them without changing its shape. I sat across from her and we had gone through the round of it, the explanation and the counter-explanation and the specific, uncomfortable process of two people who had different information arriving at the same place from different directions.I told her I understood.I told her I would try everything available to help Franklin, which was the truest thing I had said in the office and also the thing that had the most complicated implications, and Sera looked at me with the expression of someone who was hearing both the surface and the thing underneath it.I was moving toward the door when it opened from the outside.Vivian came through it with the energy of someone who had been moving fast and had arrived with something that needed somewhere to go. She looked at Sera and then at me and the look she gave me was the specific look

228

Vivian’s POVThe word landed in the warehouse the way certain words landed when they had been chosen specifically for their weight.I looked at Betty and I looked at the specific quality of what she was describing, and the quality was familiar in the way that things were familiar when you had been adjacent to them recently enough to recognise their shape even in a new form.“This is black magic,” I said.Betty looked at me with the flat, unhurried expression of someone who did not consider that a disqualifying characterisation.“We need to go,” I said to Rydan.He was looking at Betty with the specific expression of someone who had heard a price and was already doing the arithmetic of whether the price was payable, which was the expression I had been afraid of from the moment Betty said the words.“Rydan,” I said.“What exactly would the exchange involve?” he said. To Betty, not to me.I put my hand on his arm. “We’re leaving.”He didn’t move immediately, which was the specific, weigh

229

Vivian’s POVI was halfway to the window when Sera was already inside the room.Not coming through the door, not announcing herself with the handle or the hinges. Simply there, with the specific quality of someone who had decided that the ordinary sequence of entering a room was optional for them in their own house. She stood near the wardrobe and looked at me with the composed, unhurried attention of someone who had arrived with a question and was going to receive its answer.“Why aren’t you downstairs?” she said.I looked at her and made the calculation that the truth required more energy than I currently had available for it, and the lie was already forming before I had fully decided to use it.“I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I needed more rest.”She looked at me for the specific length of time that someone looked at a thing they were deciding whether to accept at face value. Then she sat in the chair near the window and the sitting had the quality of someone who was not planning

230

Rydan’s POVThe lie sat in me through the whole of breakfast in the specific way that lies sat when you were looking at the person you had told them to.Sera ate with the unhurried quality she brought to everything, and across the table she looked at us with the periodic, assessing attention of someone who had not fully accepted the reading glasses explanation and was keeping the question open rather than closed. I kept my eyes on my plate and worked through the food with the focused attention of someone who needed to appear occupied.Vivian was doing the same thing on the opposite side of the table, which I knew without looking because I could feel the specific quality of someone trying very hard to behave normally, which had its own distinctive texture that was not quite normal.I pressed my foot against hers under the table.She looked at me.I looked at my plate.She looked at her plate.Sera set her coffee down and said that Franklin’s situation was ongoing, that she was still wo

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