Page 13 of The Silent War

And now she was gone.

The only system I didn’t control was her will to press delete. That was the paradox. I owned Veil. I rewrote it to the bone. But she had walked in and erased herself, and no code in the world could reverse that.

I cracked my neck, sat up, trying to control my breathing. Now she was gone.

The one thing that had stopped me from stalking her in person.

Gone.

Chapter Six

LUCA

Three long fucking days.

That was how long it had been since her Veil account vanished.

I hadn’t slept. Not in any way that mattered. My body shut down for an hour here, maybe two there, before my mind dragged me back up, searching for her again. Food didn’t matter. I stayed upright on caffeine pills and the whiskey Bastion pretended not to notice was disappearing from the cabinet. My fists still ached from the walls, but pain blurred when it wasn’t hers.

What didn’t blur was the silence. Not seeing our girls face every morning, or falling asleep memorising every detail of her latest photo.

The table was covered— four devices, cables everywhere’s, three monitors that showed command after command like I was forcing God into existence.

But it wasn’t God. It was worse. It was the thing I had sworn not to build.

A mirrored operating system. Custom firmware. Ghost-layered. Permissions buried so deep no one would ever see them until it was too late.

The box sat in front of me. A brand-new phone.

Tomorrow it would be sent out—white tissue, gold ribbon, no name. Dynasty daughters received gifts like that every day. But this wasn’t a gift. It was a leash.

It would log her location every ten seconds. Take screenshots every ten minutes. Record audio the moment I asked. Save every message before she pressed send. Back up her entire camera roll.

And with one click on the mirroring app, I could search her phone in real time. Every screen she opened. Every word she typed. Like it was mine.

Dynasty houses already buried spyware in their heirs’ devices. Governments called it counter-terrorism. Families called it protection.

What I built wasn’t new. It was perfected. Because our girl didn’t get second-standard anything. Only perfection.

The worst part wasn’t that I built it. The worst part was that I felt calm while I did. Relief. Like something out of place in me had finally clicked back into alignment, because soon she would be under my hands again.

Three nights without her. If I couldn’t watch from a distance anymore, then I had no choice but to pull her closer. Even if it meant becoming the exact kind of monster I had promised myself I wouldn’t be.

My knuckles pressed against my thigh, grounding the tremor in my wrist.

This was the line.

The one I drew at the Academy. Wardrobe, stylists, travel approvals—fine. Already ours.

Every Adams vehicle ran through Crow channels. Every so-called family security detail was men who answered to us.Trained personally by Bastion. Every hotel suite she ever walked into had been swept before she unpacked her bag, cameras gutted and replaced with ours.

That was acceptable. Protection. She never knew. She was never supposed to. But her phone—her privacy—was supposed to stay hers. The one corner of her life I swore I wouldn’t breach.

But she deleted us. And now I was erasing the line.

The screen glowed faint as I tested protocols. Fake updates masking permissions. Silent syncs disguised as diagnostics.

“Luca.”