Page 14 of The Silent War

Bastion stood in the doorway. His eyes moved across the table—the wires, the code, the box waiting to be wrapped. He didn’t look surprised. Just tired.

He wasn’t coping either. I’d seen it. He spent more hours in the tunnels than anywhere else, bleeding his rage into other men until his hands stopped shaking.

“How long have you been here?”

I finished the command, closed the laptop slow, kept my hand on the lid. I didn’t answer.

“Three days,” he said. “You haven’t left this room in three days.”

I exhaled once.

“She deleted the only thing we had left. The only way I knew she was okay. The only way I could still…” I pressed my hands to my eyes. “…still see her face.”

Tremors ran down my wrist.

“I said I wouldn’t do this,” I muttered. “Said we’d wait. Earn her back.”

“Luca—”

“I said we wouldn’t touch her phone.”

His eyes dropped to the box. Then to me. He walked across the room.

“What’s it loaded with?”

“Everything. Real-time pings. Remote activation. Camera. Audio. Cloud. Unlimited access.”

He didn’t flinch. Just lowered into the chair across from me.

“You’re really doing it.”

“I have to. When I can’t see her, it’s like I’m….” I didn’t finish the sentence and I didn’t have to. Bastion already carried the rest of it in his chest, the same place it lived in mine. We weren’t born two men—we were born one.

The world wouldn’t understand our love for her. They’d call it obsession, dangerous, call it every word they reach for when something is too big for them to name. But what we felt for her wasn’t obsessioninsteadof love. It was obsessionbecauseof love.

She was the piece that made us whole. The proof that the fracture between us had been waiting for her all along. She didn’t love Bastion. She didn’t love me. She loved us. Both halves. The whole. And that meant she wasn’t just ours—she was meant for us.

Other men said they’d die for their women. We never said it, because it wasn’t enough. Death was too easy. We would live for her. Burn for her. Break laws, break dynasties, break the world if that’s what it took. Our devotion wasn’t just a vow.

“If we’re crossing the line,” Bastion tapped the desk with one finger, then he reached across taking the box, “we cross it together.”

He wasn’t stopping me. He was claiming his part. Because that was what we did.

When one of us broke, the other didn’t stop him. He steadied his hands. And together, we finished it.

Chapter Seven

LUCA

Bastion had handled the groundwork. He made sure her old phone collapsed the way we needed it to—a low-grade virus that turned her screen to static one morning. No threat and no real damage—just a controlled failure, a push toward replacement that looked like chance.

And when the moment came, she received ours.

I hadn’t let myself hope. Not until now. Because now the screen lit.

[EMILIA_ADMS] — DEVICE ACTIVATION DETECTED

My lungs locked. Then, for the first time in six days, I inhaled sharp—like my body had been waiting on her permission to remember how.