Page 15 of The Silent War

The notification held. It didn’t blink away. She had turned it on. She was setting it up.

She was holding what I had built for her—every line of code, every hidden protocol—and she didn’t even know that what she carried wasn’t just a device. It was me, in her hands, disguised as glass and breathing with her every movement.

I dropped into the chair, blood rushing in my ears as the console came alive. Real-time logs scrolled across the screen,every process running exactly as I had designed it, each line of code like a pulse I had written for her.

There she was. Fingerprint verified, personalization engaged.

User confirmed: Emilia Adams.

She could have been across the world—some Dynasty spa, some island villa—but in that moment she was closer than she had been in years. Because this wasn’t just a phone. This was ours.

The device ran its self-check. The camera blinked alive for a split second, long enough to catch a grainy silhouette, white robe. I didn’t move to capture it. I just watched.

She tapped through onboarding without hesitation, like she wanted to believe in it. And I prayed she did, because I hadn’t breathed right in six days.

Then she logged in. Data syncing. Contact list downloading straight into a server I owned.

She had no idea—every text, every screenshot, every note she saved was already mirrored back to me. The emergency override had been rewritten so only two numbers would ever go through—mine and Bastion’s. Her wallpaper options filtered through an AI I trained on her favorite colors. The OS built to breathe with her, brightness shifting with her pulse when the watch paired, volume tuning itself to the sound of her voice.

Because that was obsession. Not noise for the sake of it. It was code, architecture, invisible hands catching her every time the world forgot.

The logs flickered. Camera feed opened again. Front-facing. No photo saved, just a test.

App installation: Veil.

My pulse stopped. She wasn’t only setting up the phone. She was building a new account.

I went still, eyes locked on the stream of code.

New account request: EMILIA.A.

Same handle, slight variation. Just her, raw. Rebuilding herself from scratch. And doing it inside my system.

My fingers moved before thought. Normally new accounts waited six hours for approval. Not hers. Never hers. I cut straight into root, overrode the gate, backdated her bloodline clearance.

Approved. Account verified: Luca Crow.

Elapsed time: 4.6 seconds.

And then I paused. Because she was back in the system. Our feeds and our world.

My throat burned, the air flooding in too sharp—relief and obsession mixed with oxygen rushing into a body that had been suffocating for six nights and was only now remembering how to function.

I opened her profile. Blank, for now. I traced her user code across the glass the way other men trace veins, like following it kept me alive.

“You came back, baby.”

Chapter Eight

EMILIA

The Adams crest was every four meters within the marble. The same crest stamped on announcements, contracts, birth certificates. The emblem that had been branded into my life before I could spell it.

I put my hand on the door knob, smoothed my dress, and opened the door.

Alexander didn’t look up.

He didn’t need to. The spreadsheets across his screens had his attention. Three phones laid to one side. A fourth buzzed and was silenced with a flick of his fingertip.