By the time I hit the penthouse, I didn’t want food or whiskey. I wanted silence and my girl.


    I dropped down on the bed and reached for my phone. Because this part was ritual.


    She was my ritual.


    My day started with her face. And ended the same way. Every fucking day for thest three years.


    Before I cleaned blood off money, shifted millions through ounts, signed off on executions and reminded the city why the Crow name was the de they slept with at their throat…


    Her.


    My girl.


    Even if she didn’t know it anymore and hadn’t said my name in three years. And I hadn’t called her baby in longer.


    Some people built empires for power. We built ours for possession.


    I opened the app with one swipe.


    Veil.


    The dynasty’s elite social mediawork. Verified only through bloodline. She had one. Of course she did. The golden girl of Dynasty daughters.


    Everyone else used Veil for their own gain. It was where heirs watched each other in curated silence.


    But me? I didn’t use it like them.


    I owned it.


    Literally.


    I had bought Veil two years ago, the week after one of her videos buffered too long on my screen and the audiogged by two seconds.


    I had hated that. Hated the glitch, the instability, the thought of her being processed through a system that wasn’t worthy of her.


    So I called the board. Bought out the routing rights. Then acquired the entire development backend. Because if she was going to exist anywhere online, it was going to be mine.


    Her posts, metadata, videos. They belonged to me. To us.


    Not on some public cloud, foreign servers, or stored where some desperate dynasty tech could trace her filters or download her drafts.


    No.


    Her image only lived where it could be trusted.


    In our vault. On our servers. Under my passwords.


    I rebuilt the system from the inside. Hardened the encryption. Blocked export functions for her ount. Even wrote a subroutine that watermarked her photos behind the scenes, digital bloodcode only I could read.


    It was how I knew which heir hovered too long on her photo. Which bastard zoomed in. Which ones saved it.


    The amount of heirs I had blocked behind her back. Hidden their messages. Buried their likes,ments, corrupted their phones when they downloaded her photos. She never even knew they had tried.


    Because they didn’t get to talk to her or have the fucking right to flirt with our girl. She belonged to us. Because that’s what she was to me.


    Not a memory.


    Not an ex.


    Ours.


    Even if she thought we had walked away.


    Her profile was always the first. Hardcoded to appear at the top of every login. I had rewritten the algorithm myself. She never followed me back. It didn’t matter. I watched anyway. Until tonight.


    “User not found.”


    My thumb hovered, refusing to ept what I was reading. I blinked at the screen, frowned, refreshed. Nothing.


    I sat up, ignoring the pull in my ribs, the pain in my temples. None of it mattered.


    I typed her name into the search bar.


    Still nothing.


    No shadow reposts. No tags. No stories. Not even a trace buried in the cache.


    Gone.


    The phone trembled in my hand before I forced it still. I bit down hard enough to taste blood. Screens weren’t supposed to lie. People did. But this—this felt like the screen was lying to me, and it was worse.


    She had walked into her profile and pressed delete. And in that instant, my entire fucking chest went cold.


    Because for three years, she had been my screen-sized proof of life.


    Even when we stopped speaking. When I forced myself not to reach out because I knew it would hurt her more than it helped.


    I still saw her.


    What city she was in.


    What dress she wore.


    If I told Bastion now, he’d go straight to the tunnels, find the nearest man stupid enough to breathe wrong, and bleed him out on the concrete just to quiet the noise in his chest. It wouldn’t fix it. It never fixed it. Only she did.


    I forced my hand steady. Logged out. Logged back in through the ghost ount.


    The one I had built just to watch her silently, invisibly, without triggering alerts. No links to my verified ount.


    I searched again.


    Still nothing. And I knew it wasn’t a bug.


    Because I had rebuilt the fucking app. So if her profile was gone, I was going to see how.


    I reached for the second phone. The ck one. The one with my ess protocols. Opened the admin interface. Typed her user ID. Slid into the rootyer. There it was.


    ount ID: [REDACTED]


    Status: DELETED


    Method: MANUAL


    Timestamp: 02:41 A.M.


    Permanence: IRREVERSIBLE


    I stared at the screen like it might undo itself.


    She had deleted it herself. On purpose. Walked away from the one connection we still had.


    Tore down thest thread I used to breathe.


    We never broke up.


    She was still ours. We had just stopped using words and started using power.


    She didn’t know we had killed three fiancés before the contracts ever reached her.


    Didn’t know we had rewritten business agreements behind closed doors so herst name couldn’t be transferred.


    That we had leaked intel about rival heirs just to burn down their worth.


    We had bought out her hotel floorst winter so no man could stay beside her.


    Fuck. We had funded her favorite brand’s entire new collection, just so she would wear something we had designed behind closed doors.


    The clothes had be an addiction; she hadn’t worn something we didn’t own in two and a half years. Every piece in her wardrobe had been curated by us.


    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.<fn5c99> Original content can be found at find~novel</fn5c99>


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


    Gone.