Three long fucking days.


    That was how long it had been since her Veil ount 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 cab. 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 hertest photo.


    The table was covered— four devices, cables everywhere’s, three monitors that showedmand aftermand 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. Ghostyered. Permissions buried so deep no one would ever see them until it was toote.


    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 ce 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 bing 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 reced with ours.


    That was eptable. 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.”<fn31cf> Th? link to the orig?n of this information r?sts ?n Find?Novel</fn31cf>


    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 themand, closed theptop 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 ess.”


    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 ce 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 obsession instead of love. It was obsession because of 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. Breakws, 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 iming 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.