Bastion had handled the groundwork. He made sure her old phone copsed 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 recement 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.


    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 ss 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 ind vi—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 instation: Veil.


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


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


    New ount 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 ounts waited six hours for approval. Not hers. Never hers. I cut straight into root, overrode the gate, backdated her bloodline clearance.<fn9c7d> This text is hosted at find(?)ovel</fn9c7d>


    Approved. ount verified: Luca Crow.


    psed 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. nk, for now. I traced her user code across the ss the way other men trace veins, like following it kept me alive.


    “You came back, baby.”