I remembered every word. I just wasn’t handing them the satisfaction.
“You sent, ‘stop babysitting my digital life and teach me the damn interface.’ Full sentences. No typos. You were sober.”
Bastion smirked. “Bet I can guess what put him in that mood.”
He wasn’t wrong. My girl, sore from my cock, whispering she loved me, then straightening her spine and walking toward the wolf den because dynasty demanded it. She could barely sit and she was still worrying about me seeing some angle on camera that made her feel less than perfect.
She didn’t want Daddy seeing her that way.
Nikolai flicked to another screen, bored of the argument. “It’s not optional. You’re too high-profile to be as illiterate as you are. Learn the basics so you stop calling Veil ‘that fucking website with the drones’ like some eighty-year-old.”
“It is that fucking website with the drones.”
“It’s a platform. Not a website. So, at least learn what button does what. So when there’s a problem with Madeline’s feed, you can yell at Luca with precision. He loves that.”
Luca slid a datapad down the table toward me. “Humour us.”
I stared at it like it was contagious. “No.”
He waited. Patient. Infuriating. “You can’t punch Veil, Vince. You can only outplay it. To do that, you need to know the board.”
Rome twisted the pen between his fingers. “He also needs to stop calling every app an ‘interface abomination.’ It embarrasses us in front of the developers we bribe.”
“I’m not learning an app.”
“You’re learning it because your sub’s life is being curated on it and you asked me for this, you liar.”
The word sub landed heavy. My sub. I might have also been overactive when Madeline fainted and itnearlywent global. Perhaps at that time high strung. I told Luca, I wanted to know everything about it. Since that, I remembered I had little brothers. This could stay here area.
Bastion huffed, impatience. He reached across, took the datapad away from Luca before I could push it back, and started typing.
Luca frowned. “Don’t?—”
“Relax.” Bastion’s split lip pulled into something that wanted to be a grin. “You want him engaged. I’m engaging him.”
His thumbs moved quick. He glanced at the screen once, expression flattening into something I recognised—oh, this will hurt him—and then slid the pad down the table until it thumped against my forearm.
“There. Now he cares.”
I looked down.
Her name sat at the top of the Veil search results.
MADELINE THORNE. Crest icon. Verified. Handle: @madelinethorne.
Everything in the room tilted a fraction.
My brain went straight back to her standing by my elevator in that dress last night. Don’t watch the stream. The Veil drones always catch my worst side.
There was no worst side. There was only mine. Anything that wasn’t for me was the problem.
Luca had been talking about Veil like a city. What they’d built for her wasn’t a profile. It was a monument. A public shrine to a woman who should’ve been for my hands, my mouth, my eyes. Not for six hundred thousand bored, greedy strangers.
The interface was all clean white. Thorne colours. Grid of images filling the lower half of the screen. Little slices of her life, pressed flat for people who didn’t deserve depth.
Events. Panels. Dinners. That fucking Thorne staircase.
Silver gown, hair swept up, neckline, eyes fixed on something past the camera. I remembered that dress. Remembered the stream notification I’d ignored because my girl had asked Daddy not to look.
