I struggled to keep that whole sentence in English, I always slipped into crow dialect when I was angry.
Rome choked. “You want us to purge half a million people because they think she’s hot.”
“Yes.”
And, because they saw the shot with the tattooed arm and decided it was cute to ship her with whoever that was, while I sat here finding out after the fact.
Nikolai stared at the ceiling. “Vincent.”
“I can target problem users. Shadowban. Slow their feeds. I cannot delete every account.”
“Why not.” I did not want him reasonable. I wanted every fucker gone. “We own half the infrastructure behind Veil in this city. You boast about scrubbing footage in under thirty seconds. Do it.”
“Because those accounts belong to sovereign heirs, dynasty staff, old money wives, and bored syndicate kids with rich parents. They are power, money, data. If I start erasing them because you don’t like their parasocial crush, the blowback hits more than their notifications.”
“Good. Then they’ll learn my girl isn’t a public toy.”
Rome winced. “He means that.”
“Learn what,” Luca pushed. “That Vincent Crow is emotionally compromised over one Thorne and will abuse a global platform to manage his feelings?”
Emotionally compromised was generous. I was one Veil update away from getting on a plane to whichever city she was in and hauling her back to Villain and out of frame.
My brain knew that was insane. My chest thought it was efficient.
And, I know my brother. Luca would have a million nets around Emilia to stop this exact thing from happening. He was lucky I loved him more than my own suffering.
Nikolai gave me a look, as if reminding me. Do not mention her to the twins. It was enough to make me mutter a string of curse words in crow while glaring at the screen.
“I want them off the platform,” I tapped the datapad hard, my finger staying on the ugly tattooed hand. “No more strangerstalking about how a dress fit my sub’s ass or how good she looks in some other fucker’s grip.”
“Like a fantasy,” Rome said.
“Yes.”
“Pot,” he pointed at me, “meet kettle.”
I ignored him.
Bastion shifted. “You’re yelling at the wrong person. Luca didn’t invent Veil.”
“No. He just rebuilt it.” Rome oh so causally reminded me.
That snapped my focus to Luca. “What.”
Luca shrugged, ready to deflect like normal. “I rebuilt the backend. Patched the vulnerabilities. Optimised the stream pipeline. Then we bought controlling interest through three shell companies. Quietly.”
Of course he had.
My little brother had essentially rewired the digital city everyone was living in, and I’d been stomping around pretending ignoring it made me principled.
He had done it for the woman he loved. I wasn’t stupid. Crows are over protective. That was putting it mildly.
I looked down to see a different photo this time. This one had a hologram feature attached.
Seventy thousand people had liked that photo. “How does she stand it.” The question slipped out.
“Stand what?”
