“Being consumed. Picked over like this. Every outfit turned into someone’s fantasy or joke. Let people who don’t know her, judge her by lines they read and interpret.”
“She compartmentalises. It’s armour. That’s not her, it’s a projected version. She knows that.”
She told herself that. My girl was good at pretending nothing got in. She wasn’t as good at hiding it from me anymore.
I’d seen the way certain phrases—too much, too loud, too dramatic—hit old wounds. I’d seen the flinch behind the smile when some article framed her as high-maintenance. They thought they were just talking about a dynasty princess. They were talking about my sub. Who had a really good heart, too fucking good, for any of them.
I set the datapad down harder than I meant to. It thumped against the table.
“I hate this thing.”
“Welcome to Veil.” Rome spun the pen. “We all do.”
Luca’s hand landed briefly on the back of my chair. “You needed to see it. You can’t protect her from what you won’t look at.”
He was right. Didn’t make it less ugly.
My eyes drifted back to her handle. At the Thorne bloodline crest beside her name.
In Crow language, what we had wasn’t casual. Dom and sub wasn’t a kink. It was the blueprint for husband and wife written in a different tense. Long-term. Codex-deep.
One day, there’d be a Crow sigil next to her handle instead. One day, anyone who opened her profile would see exactly which dynasty she really belonged to.
“For now,” Luca said quietly, as if he’d heard the direction of my thoughts, “I’ll tighten the nets. Anything even slightly off about her mentions hits here first. You get a live feed if you want it. But I’m not burning the whole city down because you can’t stand that people have eyes.”
“I can stand that they have eyes.” My gaze stayed on her last picture. “I can’t stand they think they have the right. They weren’t there when she asked Daddy not to watch her get paraded on stream. Scared of cameras that shouldn’t be on her.”
Rome flicked the pen at Bastion; it bounced off his shoulder. “See? Romance.”
“Idiocy,” Nikolai corrected. “We need him alive, not in prison for strangling a sovereign over a comment section.”
“If they talk about her like that in person, I’m strangling someone,” I muttered.
“Good,” Bastion said. “Then we agree.”
Rome smiled. “That sentence right there is why you’d start a war, just so she’s wear your name.”
“Shut up.”
“Look at him pretending this isn’t marriage-brain,” Nikolai muttered, swiping to a different panel. “We all know what it looks like when a Crow decides.”
“Dom and sub, we know what that means.” Bastion glanced at me, something like pride in his eyes.
My fingers found the datapad again. I dragged her profile back up, one more look at the digital city that thought it owned my girl.
“If this broken app is going to keep her on display, I’m not staying illiterate.” The words tasted like surrender and strategy at once. “Show me how to break it, little brother.”
Luca’s mouth twitched. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
He moved back to my side, hand settling on the back of my chair again, this time like an anchor instead of a restraint. “All right. Lesson one. How to set your own filters. And how to see who’s really looking at her.”
That, at least, I could work with. If the world insisted on watching my girl, I was going to learn every alley and blind spot Veil had to offer.
22
Madeline
My phone woke me before the sun did.
