Iwakebeforethesun,trained to do so by years of my father teaching me the value of a head start. Three hours of sleep, but it’ll have to be enough.
The city is just starting up with it’s usual noisy bullshit. I lay there, listening to the honks, before focusing on the slow, even breath of the man asleep beside me. Landon’s body sprawls diagonal, half the duvet lost to the floor. He sleeps like he doesn’t expect to be woken—like he trusts that no one will come for him, not in this room, not in my bed. The feeling is unfamiliar.
His hair is a tangle over his eyes, one arm pinned beneath the pillow, the other thrown haphazard across the mattress. There are bite marks on his shoulder, fading into the tan of his skin, and when he shifts, a fresh bruise blooms purple at the base of his neck. My doing. The sight makes my cock hard.
I slip out of bed. Quietly. Carefully. I’m not afraid of waking him, but I do need some time alone to get these reports to The Silent before they take matters into their own hands. The floors are cold on my feet, and my body is heavy with the hangover of sex and too little sleep. I pull on a pair of sweats and move to the hall, leaving the door cracked in case he wakes.
The penthouse is big and full of light. Everything is open. Makes it easier to spot threats. My father designed it for his own use, but after he died, the place became mine by default. The art on the walls is original, the furniture imported and arranged to maximize both power and comfort. The effect is cold to outsiders, but I find it calming. It is a place built to make you feel observed, even when alone.
My office is at the far end of the hall, past the trophy cases and the family portraits. No one is allowed in without my say. The door recognizes my palm, and slides open with a pneumatic hiss. Inside, the room is dark: matte black walls, a desk that floats on two knife-thin legs, three monitors arranged in a gentle arc. The Harrington family crest is etched into the glass of the window, visible only when the light catches it.
I sit, and the chair molds to my spine. The desk is empty, save for a notebook and a pen. I power on the monitors, and blue light spills over my hands as I crack my knuckles, ready to get this done and dusted.
The security protocol is intense, full of codes and biometric checks, and it takes less than ten seconds for me to access the Ministry’s internal network. The Ministry of Design is the brain, the pulse, the thing that makes the rest of The Silent possible. Here, the wars are fought with information, not bullets. My credentials open every door.
Every Design agent is trained in both psychological warfare and physical brutality. The two sides to the same coin. The Yin and The Yang.
Today, I tap into my ability to read people and tell them what they need to hear in order to feel safe.
I ignore the overnight memos. Most are irrelevant, others designed to distract. My target is already waiting in the flagged queue: “Thompson, Landon J. - Potential Liability. Request for Elevated Surveillance. Dispatch.” The file is a neat fifty megabytes, but I know it by heart. The digital equivalent of a scarlet letter.
I open the dossier.
Everything is accounted for—Landon’s birth certificate, school records, medical history. Every search he’s ever made, every email sent or received. Even his porn history, filled with searches of ‘Daddy Dom and his twink.’
A record of last night’s entry into the Harrington estate, complete with timestamp and satellite feed. There’s also a psych assessment, run through one of our newer AI, which lists his obsessions in order of risk. Puzzle solving, stubbornness, an inability to let things go. A detailed history of his interactions with the charity, the funds he flagged, the patterns he tracked.
The most recent entry: “Attended Society Event. Contact with B. Harrington, unscheduled. Potential compromise.”
I scan the report, my eyes trained to find the spaces between the lines. Someone in Internal flagged me before I’d even done anything against the Ministry’s orders.
I tap a finger against my chin, thinking.
The algorithm already wants him gone. Officially, the matter should be handled by Disposals—a quick, clean removal,followed by a sweep of all digital remnants. But the system is fallible. The right hand doesn’t always know what the left is doing. I have at least a twelve hour window before the order passes to them.
And it will only pass to them, should I fail.
I decide to buy myself some time.
Open the edit panel, I access root permissions, and rewrite the analysis from scratch.
I start by downgrading the threat level, changing a red flag to yellow. I cite “inconclusive intent,” “possible misinterpretation of data,” and “personal intervention by B. Harrington.” The AI doesn’t care, as long as the metadata is consistent. I delete every log that shows Landon’s presence at the masquerade, every trace of him entering or leaving the estate. The camera feeds are easy—I own the hardware. I swap out his face in the guest list, replace it with a shadow. To the system, he was never there.
Of course that doesn’t account for everyone who saw him, but the system has a brain of it’s own and if we fail to scan our task and complete it, it sends out men who are bigger and badder than I am.
And I can’t have that happening until I know what the fuck I’m going to do with him.
A notification slides onto the screen: “Clarification Required: Thompson, L. - Status Update Expected Before 02/14, 19:00.” I dismiss it with a tap, but the system insists, flashing the deadline in the top corner of the screen.
I keep editing. I insert new data points, subtle but effective—Landon’s investigation was part of a routine audit, not a targeted probe. The anomalies he found were already under internal review, slated for correction. I draft a report that blames the patterns on “legacy accounting software,” an excuse that will hopefully work. I inject fake correspondence between Landon and a fabricated supervisor, showing him following orders, not acting alone.
Every keystroke is a risk. The deeper I go, the harder it will be to untangle. But this is what I do best—rewrite the truth until it’s real.
Another alert: “PRIORITY: Please confirm intent regarding asset Thompson, L. Action required.”
My jaw tightens. I pause, listening for any sound from the bedroom, half expecting to hear Landon shuffling down the hall. Silence. I resume.
They must have triggered his erasure from a different department.
