The phone trembled in my hand before I forced it still. I bit down hard enough to taste blood. Screens weren’t supposed to lie. People did. But this—this felt like the screen was lying to me, and it was worse.
She had walked into her profile and pressed delete. And in that instant, my entire fucking chest went cold.
Because for three years, she had been my screen-sized proof of life.
Even when we stopped speaking. When I forced myself not to reach out because I knew it would hurt her more than it helped.
I still saw her.
What city she was in.
What dress she wore.
If I told Bastion now, he’d go straight to the tunnels, find the nearest man stupid enough to breathe wrong, and bleed him out on the concrete just to quiet the noise in his chest. It wouldn’t fix it. It never fixed it. Only she did.
I forced my hand steady. Logged out. Logged back in through the ghost account.
The one I had built just to watch her silently, invisibly, without triggering alerts. No links to my verified account.
I searched again.
Still nothing. And I knew it wasn’t a bug.
Because I had rebuilt the fucking app. So if her profile was gone, I was going to see how.
I reached for the second phone. The black one. The one with my access protocols. Opened the admin interface. Typed her user ID. Slid into the root layer. There it was.
Account ID: [REDACTED]
Status: DELETED
Method: MANUAL
Timestamp: 02:41 A.M.
Permanence: IRREVERSIBLE
I stared at the screen like it might undo itself.
She had deleted it herself. On purpose. Walked away from the one connection we still had.
Tore down the last thread I used to breathe.
We never broke up.
She was still ours. We had just stopped using words and started using power.
She didn’t know we had killed three fiancés before the contracts ever reached her.
Didn’t know we had rewritten business agreements behind closed doors so her last name couldn’t be transferred.
That we had leaked intel about rival heirs just to burn down their worth.
We had bought out her hotel floor last winter so no man could stay beside her.
Fuck. We had funded her favorite brand’s entire new collection, just so she would wear something we had designed behind closed doors.
The clothes had become an addiction; she hadn’t worn something we didn’t own in two and a half years. Every piece in her wardrobe had been curated by us.
