Page 11 of The Silent War
Veil.
The dynasty’s elite social media network. Verified onlythrough bloodline. She had one. Of course she did. The golden girl of Dynasty daughters.
Everyone else used Veil for their own gain. It was where heirs watched each other in curated silence.
But me? I didn’t use it like them.
I owned it.
Literally.
I had bought Veil two years ago, the week after one of her videos buffered too long on my screen and the audio lagged by two seconds.
I had hated that. Hated the glitch, the instability, the thought of her being processed through a system that wasn’t worthy of her.
So I called the board. Bought out the routing rights. Then acquired the entire development backend. Because if she was going to exist anywhere online, it was going to be mine.
Her posts, metadata, videos. They belonged to me.To us.
Not on some public cloud, foreign servers, or stored where some desperate dynasty tech could trace her filters or download her drafts.
No.
Her image only lived where it could be trusted.
In our vault. On our servers. Under my passwords.
I rebuilt the system from the inside. Hardened the encryption. Blocked export functions for her account. Even wrote a subroutine that watermarked her photos behind the scenes, digital bloodcode only I could read.
It was how I knew which heir hovered too long on her photo. Which bastard zoomed in. Which ones saved it.
The amount of heirs I had blocked behind her back. Hidden their messages. Buried their likes, comments, corrupted their phones when they downloaded her photos. She never even knew they had tried.
Because they didn’t get to talk to her or have the fucking right to flirt with our girl. She belonged to us. Because that’s what she was to me.
Not a memory.
Not an ex.
Ours.
Even if she thought we had walked away.
Her profile was always the first. Hardcoded to appear at the top of every login. I had rewritten the algorithm myself. She never followed me back. It didn’t matter. I watched anyway. Until tonight.
“User not found.”
My thumb hovered, refusing to accept what I was reading. I blinked at the screen, frowned, refreshed. Nothing.
I sat up, ignoring the pull in my ribs, the pain in my temples. None of it mattered.
I typed her name into the search bar.
Still nothing.
No shadow reposts. No tags. No stories. Not even a trace buried in the cache.
Gone.
