Chapter 21 Vince
Vince
The war room was quiet when I walked in. Screens humming, Villain glowed along the walls in grids of blue and red, club feeds, street cams, dock trackers. Half the city pulsing on monitors, every heartbeat a potential problem.
Bastion was slouched in his chair like it had personally offended him. One eye already darkening, fresh split along his cheekbone, knuckles scraped raw.
Rome had his boots on the table, leaned back, spinning a pen between his fingers like he was auditioning to be punched.
Luca sat at the head of the table. Nikolai paced by the main screen with a datapad and the expression of a man who had lost sleep because of his family, again.
So, normal.
Rome glanced up when I walked in. “Look who remembered passwords. Nik, call the press. Vincent Crow has entered the digital age.”
“Shut up.” I dropped into the empty chair beside Bastion. “Somebody had to actually touch the problems today instead of watching them in HD.”
Bastion scoffed, winced when it pulled his cut. “I touched them.”
“You put a bottle in a man’s face because he brushed your shoulder,” Nikolai muttered, flicking through footage.
“He spilled a drink on me. On purpose.”
Rome grinned. “Did he admit that before or after the stitches?”
“Focus.” Luca didn’t look up when he said it, just let the word land in that quiet, precise tone that made everyone except Rome listen.
“I am focused.” Rome tapped the pen against the table. “I’m focusing on the abstract art piece that is Bastion’s face.”
Bastion flipped him off without looking.
Nikolai gestured at the main screen. It shifted to Orpheum, sublevel. Freeze-frame of Bastion mid-swing, bottle caught in the air, crowd already flinching back. “This is half of why we’re here. Containment, narrative, Veil. The usual.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. Enforcement had run long. All I wanted was a shower, Madeline’s voice in my ear, then sleep.
Instead I’d let myself be bullied into a “training session.”
Apparently tonight was about “integrated oversight” and “future-proofing surveillance infrastructure.”
Translated: Luca was done with me pretending Veil didn’t exist.
“Club feeds are already scrubbed,” Luca said. “Anyone who recorded on personal devices had their Veil packets intercepted and corrupted. Bastion’s charming little tantrum is not trending.”
“Yet,” Nikolai added.
“Yet.” Luca’s gaze slid to me. “Which brings us to the second half of tonight. Vince is going to learn Veil.”
Rome slapped a hand to his heart. “Historic. Someone screenshot his face. This is our moon landing.”
“Try it. See what happens to your phone.”
Nikolai didn’t bother hiding his amusement. “Sit down, shut up, learn the toy. It’s an hour. Then we can get back to the part where we decide who we’re going to inconvenience financially this week.”
“That’s the only reason I came,” Rome said. “Sanctions are my self-care.”
“I don’t need Veil.” I leaned back, folding my arms. “I have you. That’s why God invented little brothers. You suffer through the apps so I don’t have to.”
Luca’s attention sharpened. “That was cute when Veil was just kids posting grainy club fights. It’s less cute now that half our enemies are building soft power on it.
Alliances are tested there. Narratives seeded.
Heirs auditioning for their own cults. You don’t have to like it. You have to stop being blind.”
He was right. I hated that he was right.
I also hated Veil. Hated the drones that hummed over every event. Hated the way people poured their lives into comment sections for strangers to pick apart.
Mostly I hated that the other night, my perfect little sub had still been sore from my cock, after giving me her first time, and still left. She asked for me not to watch the stream.
So I didn’t watch. Daddy stood down when my baby asked me to. I respected it. Sat on my hands while Veil drones circled her like flies, knowing my girl was out there smiling for strangers while she was still bleeding from loving me.
I filed Veil under shit I hated on principle and left it there.
Right up until I realised hating something I didn’t understand was bad Crow practice, and texted Luca in a moment of very poor impulse control: teach me Veil.
I should’ve thrown my phone in the bay instead.
“I’ve changed my mind.” I stretched my legs out under the table. “Pass.”
Luca finally looked at me properly. “You texted me nights ago asking for this.”
Rome’s eyebrows shot up. “You what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
I remembered every word. I just wasn’t handing them the satisfaction.
“You sent, ‘stop babysitting my digital life and teach me the damn interface.’ Full sentences. No typos. You were sober.”
Bastion smirked. “Bet I can guess what put him in that mood.”
He wasn’t wrong. My girl, sore from my cock, whispering she loved me, then straightening her spine and walking toward the wolf den because dynasty demanded it. She could barely sit and she was still worrying about me seeing some angle on camera that made her feel less than perfect.
She didn’t want Daddy seeing her that way.
Nikolai flicked to another screen, bored of the argument. “It’s not optional. You’re too high-profile to be as illiterate as you are. Learn the basics so you stop calling Veil ‘that fucking website with the drones’ like some eighty-year-old.”
“It is that fucking website with the drones.”
“It’s a platform. Not a website. So, at least learn what button does what. So when there’s a problem with Madeline’s feed, you can yell at Luca with precision. He loves that.”
Luca slid a datapad down the table toward me. “Humour us.”
I stared at it like it was contagious. “No.”
He waited. Patient. Infuriating. “You can’t punch Veil, Vince. You can only outplay it. To do that, you need to know the board.”
Rome twisted the pen between his fingers. “He also needs to stop calling every app an ‘interface abomination.’ It embarrasses us in front of the developers we bribe.”
“I’m not learning an app.”
“You’re learning it because your sub’s life is being curated on it and you asked me for this, you liar.”
The word sub landed heavy. My sub. I might have also been overactive when Madeline fainted and it nearly went global. Perhaps at that time high strung. I told Luca, I wanted to know everything about it. Since that, I remembered I had little brothers. This could stay here area.
Bastion huffed, impatience. He reached across, took the datapad away from Luca before I could push it back, and started typing.
Luca frowned. “Don’t—”
“Relax.” Bastion’s split lip pulled into something that wanted to be a grin. “You want him engaged. I’m engaging him.”
His thumbs moved quick. He glanced at the screen once, expression flattening into something I recognised—oh, this will hurt him—and then slid the pad down the table until it thumped against my forearm.
“There. Now he cares.”
I looked down.
Her name sat at the top of the Veil search results.
MADELINE THORNE. Crest icon. Verified. Handle: @madelinethorne.
Everything in the room tilted a fraction.
My brain went straight back to her standing by my elevator in that dress last night. Don’t watch the stream. The Veil drones always catch my worst side.
There was no worst side. There was only mine. Anything that wasn’t for me was the problem.
Luca had been talking about Veil like a city. What they’d built for her wasn’t a profile. It was a monument. A public shrine to a woman who should’ve been for my hands, my mouth, my eyes. Not for six hundred thousand bored, greedy strangers.
The interface was all clean white. Thorne colours. Grid of images filling the lower half of the screen. Little slices of her life, pressed flat for people who didn’t deserve depth.
Events. Panels. Dinners. That fucking Thorne staircase.
Silver gown, hair swept up, neckline, eyes fixed on something past the camera. I remembered that dress. Remembered the stream notification I’d ignored because my girl had asked Daddy not to look.
They’d filmed her on that balcony while her body was still aching, bleeding from me.
Another shot of her laughing at something off-scree. One from Malice in a sundress, sunglasses on her head. Bare legs.
I knew exactly how beautiful she was. I’d mapped every line with my hands and my mouth. I’d watched her cry in my arms because it hurt, watched my perfect little sub bleed for Daddy and apologise for it. I’d watched her sleep on my chest with my chain caught in her fingers like a leash.
Seeing her flattened and edited for strangers hit wrong. It felt like someone else’s hands on her without permission.
Every angle chosen. Whoever ran this thought of her as product. They weren’t wrong; dynasty had turned her into one years ago.
I just didn’t like being reminded that I wasn’t the only one who understood her value.
Numbers glowed under her handle.
Something in my brain misfired. “Six hundred thousand.”
Rome leaned over my shoulder. “Huh. Maddie’s populate.”
“She is not Maddie to you.”
He raised both hands. “Relax. I’m admiring the reach. That’s… obscene, all high profile accounts too. Not just fans.”
Obscene was one word for it. Six hundred thousand sets of eyes on my sub while I wasn’t there to put my hand on the back of her neck and remind her who she belonged to.
Crow instinct didn’t like that math. Crow instinct wanted those six hundred thousand reduced to one. Me.
Nikolai stepped in to look. “Dynasty-heavy audience. Heirs. Investors. Staff. Social climbers.”
Luca stayed where he was, watching my face instead of the data. “She’s high-traffic. We keep a constant net over her tags. Anything off gets flagged before it spreads.”
Him kept the net. I’m just now learning about it.
I scrolled before I could talk myself out of it and tapped the most recent post.
They’d filmed my girl still sore from taking me. Streamed it. Clipped it. Posted it.
My stomach burned. I saw my perfect sub’s first-time blood still drying on her thighs while she posed for a feed.