Chapter 21 Vince #2
The comment panel slid up when I dragged a thumb.
Goddess.
Marry me, Maddy.
too pretty to be working this hard
those legs
if my negotiator looked like this i’d sign my soul over lol
she can tell me to jump and i’d say how high
Rome snorted. “The internet is down bad. I respect the commitment.”
“Why are they allowed to talk about her like that.”
“Because it’s Veil,” Luca said. “And because half those handles belong to men we trade with. It’s noise. She doesn’t see most of it.”
“She shouldn’t have to exist as content for people who don’t even know her favourite coffee order.”
“She doesn’t. Her mother’s PR team runs a gate. We run another. What makes it through is what they decide is useful.”
Massie Thorne deciding what my sub was allowed to read about herself made my jaw lock. The idea of anyone else editing the reflection my girl saw felt wrong in my bones. That was my job. Daddy’s job. I was supposed to be the one catching the poison before it hit her.
But here? I couldn’t put my hand over six hundred thousand mouths. Couldn’t drag every faceless heir into a back room and make him swallow his words. Online, my reach ended where the code started.
I hated that.
One comment caught my eye. Some verified heir had replied to himself with a photo of his hand on a crystal glass, dynasty ring prominent, caption: Closed with the best.
She’d liked it.
My grip tightened on the datapad. That bastard had probably watched her on that balcony, listened to her sell a deal, then decided the correct response was to turn her into a brag.
Nikolai’s voice drifted from my left. “Relax. They’re flirting with a projection. They’re not touching her.”
“Yet,” Rome muttered.
Not helping. Also not wrong. Men like that always wanted closer.
I flicked back to the grid, looking for something else to be angry at before I broke the tablet in half. Another image loaded.
The dress cut low. At her waist, a man’s arm curved possessively, hand resting too close to her stomach. Heavy tattoo work. His head was mostly out of frame, jaw only a slice in the corner.
Intentional crop. Just enough of him to make it look intimate. Just enough to set the comments on fire.
My chest went ice cold.
The caption was some innocuous bullshit about partnerships and legacy. The comments ignored that.
power couple energy
okay but who is HE
this is giving future alliance
the way his hand is sitting on her waist… i’m feral
if that’s the crow heir i’m gonna scream
My vision tunneled on that inked forearm. Her body angled into it, not away. The image made it look like she’d leaned into him, like she trusted the hold. It almost could’ve been me—dark suit, tattooed wrist, claiming grip—except I knew every vein on my own hand. That wasn’t mine.
Veil had turned my worst nightmare into an aesthetic: my girl, soft and laughing, framed by another man’s arm.
Every possessive instinct I had bared its teeth at once. That should have been my hand. My ink. My grip. The only forearm that should’ve ever been photographed touching her waist like that should’ve had a Crow crest burned into the skin.
I dragged the image bigger, hunting for a reflection, a clue, anything that would give me a name to put on the list. The crop stayed stubborn. No face. No clear sigil.
They’d made the entire fucking shot about how good she looked pressed against a man who wasn’t me.
“So who the fuck is that.”
Rome leaned in, squinting. “Relax. It’s probably six different heirs spliced in their heads. Half the comments are conspiracy theories.”
“I’m not asking the comments.”
Luca shifted, looking now instead of just supervising my meltdown. “The profile credit lists three hosts. Could be any of them, could be none of them. PR likes anonymous hands in shots like that. It boosts engagement without making promises.”
My jaw hurt. “They’re using my girl’s body to sell engagement.”
But I was her Dom. Her Daddy. The man she called when she trusted to tell her when lines got crossed.
Seeing those lines crossed in HD, after the fact, lit something dark under my ribs.
I’d grown up with possessiveness drilled into my veins. Crows protect what’s theirs. We lock our people down with vows and blood and very clear rules. With Madeline, it wasn’t an impulse. It was a diagnosis. I didn’t just want her safe; I wanted control over everything.
Cold anger I could work with. This was hotter. Stripped. Stupid. Personal. For a man built on control, this kind of helplessness felt like acid.
“Scroll down,” Luca said quietly. “Analytics.”
I swiped. Engagement graphs. Heatmap. Rings of activity in Villain and Malice, bleeding out to St Cross and beyond.
“Her core traffic is Villain, Harlan and Malice. Good. It means we see most things first. St Cross spikes when she’s there. The rest is background noise.”
“It means half the heirs in my city have alerts on for my girl. When some faceless asshole puts his arm around her for a photo. They don’t deserve that level of access.”
“They were tracking her before Veil. This just gives them a digital shrine.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s supposed to make you realistic,” Luca said. “You don’t get to put her back in a box just because you’re in love and all crow about it.”
I didn’t want her in a box. I wanted her in my bed. My shirt, sending me the first-photo-of-the-day in the underwear I chose, knowing only Daddy saw those angles.
I flicked to notifications without thinking. Mentions. Tags. Reposts. People slicing her face and body into their own little altars and scrawling worship or jokes underneath.
One had frozen her mid-laugh, mouth open.
Caption: if i ever shut up about madeline thorne assume i died.
“She is not a meme.”
“Actually, she kind of is,” Rome said. “There’s a whole hashtag. #madelinethorne, #MaddieMyReligion—”
I looked at him once. He shut up.
Nikolai dragged his hand over his face. “This is exactly why I said we should sedate him before doing this.”
“Because I have eyes?”
“Because you have no chill. Which, for once, is a liability.”
“They’re talking about my girl!”
I could not wait for one of them to get a girlfriend.When that day came, I would make each of them suffer as I was right now.
Rome grinned. “My girl. You all heard that, right?”
Bastion’s smirked. “He’s gone.”
I was ready to deflect and mention Emilia just to get the heat off me, and back onto the twins. But the parent side of me, that saw them as sons, not annoying brothers, controlled my tongue. I wouldn’t hurt the twins like that.
Gone didn’t begin to cover it. Crow love wasn’t soft. It was absolute. Once decided, that was it. Veil didn’t fit those rules. So I was going to bend it until it did.
“Remove them.”
Luca’s brows pinched. “Who.”
“The accounts.” I kept my voice level. Barely. “Anyone who talks about her like that. Ban them.”
I struggled to keep that whole sentence in English, I always slipped into crow dialect when I was angry.
Rome choked. “You want us to purge half a million people because they think she’s hot.”
“Yes.”
And, because they saw the shot with the tattooed arm and decided it was cute to ship her with whoever that was, while I sat here finding out after the fact.
Nikolai stared at the ceiling. “Vincent.”
“I can target problem users. Shadowban. Slow their feeds. I cannot delete every account.”
“Why not.” I did not want him reasonable. I wanted every fucker gone. “We own half the infrastructure behind Veil in this city. You boast about scrubbing footage in under thirty seconds. Do it.”
“Because those accounts belong to sovereign heirs, dynasty staff, old money wives, and bored syndicate kids with rich parents. They are power, money, data. If I start erasing them because you don’t like their parasocial crush, the blowback hits more than their notifications.”
“Good. Then they’ll learn my girl isn’t a public toy.”
Rome winced. “He means that.”
“Learn what,” Luca pushed. “That Vincent Crow is emotionally compromised over one Thorne and will abuse a global platform to manage his feelings?”
Emotionally compromised was generous. I was one Veil update away from getting on a plane to whichever city she was in and hauling her back to Villain and out of frame.
My brain knew that was insane. My chest thought it was efficient.
And, I know my brother. Luca would have a million nets around Emilia to stop this exact thing from happening. He was lucky I loved him more than my own suffering.
Nikolai gave me a look, as if reminding me. Do not mention her to the twins. It was enough to make me mutter a string of curse words in crow while glaring at the screen.
“I want them off the platform,” I tapped the datapad hard, my finger staying on the ugly tattooed hand. “No more strangers talking about how a dress fit my sub’s ass or how good she looks in some other fucker’s grip.”
“Like a fantasy,” Rome said.
“Yes.”
“Pot,” he pointed at me, “meet kettle.”
I ignored him.
Bastion shifted. “You’re yelling at the wrong person. Luca didn’t invent Veil.”
“No. He just rebuilt it.” Rome oh so causally reminded me.
That snapped my focus to Luca. “What.”
Luca shrugged, ready to deflect like normal. “I rebuilt the backend. Patched the vulnerabilities. Optimised the stream pipeline. Then we bought controlling interest through three shell companies. Quietly.”
Of course he had.
My little brother had essentially rewired the digital city everyone was living in, and I’d been stomping around pretending ignoring it made me principled.
He had done it for the woman he loved. I wasn’t stupid. Crows are over protective. That was putting it mildly.
I looked down to see a different photo this time. This one had a hologram feature attached.
Seventy thousand people had liked that photo. “How does she stand it.” The question slipped out.
“Stand what?”
“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.