Lina POV:
A film of moisture gathered in my eyes, distorting the red dots on the screen into blurry, crimson smears.
I blinked them away, refusing to let them fall as I scrolled up the chat history, the pad of my finger catching and dragging against the glass.
My chest ached with a dull, throbbing pressure, and every breath I took tasted of old, rusted metal.
Every last voice message I had sent him in five years bore that same small, red mark, a testament to their unplayed status.
It had not always been this way.
I remembered the first two years.
Back then, William would pin my messages to the top of his feed.
He used to smile and tell me my voice was his sanctuary from the grim necessities of his work.
He would replay my casual, joking voice notes over and over again.
He'd insisted that listening to me talk about grocery shopping or the weather kept his humanity intact while he was scrubbing blood from beneath his fingernails.
A desperate, cultivated ignorance had led me to believe that things had not fundamentally changed.
I had reasoned with myself that even if his replies were brief, he was still making the effort to respond to me.
I had convinced myself he was simply burdened by the heavy crown of his rising power within the Family.
But the small, red dots proclaimed the unvarnished truth.
They announced that William had not truly listened to my voice in five unending years.
My hands unsteady, I navigated to the active chat history between William and Sophie once again.
My gaze caught upon their latest exchange from this very afternoon.
Sophie had sent a fifty-nine-second voice note, and with a masochist's curiosity, I tapped the voice-to-text transcript option, seized by the fear that playing the audio itself would alert him.
Her rendered words filled the luminous screen, a cloying, whining complaint that the office coffee was too bitter and had ruined her day.
I looked at William's detailed, typed reply beneath it.
He told her he remembered she hated bitterness and preferred coconut milk, and that he had already ordered a special drip coffee to be delivered to her desk.
Beneath another short voice note from Sophie, William had replied that he would take her to an exclusive private kitchen tonight-one that demanded a two-week reservation.
He had hired its executive chef just for her.
I sat there in the airless silence, comparing his meticulous care for her against his chilling apathy toward me.
Only a few days ago, I had been wrestling with a 103-degree fever.
I had collapsed on the cold grout of the bathroom floor, shivering uncontrollably, unable to risk a public hospital because of the targets his enemies had fixed upon us.
I had sent him a feverish voice message, begging him to send the Family's underground doctor.
He had immediately replied with a single, typed word: Understood.
He never returned that night.
I suffered alone in this massive, guarded estate, waiting for a help that never materialized.
He at last came home the next day at noon, tossing a plastic bag of tepid takeout soup on the counter.
He claimed the Syndicate's security system had crashed and he had to work through the night.
I realized now that his so-called all-nighter had been a solicitous dinner with another woman.
His aseptic Understood had not been an acknowledgment; it was a flat, careless shrug in the face of my own life.
The abrupt cessation of running water from the bathroom jerked me back to the present.
I drew in a shaky breath and calmly exited the encrypted communications app.
I navigated back to the food delivery app and absentmindedly ordered two bowls of plain noodle soup.
I set the phone screen-down on the bedside table just as William stepped out of the bathroom.
He was drying his dark, wet hair with a towel, rivulets of water trailing down the hard planes of his sculpted chest as he walked over to me.
He leaned down and naturally pressed a slow kiss to the top of my head.
He smelled of expensive cedarwood body wash and billowing steam.
"Did you order food, sweetheart?" he asked gently. "Thank you for arranging a simple dinner. I have a splitting headache from staring at numbers today."
His tone was flawlessly, nauseatingly tender.
I looked up at his handsome, untruthful face.
I did not flinch. I did not scream.
"The order's placed," I said, my voice a monotone, devoid of inflection.
