Luca's pov – Present Day
Yeah. I'm okay.
Luca stared at the three words on his screen until they blurred. They were the worst possible response. Not "I'm planning my escape" or "I hate him." Not even "Help me." Just… okay.
A neutral, passive, terrifying okay.
He threw his phone onto his bed as if it had burned him. It bounced off the duvet and landed on the floor with a thud that felt like a punctuation mark. The silence in his apartment was suddenly deafening, a vacuum where his panic could scream without sound.
He's breaking him.
The thought was a cold, sharp blade twisting in his gut. The Jace he knew would never be just okay in a situation like this. He'd be furious, scheming, a live wire of defiance. Okay meant the fight was gone. Okay meant Damian was winning.
He paced from his bedroom to the tiny kitchen, his mind replaying the image from the street: Jace, walking stiffly beside Damian, a ghost in expensive clothes. The fire was gone from his eyes. Luca had poured his secret heart out to the most dangerous man he knew to protect that fire, and now Damian was the one smothering it.
His own guilt was a physical presence, a second skin he couldn't shed. He'd been the architect of this. Every link in the chain was forged by his own hands: the secret plea to Damian, the advice that pushed Jace to say the fatal words, his own cowardly silence.
He bent and picked his phone up off the floor. He pulled up Damian's contact a number he'd sworn he'd only ever use for the monthly, soul-crushing transfer of his repayment installments.
His thumbs flew over the screen, fury and fear making them clumsy.
Luca: What are you doing to him?
The response was almost instantaneous. Damian must have been waiting for it.
Damian: I'm giving him what you never could. Security. Clarity. Purpose.
Luca's vision swam with red. He typed back.
Luca: You're destroying him. That was never the deal. I asked you to HELP him.
Damian: The deal, cousin, was for the money. That deal is complete. Your sentimentality does not bind me. This is a new arrangement. One he entered willingly.
Willingly. The word was a mockery. What did "willing" mean when the alternative was ruin? When the person you owed was a man like Damian?
Luca: Tell him. Tell him the truth. That I came to you. That the debt was already gone.
Damian: And violate our original condition? The one you agreed to to save him? If I tell him, the debt reactivates. Against him. Would you truly risk that, after all your noble sacrifice? Or would you rather he simply… belongs to me?
Luca's breath came in short, sharp gasps. It was a perfect trap. The trap he himself had agreed to, thinking he was being selfless. If he forced the truth out now, he would be the one plunging Jace back into financial hell. He would be the villain. Damian had known. He had always known how this would end.
Damian: He's adapting. He's quieter. More biddable. He's learning his place. You should be happy for him. This is the stability you wanted for him, isn't it?
The cruelty was so precise, so intelligent, it felt like a surgical instrument probing an open wound. Damian was describing the extinction of everything Luca loved about Jace and framing it as a gift.
Luca didn't reply. He couldn't. He slid down the kitchen wall to the floor, clutching the phone to his chest.
He thought of the sixteen-year-old Jace with the bloody lip, grinning through the pain. "Guess I'd better keep you around, then." He'd been trying to keep him around ever since. And he'd failed.
Now, from the shadows, he could only watch as Damian remade the vibrant, stubborn boy he loved into a quiet, "okay" companion. The debt Luca had secretly paid to give Jace a future was now the very chain that bound him to a man who was systematically unmaking him.
He was no longer just a guilty friend. He was a witness to a crime he had financed. And the worst part, the part that kept him frozen on the cold linoleum floor, was the dawning, horrific realization:
He had sold Jace to Damian twice. First, for money. And now, through his silence, for good.