The morning arrived grey and cold, mist clinging to the trees outside like ghosts. Jace had barely slept. He'd lain awake, replaying Damian's words, searching for the trap he knew must exist. But as the hours passed and no trap sprang, a fragile, terrifying possibility began to take root.
Maybe Damian meant it. Maybe the monster was capable of change.
Or maybe Jace was so broken he'd started seeing mercy in cruelty.
A guard came for him at dawn, leading him not to Damian's room but to the front hall. Luca was already there, standing by the door with a duffel bag at his feet. He looked thinner than yesterday, paler, but there was something new in his eyes a desperate, trembling hope.
"Jace."
Luca started toward him, then stopped, glancing at the guard. The guard stepped back, giving them a sliver of privacy.
"Is this real?" Luca whispered. "Is he actually letting me go?"
Jace nodded, his throat tight. "He said... he said he's tired of winning."
Luca's laugh was wet and broken. "Since when do monsters get tired?"
"I don't know." Jace looked at his best friend the boy who had loved him in secret, who had destroyed him trying to save him, who was now being handed a freedom Jace couldn't share. "But you need to go. While he's still... whatever he is right now."
Luca grabbed his hands, gripping them tight. "Come with me. Please. We can run, we can hide, we can..."
"The second I step out that door, he'll come after us both." Jace shook his head. "You know that. This is the deal you go free, I stay. That's the only way it works."
"I can't leave you here." Luca's voice cracked. "I can't."
"You have to." Jace squeezed his hands, then let go. "You have to live. For both of us. And someday, when you're safe, when you've built something real... you find a way to come back for me. Okay?"
Luca was crying openly now, tears streaming down his face. "I will. I swear it. I will come back for you."
"Go." Jace's voice was barely a whisper. "Before he changes his mind."
The guard opened the front door. Cold air rushed in, carrying the scent of wet earth and freedom. Luca picked up his bag, took one last look at Jace, and walked through.
The door closed behind him with a soft, final click.
Jace stood in the empty hall, listening to the sound of footsteps fading on gravel, then nothing. Just silence. Just the hollow echo of his own breathing.
He was alone now. Truly alone. Luca was gone, escaping into a world Jace couldn't follow. The last tether to his old self had been cut.
And somewhere in this house, the man who had broken him was waiting.
Jace found Damian in the study, standing at the window, watching the same mist-shrouded trees Luca had just disappeared into. He didn't turn when Jace entered.
"He's gone," Damian said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
A long pause. Damian's reflection in the glass was unreadable. "You hate me more now."
It wasn't a question either.
Jace considered the statement. Did he hate Damian more? Luca was free that was what he'd wanted, what he'd begged for. But freedom meant absence. It meant being left behind. The gratitude and the loss twisted together into something he couldn't name.
"I don't know what I feel," Jace admitted. "I haven't known for a long time."
Damian finally turned. His face was tired, the sharp edges softened by something that might have been regret. "That's my fault."
"Yes."
The word hung between them, honest and brutal. Damian didn't flinch. He just nodded, accepting the judgment like a man accepting a sentence.
"I don't know how to be different," Damian said quietly. "I've never... I don't have practice at this. At caring about something more than owning it."
Jace thought of the Terms of Obedience, the inspections, the punishments. The way Damian had systematically dismantled him and called it love. The way even now, even trying to change, Damian's vocabulary was still about ownership caring about something more than owning it.
"Maybe start by not owning me," Jace said.
Damian's eyes met his. For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Damian crossed to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a folder the original contract, the Terms of Obedience, every document that bound Jace to him.
He held them out.
Jace stared at the papers, uncomprehending. "What is this?"
"Firewood," Damian said. "If you want."
"You'd just... let me go? Like Luca?"
"No." Damian's voice was firm, but not cruel. "I can't let you go. I've tried to imagine it, and I can't. You're... you're not just a possession to me, Jace. You haven't been for a long time. You're something I don't have a word for. Something I didn't know existed."
He set the folder on the desk between them.
"But I can give you this. The choice. The papers mean nothing if you don't choose to stay. And I..." He swallowed, a rare crack in his composure. "I need you to choose. Even if you choose to leave. I need to know that what's between us isn't just chains."
Jace looked at the folder. All that paper, all those words, all that carefully constructed control reduced to a choice. His choice.
"You're giving me a choice now," Jace said slowly. "After everything. After breaking me until I couldn't choose anything."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Damian met his eyes, and for the first time, there was no mask, no calculation, no cold control. Just a man, standing in the wreckage of his own making, asking for something he had no right to ask for.
"Because I don't want a doll," Damian said. "I want you. The real you. The one who threw a plate at my wall and screamed that he wasn't my dog. The one who laughed with Luca and fought the world with nothing but pride and stubbornness. I broke that person, and I don't know how to put him back together. But I know I can't... I can't keep going like this. Pretending the hollow thing in my bed is what I wanted."
Jace's throat burned. Tears pricked at his eyes—the first real tears he'd cried in weeks, not from pain or performance, but from something deeper. Something that felt like grief for the person he used to be.
"That person is dead," he whispered. "You killed him."
Damian closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet. Damian Moreau, crying. It was almost impossible to believe.
"I know," he said. "And I'll spend the rest of my life trying to bring him back, even if he never wants to see me. Even if he walks out that door and never looks back. But I can't... I can't keep owning a ghost."
He pushed the folder slightly toward Jace.
"Choose," he said. "Stay or go. But choose. Please."
Jace looked at the folder. At the door. At the man who had destroyed him and was now, impossibly, offering him a way out.
He thought of Luca, somewhere out there, free. He thought of his father, dead and gone. He thought of the boy he used to be, the one who laughed and fought and trusted.
That boy was dead. Damian had killed him.
But standing here, in this quiet room, with tears on a monster's face and freedom in his hands... Jace realized something.
Maybe dead things could be reborn.
He reached out and took the folder. Damian's breath caught, a sound of pure, naked vulnerability.
Jace didn't open it. He didn't tear it up. He just held it, feeling the weight of everything it represented.
"I don't know if I can ever forgive you," Jace said quietly. "I don't know if I can ever be who I was. But I know that walking out that door won't bring him back. And I know that... that some part of me, the part you couldn't quite kill, doesn't want to leave."
He looked up, meeting Damian's wet, desperate eyes.
"I'll stay," he said. "Not because I'm owned. Because I'm choosing. And if you ever treat me like property again, I will destroy you. Not with a public stunt I'll find a way that leaves nothing left. Do you understand?"
Damian nodded, unable to speak.
Jace held up the folder. "And these go in the fire. Now. Together."
They walked to the fireplace. Damian struck a match and held it to the corner of the folder. The flame caught, spreading hungrily, consuming every word of every contract, every clause of every term.
They watched together as the papers blackened and curled, turning to ash.
When it was done, Damian turned to Jace. There was no triumph in his eyes, no satisfaction. Just exhaustion, and something that looked terrifyingly like hope.
"Now what?" Damian asked.
Jace looked at the ashes, then at the man beside him. The monster who had broken him. The man who was crying. The same person, somehow.
"Now," Jace said, "we figure out who we are without chains."
He held out his hand.
Damian stared at it for a long moment, as if he'd never seen such a simple gesture before. Then, slowly, he reached out and took it.
His hand was warm. Human. Trembling, just slightly.
Outside, the mist was beginning to burn away, revealing a pale winter sun. Somewhere out there, Luca was running toward freedom. And in here, two broken men stood holding hands over the ashes of everything that had bound them, trying to imagine something new.
It wasn't a happy ending. It wasn't even close, But it was a beginning.