The name Moreau echoed in Jace's skull like a bell tolling for a dead friendship. Luca Moreau. It explained everything and nothing. It explained the secret deal, the access, the strange undercurrents he'd never understood. It explained why Damian, a man who seemingly valued nothing, had entertained his cousin's desperate plea.
It did not explain why Luca had lied to him every single day for three years.
Jace moved through the penthouse like a ghost haunting his own life. His performance was flawless, but it had gained a new, chilling depth. Before, he'd been playing a role to survive. Now, he was embodying a character to wage war. Every smile he gave Damian was a scalpel, poised to cut. Every time he leaned into his touch, he was measuring the weight of the chains he would shatter.
The hardest part was the quiet moments. Lying in bed at night, Damian's breath warm against his neck, Jace would stare into the dark and feel the cold stone of his fury ache. He'd think of Luca's laugh, his terrible advice, his hand on Jace's shoulder. All of it had been a performance. A prelude to handing him over.
He needed to act. Not with a scream, but with a click.
His opportunity came in the form of the charity gala. Damian was consumed with final preparations security details, seating charts, last-minute donor calls. It was the perfect noise in which to move silently.
Using the admin access he'd noted from the smart-home logs, Jace waited until Damian was in a late-night planning session with his security chief. From his laptop, he accessed the penthouse's secure server a system meant for climate controls and surveillance feeds. He wasn't a hacker, but he was observant. He'd seen Damian type a complex master password weeks ago, his fingers flying over the keypad on the wall. Jace had memorized the rhythm, the shape of the keystrokes.
He tried a variation of Damian's usual corporate password, adding the penthouse's street number. The system blinked, then accepted.
His heart hammered against his ribs. He was in.
He didn't go for financial records that was too obvious, too easily traced. He went for something more personal, more corrosive. He navigated to the archived communication logs. He searched for Luca's name.
There were hundreds of entries. Brief check-ins. Fund transfers with the memo "Monthly – L. Agreement." And then, he found it. A text message string, synced from Damian's phone to the server, dated the night of Jace's "joke."
He read the exchange, his blood turning to ice.
Luca: He's going to see you. He's desperate. Please, just hear him out. Don't hurt him.
Damian: Your concern is tedious. What would you have me do?
Luca: I don't know! Just… be human for once.
Damian: Humanity is a currency he cannot afford. You made sure of that.
Then, a message sent an hour later, after Jace had been taken to the bedroom for the first time:
Luca: Where is he? What did you do? ANSWER ME.
Damian: He's fulfilling the new terms of his arrangement. You should be happy. This is the stability you wanted for him. He's in my bed. Where you were too cowardly to put him.
Jace stopped breathing. The words on the screen blurred. He could hear Luca's voice, cracking with panic on the phone that night. It hadn't just been worry. It had been the horrified realization of a man watching his own trap spring shut on the person he loved.
A strange, fractured pity splintered through his rage. Luca was a coward, a liar, and a fool. But he was also a prisoner, just in a different wing of Damian's prison.
The pity lasted only a second. It was overtaken by a clearer, colder understanding. Luca was a weakness. Damian's one point of sentimental vulnerability, however twisted.
Jace carefully copied the most damning lines of the exchange Damian's cold dismissal, his reference to the "L. Agreement," the brutal "He's in my bed. Where you were too cowardly to put him." He encrypted the file and sent it to a new, anonymous digital dropbox he'd created.
He didn't confront Luca. Not yet. This was a piece for later. A key to a lock.
He then did something even more dangerous. He created a false entry in the server log. A fabricated, outgoing message from Damian's account to a rival business figure, hinting at leveraging insider information from the upcoming gala for a hostile takeover. It was crude, a mere seed of doubt. He backdated it by two days and hid it within a cascade of real system notifications.
It wouldn't hold up to scrutiny. But it didn't need to. It just needed to exist, a single, poisoned grain of sand in the flawless machinery of Damian's control. When the time was right, he would point someone toward it.
He logged out, erasing his digital footsteps as best he could. He closed the laptop just as he heard Damian's footsteps approach down the hall.
Damian entered the living room, looking tired but energized, the way he did after solving a complex problem. He saw Jace on the sofa and his expression softened into that possessive warmth that now made Jace's skin crawl.
"All the predators are caged for the night," Damian said, sitting beside him, his arm automatically draping over Jace's shoulders. "The gala will be perfect."
Jace leaned into him, resting his head on Damian's shoulder, the picture of contentment. "I'm sure it will be," he murmured, his voice soft and trusting.
Inside, the stone of his fury was now a honed blade. And the serpent of his revenge had taken its first, silent bite. He had a weapon against Luca, and he had planted the first seed of chaos against Damian.