Chapter 375: The Horse’s Head

The ride back happened in silence. Monique was pressed against the door, her forehead almost touching the cold window, eyes fixed on the Underground lights sliding by without really seeing them.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, a light tremor rolling through in waves, and she wasn’t even trying to hide it anymore. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the detention room. Hector didn’t care. His mind was already running full speed somewhere else, on something far more urgent.

He has everything. Nash has everything.

The sentence kept coming back, over and over, like a pebble stuck in his shoe. If Nash really had gotten his hands on the evidence from the Jade Gardens network, the client logs, the videos, the fake sales contracts dressed up as business transactions, then the question wasn’t whether he’d strike. It was when. And Hector had no intention of sitting back and waiting for the blow to land.

The second the car pulled into the underground parking lot at Apex headquarters, he went straight up to his office and picked up the phone.

"Emergency meeting," he told his secretary. "The whole communications team. The lawyers too. And my best analysts. Now."

They arrived in under twenty minutes, about a dozen people settling around the big glass table, some still buttoning their jackets, others holding a half-finished coffee. The mood was tense. Everyone in the room knew that if this plan failed, it was going to go badly for a lot of people, not just Hector.

He stayed standing, hands crossed behind his back, and waited for the silence to fully settle before speaking.

"Here’s the situation," he said. "Victoria Graves likely has damaging evidence about certain past activities of this company. I won’t go into detail here. Just understand one thing: if that evidence comes out before we’ve destroyed her credibility, the consequences will be very serious. For everyone in this room."

Nobody dared ask a question.

"Our priority is to destroy her. Fast. Before she strikes first. We’re going to build a simple narrative. Solid. Solid enough that even if she puts something out against us later, nobody believes her."

He nodded toward one of his analysts, a young man with round glasses, who tapped nervously on his tablet before pulling up a first document on the wall screen.

"We present everything that’s happened recently, the Baby-Boom transfer, the illegal release of the contracts, Harlan’s betrayal, as a setup from the very start. A plan orchestrated by Victoria herself to destabilize Apex and later justify a hostile takeover of our assets."

"And Nash Blaze, in all this?" one of the lawyers asked, pen hovering over his notepad.

"A pawn," Hector answered, without the slightest hesitation. "An ambitious young player, manipulated by Victoria, seduced by her promises of power and money. We present him as a naive victim of her ambition. Not as someone who acted of his own free will. That keeps anyone from feeling sympathy for him."

Nods went around the table. Someone was already scribbling out draft press releases on a notepad.

"Get everything out there that you can," Hector ordered, leaning forward slightly, both hands coming to rest flat on the table. "Anonymous testimonies about her past with doping and fixed matches in the Upper League. Documents, even partially doctored ones if necessary, as long as they hold up at first glance. I want the name Victoria Graves to become synonymous with manipulation and lies by the end of the week."

The machine kicked into gear almost immediately. A dozen people got to work at their screens, coordinating the release of several different sources, several "testimonies" built to look completely independent of each other.

The first few hours seemed to pay off. The Underground forums lit up fast, the doping and fixed-match accusations spreading at full speed, every share adding another layer of scandal.

But something started to go wrong almost right away.

Hector had settled in front of the big wall of screens in his private crisis room, a cup of black coffee sitting untouched beside him, eyes locked on the feeds scrolling live. He expected to watch the wave of outrage rise, swell, sweep everything away like it had the last time.

Instead, he watched something else take shape in front of him.

#underground-breakball-chat

VictoriaSimp 💜

i don’t believe it until i see REAL solid proof. my wife literally funded the renovation of the sector 9 hospital, you really think a criminal would do that? 🤨

Cachalot

wait is that true?? i’ve got a buddy who works there, he says all the fees for uninsured patients have been covered for like three weeks straight, direct from Blacklist funding 👀

GhostInTheAss

yeah and the sector 14 rehab center too, free for everyone. my cousin went there and it’s Blacklist behind that one too

Maheyapee708

wait she’s behind all that?? 😭 stop it i’m still mad at them for what they did to the Falcons, don’t make me end up rooting for them

ILoveBigTT

honestly a woman dumping millions into hospitals and rehab centers for the poor in the Underground doesn’t really sound like something a heartless manipulator would do, just saying 🤷‍♂️

MyArse83

guys think about it for two seconds. who benefits from trashing her image RIGHT when Blacklist just poached ten players from Apex?? this reeks of a payback move 🚩🚩

ElusiveCoconut

exactly what i was thinking. way too convenient a timing for it to be a coincidence

PAMela

Apex loses their whole star roster overnight, and boom, a scandal gets cooked up out of nowhere against the person who picked them up?? come on 💀 it’s so obvious

Megalomelon

lmaooo even Apex’s lies are badly put together these days

Hector leaned in a little closer to the screen, rereading the messages a second time, as if reading them again would somehow change their meaning. He absently spun his pen between his fingers, a tic he hadn’t had in years.

This wasn’t supposed to go like this.

He scrolled through other platforms, other channels, looking for at least a small pocket of genuine outrage against Victoria. He found almost none. Everywhere, the same pattern repeated itself, over and over: an accusation thrown out, followed almost instantly by a spontaneous defense from people who clearly had no connection to her and no reason to be paid to say any of it.

"What the hell is this," Hector muttered, voice low.

His lead analyst approached from behind, a tablet clutched to her chest, hesitant even before opening her mouth.

"Sir," she said. "We’ve got a problem. Public opinion isn’t moving the way we expected. It’s actually turning against us."

"I can see that," Hector answered, not taking his eyes off the screen.

"There’s also..." she hesitated, flipping nervously through a few pages on her tablet. "There’s a theory starting to spread pretty widely. That Apex is behind this whole campaign, as payback for losing Baby-Boom. Some fairly well-followed accounts are already sharing it like it’s an established fact."

Hector froze, his jaw slowly clenching.

"Keep pushing," he ordered, his voice losing some of its usual certainty. "Double the effort. Find other angles. Other sources, I’m paying you people for this, for god’s sake."

The following hours only made things worse. Every new accusation seemed to generate an even stronger wave of support for Victoria. Every attempt to hurt her turned back around on Apex with almost mechanical consistency.

New testimonies kept appearing, ordinary Underground residents sharing their own stories, their own experiences with anonymously funded initiatives that were increasingly, clearly tied back to Victoria: sudden price cuts at recently bought-out shops, scholarships handed out to kids from poor families, neighborhood security programs funded without asking for anything in return.

And with every new piece of proof of her generosity, Hector’s narrative crumbled a little more.

He stayed standing in front of the wall of screens for hours, never sitting down, watching his strategy collapse piece by piece. His coffee, still untouched, had gone completely cold beside him.

It was supposed to be simple. A well-placed volley of accusations, a solid narrative, and Victoria should have crumbled under the weight of her own tarnished reputation. That’s how it always worked, in the world he thought he knew inside and out.

But none of it was working. Like some invisible wall was protecting Victoria from every hit, systematically turning every attack back around on him.

Or rather... like some protective shadow stood behind her, tearing apart the very weapon that had worked so well before.

"Sir," another voice said, one of his lawyers this time, stepping forward carefully. "We tried reaching out to some of our usual backers. To reinforce the narrative, get official statements that support our accusations."

"And?" Hector asked, without turning around.

"No response, sir. From anyone."

Hector finally turned his head, a frown crossing his face.

"What do you mean, no response?"

"The senator, two city council members, three private investors who usually respond within the hour," the lawyer listed off, flipping nervously through his notes. "Dead silence, all of them."

A doubt began settling into Hector’s mind, an instinct he didn’t want to name clearly yet.

"Contact the Jade Gardens directly," he said finally, voice lower, more tense. "I want to know where our regular clientele stands."

The lawyer hesitated, exchanging a quick glance with the analyst still standing nearby.

"That’s actually what I was about to bring up, sir," he said, careful. "We tried. Several times, over the last few hours."

"And?" Hector repeated, his patience visibly running out.

"Nothing. No movement. No transactions in three days. No reservations, no scheduled visits. Like everyone just vanished at once."

The silence that followed stretched out, heavy, almost suffocating.

Hector stood frozen, staring at the wall of screens without really seeing it, the pieces of the puzzle slowly coming together in his mind.

This wasn’t a coincidence. None of this was a coincidence.

Victoria had already started striking. Not with some explosive public reveal he could have seen coming and countered in time. No, she’d done something far more discreet, far smarter: she’d neutralized every one of his backers, one by one, quietly, in the shadows, probably by threatening each of them with the evidence she held on their visits to the Jade Gardens.

And while he’d been wasting his time trying to trash her public image, she’d been methodically dismantling his entire real power structure.

For the first time in years, maybe for the first time in his entire life, Hector felt something he’d almost never experienced before: a cold fear, the freezing certainty that the whole world was shifting beneath his feet, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

If I keep going down this path, he thought, throat tight, this is going to end very badly for me.

That was the exact moment the door to the room quietly opened. His secretary poked her head through the gap, an uneasy look on her face, her fingers gripping the doorframe tight.

"Mr. Perez," she said, hesitant. "You have a call."

"Not now," Hector answered, not even turning around, voice tense. "I’m thinking."

"Sir," she pressed, her voice more urgent this time. "It’s... it’s Mr. Lorenzo."

Hector froze instantly, his whole body going rigid all at once.

He stayed still for a long moment, without a word, before finally turning to face his secretary.

Miles away, in an entirely different world, sunlight filled a massive living room, streaming through wide bay windows overlooking a terrace suspended above the city.

A man sat on a large cream leather couch, one leg casually crossed over the other, a cigar smoking gently between his fingers. Around him, several servants in light attire moved through various tasks, one filling a crystal glass, another adjusting the cushions behind him.

A woman approached the couch, phone in hand, the screen still lit on the waiting call.

"Sir," she said softly. "Mr. Hector Perez is on the line."

The man took a long pull from his cigar, letting the smoke escape slowly between his lips, before answering, an amused smile spreading across his face.

"Put him on speaker," he said. "Might as well let everyone here enjoy the show a little."