Victor
I destroyed people. Not physically. With the truth.
And most people couldn’t handle that.
I built an empire on stories no one wanted told. Affairs. Scandals. Secrets they thought were buried.
But I splashed them on the cover of every tabloid I owned from coast to coast. There wasn’t a corner left to hide in once those stories went to print.
I didn’t just print the stories–I decided what made someone worthy of destruction. Who deserved a ruined reputation.
And those people I set my sights on? They didn’t fare well at all.
Some of them lost their jobs.
Some of them lost their spouses.
Some of them lost everything.
A few even put a gun to their temple and took the coward’s way out.
But only one of them put the gun to mine. Only one of them made me pay.
By the end, they all wanted me dead. They whispered it, plotted it, prayed for it.
Can’t say I blame them. I knew what I was.
I was the villain in everyone’s story. The controlling narcissist. The ex. The husband. The man who ruined lives with well-placed headlines.
But here’s the thing: none of it was false. And that’s what made me dangerous.
Everyone remembers the last thing I said. Not because it was profound–because it was printed. Immortalized.
And no, I don’t regret it.
If I sprang back to life right now, I’d print it again.
They gave me the story. I just gave it a place on the front page.
She begged like a dog. That was the headline.
Well, one of many. But that was the headline that kicked off the entire spiral.
That’s not where the story began. It’s just where everything unraveled past the point of repair—where five words sent my world into a fall I couldn’t recover from.
Plenty of people wanted my blood. Only one ever got it. The rest? They toasted it. Everyone who lost something to The Sun’s headlines raised a glass to the end of my reign.
“You’re going to end up on the wrong end of a bullet one day, Vic,” Callie warned.
“You can’t just mess with people’s lives like that,” Alex cried.
And Wes: “How could you do this so casually and think you’d get away with it?”
But I wasn’t the one who made the mess. I just handed out shovels and watched them dig their own graves.
Only this time, the last headline buried me.
