Chapter 150 - Santiago

Chapter 150 - Santiago
And there it was—cold, undeniable, and impossible to unsee. The clip had been leaked, just as we all feared it might be, and even though I had been mentally preparing myself for this exact moment for days now, nothing could have truly braced me for the visceral punch it landed in my gut. The screen on the phone burned into my vision as I watched the grainy, dimly lit footage unfold—the very first night I had touched Nova, that deeply intimate, unguarded moment played out under glaring stage lights, in front of an audience of anonymous faces, all captured from a fixed overhead angle. The video left very little to the imagination. It was calculated, deliberate, and perfectly timed. This wasn’t just a release—it was a message, a shot fired across the bow.

A warning from my father.

Because if there was one thing Pedro Gómez Hernández was known for in his shadow empire, it was that he never wasted ammunition unless he intended to destroy. And this was only the beginning. I knew what was likely coming next—darker, more damning footage, each one a little more invasive, a little more humiliating. The kind of content that didn’t just spark rumors or raise brows, but fundamentally rewrote how the world would see you. Footage I couldn’t even remember the full extent of, which only made the dread spiral deeper.

James stood a few feet away, and though he tried to appear composed, I could see the tension in his shoulders and the flicker of worry in his eyes as he glanced between me and the phone screen. “You okay?” he asked softly, not wanting to startle me, but clearly not sure how to help either.

Before I could even answer, Luca cut in from across the room, his tone blunt and without a trace of sympathy. “He has no choice.” And maybe that was the truest thing said all day.

I gave a short, slow nod, the kind that wasn’t quite agreement, but more a quiet acceptance of reality. Because the truth was simple: what was done was done. The footage was out there now, etched into the internet like a tattoo across my name, un-erasable and ready to be passed around like currency. And no matter how fast we moved, no matter how many fires we tried to put out, we’d never be fast enough to beat the echo of that leak.

Then, a phone rang—sharp, jarring, slicing through the silence like a knife. For a moment I didn’t even realize it was mine, not until James reached over and handed it to me, his brows furrowed slightly as he read the screen. Without thinking, I pressed the green button and lifted it to my ear.

“Hello?”

Before I could even register a response, Luca was already at my side, taking the phone from my hand with a smoothness that told me he was used to stepping in. He pressed the speaker button and set it down on the table in front of us.

“Santiago? You there?” came Olivia’s unmistakable voice through the line—crisp, businesslike, but not without a hint of weight behind it.

“Yes,” I replied, my voice a little hoarse, as the surrealness of the moment settled around me like fog.

“We filed the lawsuit,” she said without ceremony, the words heavy with finality. “Your dad got the message.”

I didn’t reply right away. I didn’t need to. We all knew what that meant.

“He was expecting it,” she added, her tone growing more clipped now, more urgent. “So prepare yourselves. He’s going to retaliate—and he’s going to do it fast. He has a plan. I’m sure of it.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and exhaled slowly, letting her words roll through me like a wave. Because of course he had a plan. Pedro Gómez Hernández didn’t just sit back and let things unfold. He orchestrated. He manipulated. He leveled cities before breakfast and wiped his hands clean before anyone knew the disaster had even started.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked the room, my voice sharper than I intended, cutting through the uneasy silence like a blade through taut string. My question wasn’t aimed at anyone specific—it just hung there, raw and restless.

“Nothing,” Luca said flatly, folding his arms as if his posture alone could hold everything together.

“At least not yet,” Olivia’s voice came through the speakerphone with practiced composure, but I caught the edge beneath her calm. “We wait.”

I let out a frustrated breath, slow and deliberate, though it barely softened the tension roiling in my chest. Of course we were going to wait—because that’s what we always did. No scrambling, no scrambling to stop the bleeding. Just strategic, still silence while everything inside burned.

“You do realize the cat’s out of the bag now, right?” Olivia continued, her tone clipped, sharpened by exasperation. “There’s no walking this back. No press statement is going to smother what’s already spreading. What’s out there is permanent. We both know how this works.”

Her words sank like stones in my gut. I didn’t bother to respond—what was there to say? That I was sorry? That I hadn’t expected my father to strike this quickly? That I was starting to feel the chill of isolation, even in a room full of people?

“Anyway,” she added, with the cool efficiency of someone trying to move a meeting along, “I need you to come into the office, Santiago. If I’m going to build a watertight case, I need to know everything you know. No more surprises.”

“I figured,” I muttered, rubbing a hand down my face. The weight of the moment felt heavier than it should have, and I wasn’t sure if it was the video, or just the knowledge of how much worse things were likely to get.

“Not just you,” Olivia added quickly. “Belen, Sean, James, Levi—you all need to come in. I’ll need individual statements, timelines, corroboration. And your...”

She hesitated. I could hear the pause in her voice even through the thin layer of speaker distortion.

“And Nova,” I finished for her, making it clear there was no ambiguity. No space for her to be treated like an afterthought.

There was a pause. “Yeah. Her too,” Olivia said, and though she said it lightly, I didn’t miss the note of dismissal under the surface.

“I’ll make sure they know,” I told her, my voice steady, even though everything inside me felt anything but. Because I knew what this meant—we were no longer just trying to take my father down. We were stepping into a war we couldn’t hide from anymore.

The phone clicked off with a quiet finality, and the room fell into that eerie stillness that comes just before the next hit.

James looked over at me, concern etched subtly into his expression. “You alright?”

I wanted to lie. Say yes. Say I was fine. Say something that would let the knot in my chest loosen just a little. But Luca beat me to it.

“He doesn’t have a choice,” he said plainly, with the kind of conviction that made my stomach twist.