Most people take the hint when a relationship ends.
They move on, rebuild, maybe even learn something about themselves.
But Lucas? He wasn’t most people.
Lucas treated breakups like business negotiations. If he couldn’t have the final say, he’d do everything in his power to ensure you regretted ever leaving him.
Charm, manipulation, threats—whatever it took to keep you under his thumb.
When I started seeing someone new, I thought I’d finally shaken him off. My life was finally getting back to normal.
But Lucas wasn’t about to let that happen.
And his next move would prove that even after months of separation, he still thought he owned me.
The Threat
It started with a message, late at night when I was already half-asleep.
Lucas always knew when to strike—just when I thought I’d finally forgotten about him, he’d pop up like a bad dream.
The text was short, but it hit like a punch to the stomach.
“We need to talk. I have something you’re not going to want people to see.”
My heart sank as I stared at the words. I knew exactly what he was talking about.
The next day, I agreed to meet him. Stupid, I know, but Lucas had this way of making you feel like you had no choice.
We sat across from each other at a coffee shop, and for a moment, he almost seemed normal—until he leaned forward, that smug grin creeping onto his face.
“I have everything,” he said, his voice low. “The texts, the photos. You remember.”
I remembered. I also remembered trusting him, thinking I could share pieces of myself with someone who claimed to love me.
“If you don’t end things with your new boyfriend, I’ll make sure everyone sees them,” he continued. “Your coworkers, your friends, even your parents.”
I stared at him, my mind racing. “You wouldn’t—”
“Try me,” he said, leaning back like he’d already won.
I left the coffee shop shaking, my hands gripping my bag so tightly my knuckles ached.
By the time I got home, I was in tears, replaying his threat over and over in my head.
That’s when I called Zoe.
Zoe’s Plan
“Okay, first of all, screw him,” Zoe said as soon as I finished explaining. “Second, you’re not dealing with this alone.”
Zoe had always been the pragmatic one between us. She worked in IT, constantly wrangling systems and data breaches, and she wasn’t the kind of person to sit back and let someone like Lucas call the shots.
“He thinks he’s in control,” she continued, pacing around her tiny apartment. “But guess what? People like Lucas always leave a trail. I just need to find it.”
“Zoe, I don’t want to make this worse,” I said, my voice shaking. “If he actually sends those photos—”
“He won’t,” she interrupted. “Not if we make sure he’s too scared to.”
Zoe got to work immediately, setting up her laptop with the kind of focus that made me think she’d forgotten I was even in the room.
She muttered to herself as she typed, pulling up pages of code and interfaces that looked like something out of a spy movie.
“Here’s the thing,” she said after an hour. “Lucas isn’t exactly careful. People like him think they’re untouchable, but they’re also arrogant enough to reuse passwords.”
She paused, glancing at me. “Do you remember if he ever shared a password with you? For, like, Netflix or something?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah, he used the same one for everything. It was his dog’s name and some numbers.”
She smirked. “Classic Lucas. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Within minutes, Zoe was scrolling through Lucas’s cloud storage.
“Bingo,” she said, pointing to a folder labeled Private.
“Are you kidding me?” I said, leaning over her shoulder.
“Oh, it gets better,” she replied, opening the folder.
Inside were the photos and screenshots he’d saved—the ones he’d threatened to send.
But there was more.
Zoe found draft emails he’d written, addressed to people I worked with, complete with captions designed to humiliate me.
“Grace, this guy is deranged,” she said, her voice growing serious. “He’s not bluffing. But the good news is, he’s also incredibly stupid. He left everything here. Metadata, timestamps, even his IP address. He might as well have gift-wrapped this for us.”
By the end of the night, we had a plan. Zoe was documenting everything, building a case to report him for harassment and extortion.
“We’re going to shut this down,” she said confidently.
I tried to believe her, but the fear in my chest wouldn’t go away.
Lucas wasn’t just someone with a grudge—he was someone who thrived on control. And right now, he thought he had all of it.
What I didn’t know was that Lucas’s arrogance was about to be his own undoing.
Self-Sabotage
Zoe and I had spent days meticulously documenting everything.
From Lucas’s cloud storage to his draft emails, Zoe had pieced together a rock-solid case to counter his threats.
We were prepared to take action at any moment—but Lucas managed to destroy himself before we even had the chance.
It started with a frantic call from Zoe late one night.
“Grace, check your email,” she said, her voice laced with disbelief.
“What?” I asked groggily.
“Just check it,” she said. “You’ll see.”
I grabbed my phone, squinting at the screen as I opened my inbox. The subject line read: “Important – URGENT!!!”
It was from Lucas.
“What now?” I muttered, opening it. And then I saw it.
The email was a mess—a rambling disaster of a message that should have been saved as a draft but instead was sent to his entire contact list.
It began with a drunken video of Lucas, slurring his words and ranting about people in his life.
“They all think they’re so smart,” he said, his face close to the camera. “But I’m the one in control. I always have been.”
He laughed, gesturing with a drink in hand. “Grace? She thinks she’s moved on? Please. I can ruin her whenever I want. I’ve got everything ready.”
Attached to the email were not only the incriminating drafts of the emails he’d planned to send about me but also a series of intimate photos and videos—of himself.
My jaw dropped. I didn’t know whether to feel sick or laugh out loud.
Lucas, in his effort to humiliate me, had accidentally exposed himself instead.
When I called Zoe back, she was already pulling up the email on her laptop.
“I can’t believe he sent this to everyone,” she said, scrolling through the recipients. “His coworkers, his family, even the HOA board.”
“The HOA?” I asked, incredulous.
She smirked. “Yep. Looks like his boss and his mom got it too. This is next-level sabotage.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, the absurdity of the situation finally breaking through the tension I’d been carrying for weeks.
The Backfire
By morning, Lucas’s phone must have been blowing up.
I heard about the fallout from mutual acquaintances, each new detail adding to the picture of his unraveling.
One coworker said his boss had called an emergency meeting with Lucas to discuss “inappropriate conduct.”
Another friend mentioned how Lucas’s mother was mortified and furious, telling people she had “raised him better than this.”
When Zoe and I met later that day, she showed me a text one of Lucas’s colleagues had forwarded to her. It was from Lucas, desperately trying to explain himself.
“It was a joke,” the message read. “Someone must have hacked me. You know I’d never send something like that on purpose.”
“Sure,” Zoe said, rolling her eyes. “Because hackers are known for sending embarrassing selfies to your boss.”
For all his bluster about control, Lucas’s attempts at damage control were pitiful. No one believed his excuses.
By the end of the week, he’d been placed on leave from his job, alienated from friends, and left scrambling to salvage his reputation.
For the first time in weeks, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders.
Lucas’s threats had lost all their power. The man who had spent so much energy trying to humiliate me had instead humiliated himself in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
When I mentioned this to Zoe, she smiled.
“Honestly, it’s better than anything we could’ve planned. He thought he was untouchable. Turns out, he’s just incompetent.”
The next time I heard about Lucas, it was through an acquaintance who mentioned he’d moved back in with his parents “to get his life together.”
I didn’t feel pity—I felt free.
It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t even justice, not exactly. But it was enough.
Lucas had destroyed himself, and I could finally move on.