Ms. CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death – Episode 26
Summer returned to the safe residence without the excitement she had shown before. She checked every doorway, refused to let the bedroom lights go dark, and woke crying whenever a vehicle passed outside. The physical examination found no lasting injury. Fear had left wounds no scanner could measure.
Connor moved his work into the room beside hers. At night, he sat on the floor and read stories until she slept, sometimes beginning the same book three times after nightmares woke her. Summer built a fortress from pillows and assigned him responsibility for guarding its gate. The Merchant of Death accepted every command.
She asked for a new children’s watch. Connor expected the broken one to remind her of the kidnapping, but Summer said it also reminded her that her parents answered. He configured three emergency contacts: Daddy, Mommy, and Uncle Cypher. Scarlett watched the ritual restore a small piece of her confidence.
The quiet moments changed Connor more than any battle. He considered dissolving Dominion’s weapons divisions and destroying everything Voss wanted. If the empire continued placing Summer in danger, no fortune justified keeping it. Scarlett challenged the decision before guilt made it permanent.
Weapons and stolen technology would not disappear because Connor closed a company. Voss, the C-7 collaborator, and countless buyers would divide what remained. Scarlett believed Dominion could be rebuilt around accountability rather than fear. Connor had the power to limit the harm his inventions caused if he stopped treating isolation as leadership.
Her argument offered a future beyond destruction. Connor began drafting reforms that separated defensive research from private sales and created independent oversight. He asked Scarlett to review the structure. Their marriage slowly became a partnership formed by choices rather than emergency paperwork.
Scarlett returned to her mother’s recovered audio. Dominion analysts restored several damaged passages, revealing that Aegis began as a joint civilian research project. Scarlett’s mother had wanted rescue aircraft to navigate storms, fires, and collapsed cities without satellites. Someone later demanded the same system guide autonomous weapons.
She refused and removed the core from Dominion. The recording described threats, surveillance, and an internal authority capable of erasing project files. The name remained corrupted, but the access designation survived. C-7 had approved the conversion and ordered Aegis recovered at any cost.
Connor opened a formal investigation into every founding-era executive. Cypher warned that announcing it could drive the collaborator deeper underground. Connor answered that secrecy had protected the traitor for years. This time, light would become the weapon.
A request arrived from Stephen’s detention facility. He offered information about Scarlett’s mother in exchange for consideration from prosecutors. Scarlett initially refused to see him. Connor reminded her that hearing the truth did not require forgiveness.
They met Stephen through reinforced glass. Without his tailored authority and obedient household, he looked diminished. He admitted accepting money from Whitmore intermediaries and approving the search for Aegis. Greed made him willing to steal from Scarlett, but he insisted he never ordered her mother’s death.
The person directing him claimed to represent Dominion. Payments arrived through companies that later appeared in Voss’s network. Stephen never learned the man’s public identity, but every instruction carried the designation C-7. He had kept a private ledger as insurance.
Investigators recovered the ledger from a hidden compartment in Stephen’s office. Entries covered the months before Scarlett’s mother died and continued through the financial attack on Hayes Group. One payment corresponded exactly with the date of her fatal accident. Another funded the men who chased Scarlett four years earlier.
Scarlett closed the book before anger overwhelmed her. Stephen had not planned the murder, but his greed had helped the killers reach her mother and later his granddaughter. He asked whether cooperation repaired anything between them. Scarlett answered that truth could reduce a sentence, not restore a family.
Cypher analyzed the ledger’s authentication marks. C-7 belonged to Dominion’s original continuity system, a shared authority reserved for catastrophic emergencies. Connor believed every copy had been destroyed when he centralized control. The new evidence proved at least one remained.
Only a small founding council ever possessed the complete sequence. Voss knew parts of it through technical access, while several early investors knew financial segments. Cypher had served as the system’s operational custodian. His name appeared on the original authorization register.
Connor dismissed the implication at first. Cypher had risked death at the research base and helped rescue Summer. Loyalty expressed through blood mattered more than an old document. Yet a commander could not ignore evidence because it threatened someone close.
Cypher volunteered his devices and accounts for examination. He understood that trust without verification would repeat Connor’s earlier mistakes. Summer heard enough to worry and asked whether Uncle Cypher was in trouble. Connor promised only that they would discover the truth.
Forensic teams opened the first archived C-7 transaction. The digital signature matched Cypher’s historical credential exactly. A linked offshore account also carried an identity assigned to him during Dominion’s earliest operations. The room fell silent around the results.
Then another alert appeared. The security phrase used to remove Summer from the safe residence had been generated on Cypher’s personal terminal. Connor looked at his oldest lieutenant across the table. For the first time, the evidence suggested the man who helped save his daughter might also have delivered her to Voss. Trust became another battlefield between them.
