Ms. CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death – Episode 29
Dominion guards held position around Connor, Scarlett, and Cypher. Many had served Connor for years, yet their orders now carried Cross’s emergency authorization. Connor refused to fight employees caught between competing commands. He surrendered his visible weapon and demanded access to the board session.
Cross allowed them inside because humiliation served his argument. Directors appeared around the table and across secure video walls. He presented Connor as a commander ruled by fear for his family. The Merchant of Death, he claimed, could no longer make decisions for a global defense company.
He cataloged every recent loss. A research base had been breached, confidential systems exposed, billions spent acquiring Hayes debt, and personnel redirected to private rescues. Cross omitted his role in creating each crisis. Facts without causes became an effective lie.
Connor answered that Dominion existed to protect people, not preserve profit while children died. He accepted responsibility for revealing his identity and using company resources, but not Cross’s description of love as weakness. Summer had not destroyed his judgment. She had forced him to question what his empire should become.
Several directors supported reform, but others feared customers, governments, and rivals would abandon them. Cross offered continuity without emotional entanglement. His alliances gave him enough temporary votes to suspend Connor as executive authority. The resolution passed by a narrow margin.
Scarlett requested permission to submit evidence that Cross forged the case against Cypher. Cross refused on security grounds, calling Hayes Group an outside entity compromised by Aegis. She asked why an innocent chairman feared an accountant’s records. The question unsettled directors more than his answer.
She described the modern encryption hidden inside supposedly old transactions. Cypher produced the recovered transfer order authorizing his staged death. Cross dismissed both as fabrications created by a traitor and the wife controlling Connor. His contempt finally revealed the personal hostility beneath his professional mask.
Internal security received orders to remove all three from headquarters. When guards approached Scarlett, Connor stepped between them. Several lowered their weapons rather than threaten their commander’s wife. Loyalty divided the room in a way no board vote could settle.
Cypher activated an analog evacuation route built before Dominion’s current network. Loyal personnel opened a maintenance passage, allowing the group to leave without bloodshed. Cross let them go because every official system remained under his control. He believed power outside Dominion could not challenge him.
Connor’s accounts, vehicles, facilities, and communication channels stopped responding. Years of centralized authority became a cage once someone else held the key. He returned to an abandoned garage used during Dominion’s earliest operations. The location existed nowhere in the modern database.
Scarlett offered Hayes Group’s servers, forensic staff, and legal network. Her company was smaller, but Cross had never prepared to fight through it. Cypher connected the old Dominion equipment to Hayes infrastructure. The alliance transformed two damaged organizations into one hidden command center.
They began distributing proof directly to directors, regulators, and loyal officers. Cross blocked official channels, yet he could not erase copies already outside Dominion. Doubt spread across the board. His temporary control became more aggressive as support weakened.
A video transmission interrupted every Dominion executive terminal. Marcus Voss appeared inside an unknown medical facility, pale from his wound but alive. He accused Cross of directing Aegis weaponization and Scarlett’s mother’s death. Voss claimed he had been a partner until Cross decided everyone was disposable.
Cross labeled the transmission enemy propaganda. He cut the signal before Voss finished speaking. However, the broadcast had traveled through a C-7 handshake identical to the authority Cross now used. Directors began demanding an independent investigation.
Cypher isolated several frames before the feed disappeared. Voss held an original contract bearing Cross’s signature and a recorded order concerning Scarlett’s mother. The evidence could end the coup if authenticated. It could also be bait intended to draw Connor into another trap.
Connor refused to meet Voss without a plan. Scarlett noted that their enemy had exposed Cross publicly because the alliance between them had broken. Two traitors fighting each other created an opportunity. They needed the complete recording before either man destroyed it.
Cross initiated a purge of historical archives. Files concerning Aegis, Whitmore, and the Hayes accident vanished from Dominion storage. Hayes servers preserved several mirrored fragments, but the central command orders remained missing. Someone had to reach the backup control center physically.
Cypher identified a route beneath headquarters that Cross had not sealed. The backup center could restore deleted archives and temporarily challenge C-7. Connor prepared to enter with a small team. Scarlett insisted on joining because Guardian required her biometric authority.
Before they left, a dormant Aegis process awakened inside Dominion’s weapons network. Voss’s stolen source fragment had connected to Cross’s C-7 system. Targeting grids appeared across multiple regions. Cross was attempting something larger than preserving his board seat.
The first map showed three cities marked in red. One contained the secure district where Summer remained under guard. Connor stared at the targeting data as a timer initialized. Cross had transformed the board coup into a threat against millions of lives. Each location contained a dormant Dominion defense installation capable of launching without local approval. If corrupted Aegis completed its synchronization, the cities would become targets of the systems built to defend them. Cross had converted public safety into the largest hostage situation Connor had ever faced.
