Ms. CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death – Episode 13
The frozen image of Danielle holding Summer’s inhaler remained on the tablet. Scarlett stared until the colors blurred through her tears. Her sister had known exactly what would happen when the child’s airways closed. She had chosen to steal the medicine anyway.
Connor’s first instinct was swift and final retaliation. One order could remove Danielle from every protected place her family name provided. His people had dismantled criminal organizations more powerful than the Hayes household. No prison or private guard could hide her if he decided she was an enemy.
Scarlett read the intent in his expression and caught his wrist. She wanted Danielle punished, but not through an execution carried out in the dark. Summer had just found her father and believed him to be a hero. Scarlett would not let their daughter wake to discover that loving her had turned Connor into a murderer.
Her words reached him because they were not a plea for Danielle. They were a demand that Connor become the father Summer deserved. He ordered Cypher to proceed through law enforcement, medical documentation, and preserved evidence. Yet his agreement carried a warning: if the system failed his daughter, he would not fail her.
Cypher began assembling an unbreakable case. Dominion specialists copied camera files, verified timestamps, interviewed servants, and recovered deleted messages from the family’s phones. The evidence showed cruelty extending beyond one violent afternoon. Scarlett and Summer had lived under years of calculated pressure.
Scarlett turned away from the screen. She had endured insults because fighting every battle might have cost her control of the company. She had tolerated Stephen’s manipulation because some part of her still remembered the father she once wanted him to be. That last fragment of loyalty died beside the image of a stolen inhaler.
Inside the observation room, Summer began to wake. Connor entered first, uncertain whether the child would fear him after seeing the violence at the house. Instead, she reached for his hand before her eyes had fully opened. The simple gesture made every ruthless plan inside him fall silent.
Summer asked whether he was going away now that she was safe. Connor pulled a chair to her bedside and promised he would remain as long as she wanted him. She reminded him that he had already missed four years. He accepted the accusation with a solemn nod and promised not to miss the next four.
Scarlett watched father and daughter together, relief softening the suspicion that surrounded Connor’s secrets. Whatever else he concealed, his devotion to Summer was becoming impossible to doubt. The child asked him to stay until she fell asleep. Connor agreed as though she had assigned him the most important duty in the world.
Across the city, Stephen turned Hayes headquarters into a fortress of a different kind. He summoned the board and claimed Scarlett had suffered a breakdown, attacked her sister, and abandoned her executive responsibilities. The company’s losses, he argued, required immediate leadership. He proposed removing her before scandal destroyed what remained.
Danielle attended with makeup hiding Connor’s grip marks and a bandage displayed prominently across her cheek. She told directors that Scarlett’s unstable behavior endangered employees and investors. Her mother supported every lie with carefully rehearsed concern. None of them mentioned the child recovering in a hospital.
Stephen also reopened negotiations with Bennett Whitmore. The Whitmore family had the liquidity Hayes Group desperately needed, but Bennett had never offered money without control. He still wanted Scarlett, both as a social prize and as a path to the assets inherited from her mother. Her sudden marriage merely added an obstacle.
Bennett studied a photograph of Connor in work clothes and laughed. A drifting truck driver could be removed through money, humiliation, or force. He told Stephen the investment remained possible if Scarlett was separated from her husband and compelled to honor the original engagement. Stephen readily agreed to sacrifice his daughter again.
At the hospital, Scarlett’s assistant arrived with the emergency board notice. Unless Scarlett appeared the following morning, the directors would vote to remove her permanently. The documents also challenged her control over properties left by her mother. Stephen had chosen the moment when both she and Summer were most vulnerable.
Connor read the notice and offered to make the meeting disappear. Scarlett refused. She had spent years building the company while Stephen drained it, and surrender would reward everything he had done. More importantly, her mother’s legacy belonged to Summer one day.
She intended to attend despite her injuries. Connor objected that she could barely stand without pain. Scarlett answered that strength was not the absence of pain; it was deciding something mattered more. The words reminded Connor why she had survived four years without him.
He agreed to accompany her, though Scarlett warned him not to threaten the board with armed men. Connor accepted the condition with suspicious ease. He could protect her without revealing every weapon at his disposal. A room full of executives was merely another battlefield with cleaner floors.
Summer woke again and heard enough to understand her mother was leaving for an important fight. She asked Connor to make certain no one hit Scarlett this time. He promised that anyone who tried would answer to him. The certainty in his voice soothed Summer but unsettled Scarlett.
Connor arranged trusted doctors and Dominion guards outside the child’s room. To Summer, he described them as friends who would keep her company. To the operatives, he gave orders with no gentleness at all. Nothing and no one would approach his daughter without verification.
Scarlett opened the final page of the board notice and saw the true scope of Stephen’s attack. If the vote passed, she would lose her position, her mother’s shares, and the company she had sacrificed years to protect. She looked toward Connor for reassurance, but his gaze had fixed on one name at the bottom of the document: Bennett Whitmore was attending as the company’s proposed savior. The man Scarlett once rejected was returning with enough money to purchase her future.
