Ms. CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death – Episode 45
Connor faced the press without security around him. He admitted authorizing operations under Vale and named the civilians killed by those decisions. He offered records to investigators and promised no immunity had been requested.
Reporters expected denial or justification. Connor gave neither. He explained that believing a weapon could create peace had allowed him to treat distant lives as numbers.
Dominion shares fell faster with every sentence. Directors accused him of destroying the company to save his conscience. Connor replied that a company dependent on concealed graves had already destroyed itself.
Vale released a response portraying the confession as proof of Connor’s instability. He claimed Vanguard represented disciplined progress rather than emotional surrender. Yet former Dominion employees began challenging him publicly.
One engineer described Vale overriding evacuation warnings. Another produced handwritten notes showing Connor ordered illegal testing stopped. Their testimony did not erase Connor’s actions, but it broke Vale’s simple story.
Authorities permitted Connor to remain free while cooperating. He returned home prepared for Summer to fear him. Instead, she asked whether saying sorry fixed everything.
Connor said it did not. An apology began the work, while changed behavior had to continue afterward. Summer considered this and made him promise never to build a machine that chose people to hurt.
He recorded that promise in her watch beside the one about coming home. Scarlett understood that the small device had become their family’s archive of truth. Summer trusted what she could replay.
At Asterion, the former employee met Scarlett under protection. Dr. Mara Chen had worked with Evelyn on an emergency-navigation safeguard. They called it Constellation because no single point controlled the whole system.
Constellation allowed civilian nodes to vote against corrupted guidance commands. If enough hospitals, rescue networks, and public systems rejected a target, Aegis could not direct a weapon toward it. Evelyn designed protection as collective consent.
Vale considered the protocol a defect and ordered it removed. Evelyn hid fragments inside ordinary rescue software before leaving the project. The star diagram mapped those fragments.
Scarlett asked why no one had activated it during Cross’s attack. Chen explained that the visible Aegis core contained only Guardian. Constellation required a deeper authentication sequence that Evelyn never disclosed.
Cypher compared the diagram with data from the recent drone failure. Summer’s repaired watch had logged brief pulses from every affected rescue node. The signal formed the same constellation pattern.
Summer had noticed that her watch displayed stars whenever the news drones crashed. She assumed Richard’s repair had added a game. In reality, its emergency beacon had responded to dormant Aegis nodes.
Connor praised her observation without turning the discovery into a burden. Summer asked if the stars could help people. Scarlett said her grandmother had created them for exactly that reason.
The activation map pointed to three required credentials. Scarlett’s biometric signature controlled the civilian network, while Dominion’s original founder key governed the defense layer. Connor still possessed that physical key.
The third credential was hidden behind a symbol belonging to Vale. Constellation required authorization from every original architect, preventing one creator from controlling it alone. Evelyn had built trust into its structure.
Vale contacted them before Cypher finished the analysis. He knew they had found Constellation and offered his authorization in exchange for Connor’s founder key and public surrender of Dominion.
Connor rejected the trade. Vale warned that the next Vanguard demonstration would use a live metropolitan grid. Without the third credential, Scarlett would watch her mother’s safeguard remain silent.
After the call, Scarlett examined Evelyn’s inventory again. One line referenced a duplicate authorization held in trust under an old Reed Foundation account. Richard had possessed the missing piece for twelve years.
