From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 475: You need to see this

"You need to see this."

Micheal receive the file and open it the contents made him feel small as he was unable to get this information but happy.

The file sat on Michael’s desk like a weapon that had already discharged.

Michael had not slept. He had read through it three times since it arrived at 3:47 in the morning, moving from screen to printed pages to the encrypted backup on his private tablet, as if seeing it in different formats would make it more real. Or less dangerous.

Photographs. Purchase records. Medical registrations. Winnie’s field report. Luna’s identity cross-referenced against industry databases. A five-month-old child with no father listed. A family that visited daily with baby supplies. And Dayo the man who had built a $2.5 billion empire in silence, who had returned to the industry like a conqueror, who had never made a single public misstep hiding a daughter in a mid-rise apartment while the world believed he was merely focused.

Michael set the tablet down and walked to the window. The city below was still dark, the lights sparse in the hour before dawn. He had been standing here for years, looking down at this same view, believing that he was the one who controlled what happened in the spaces between these buildings. He had spent years trying to prove that belief. Years of hiring investigators who found nothing. Years of planting sources who reported back with gossip rather than leverage. Years of watching Dayo move through the industry like a man who could see around corners, while Michael stood in the same spot collecting rumors that evaporated the moment he tried to use them.

And now Silas had handed him everything in a single morning.

Michael felt the old hatred rise in his throat, bitter and familiar. Silas and the other three had always treated him like an intern running errands for adults who had already made the real decisions. They gave him instructions, expected compliance, and never shared the full picture. Michael had accepted it because he had no choice. Because the structure they controlled was the only structure that had allowed him to build anything. But he had never stopped resenting it. And he had never stopped conducting his own small, private investigations on the side — whispered questions to industry insiders, careful analysis of Dayo’s release patterns, quiet conversations with data analysts who owed him favors. Nothing that could be traced back to him. Nothing that risked the four discovering he was asking questions they had not authorized.

He wanted to know what Dayo used. Not for them. For himself.

Because Michael had seen the same thing Silas had seen. The impossibility of Dayo’s timing. The precision that did not align with any known strategy. The way every decision landed exactly where it needed to, as if Dayo were reading a script that no one else had access to. Thjs was the reason for them to look Dayo’s way. Michael had spent years trying to find that script. And now the four were asking him to simply walk up to Dayo and demand it.

His phone rang.

The number was blocked, but the pattern of the ring told him everything. The four did not wait for convenient hours. They called when they had something to say, and they expected him to be awake and ready.

Michael answered.

"You have seen the file," the voice said. Graham. Michael recognized the deliberate pace, the voice that treated every conversation like a deposition.

"I have."

"Good. This is what you are going to do. You will contact Dayo. You will arrange a private meeting. And you will make him understand that the world does not need to know about his daughter if he tells us what he uses."

Michael held the phone against his ear and stared at his own reflection in the dark window. He kept his voice flat, controlled, the tone of a man who was processing instructions rather than calculating how to subvert them he knew they knew but his reflex refuse to let him accept that he would get what Dayo is using and submit it to them.

"What he uses?" he asked.

"Do not play stupid, Michael," Graham said, and there was a warning in the words. "The man has no background in strategy. No formal training. No family connections when he started. And yet everything he touches becomes a hit. The timing is impossible. The precision is impossible. He has something — a system, a formula, a method — and we want it. Use the child as leverage. Make him give us the secret behind his success, or we bury his perfect image under a scandal he cannot control."

Michael nodded at his own reflection, as if Graham could see him through the line. "And if he refuses?"

"Then you have failed," Graham said. The words carried no emotion. Just finality. "And if you fail, Michael, you are no longer useful to us. You spent years chasing him with nothing to show. Now we hand you proof, and a direct path. Succeed, and you keep your position. Fail, and we find someone who can do what you cannot."

Michael felt the familiar cold spread through his chest. It was the same threat they had always used, the same leverage that kept him running their errands while they sat above him pulling strings. But this time, mixed with the fear, was something sharper. An opportunity he had not expected.

They wanted him to extract Dayo’s secret and bring it back to them.

But Michael had his own plans for whatever Dayo revealed.

"Understood," Michael said, and his voice carried exactly the right amount of submission. "I will arrange the meeting. I will get the information."

"Do not contact us again until you have it," Graham said. "We will reach out when we expect results."

The line went dead.

Michael stood in his penthouse with the phone still pressed to his ear, listening to the silence that followed. He lowered it slowly and walked back to his desk, picking up the tablet with the file still open on the screen. He looked at the photograph of Luna holding her child in a window, the image captured from a distance by a lens she had never noticed. He looked at the birth record with the empty space where the father’s name should have been. He looked at the evidence that proved Dayo was human after all, vulnerable, hiding something that could undo everything he had built.

Michael smiled. It was not a warm expression. It was the smile of a man who had spent years being treated as a servant by people who believed he had no ambitions of his own. They had given him the weapon. They had told him where to point it. And they expected him to return with the prize like a loyal dog.

But Michael had been conducting his own investigations for years. Small ones. Quiet ones. Digging in the margins where they did not bother to look. He understood Dayo’s patterns better than they realized. And if he could get Dayo to reveal what made him different — the system, the formula, the impossible precision — Michael would not simply hand it over to the four bosses who treated him like an errand boy.

He would study it. He would learn it. And he would decide whether to share it with them at all.

The fear was still there. It always would be. The four were too powerful to challenge directly. But for the first time in the long, degrading history of his relationship with them, Michael held something they wanted. And that changed the equation. It did not make him equal. But it made him necessary. And necessity was the closest thing to power he had ever had.

He sat down at his desk and began to compose a message. Not to Dayo. Not yet. First, he needed to think about how to approach him. How to make the threat feel real without making Dayo desperate enough to destroy everything rather than negotiate. How to find the pressure point that would make a billionaire with a secret child decide that sharing his magic was better than watching his family become tabloid headlines.

Michael typed a single line into his private notes, a reminder to himself of what he was really after.

What does he use?

The question that Silas had spent months trying to answer with surveillance and data. The question that Michael had spent years chasing with rumors and failed investigations. The question that the four bosses believed they could extract through blackmail.

And now, the question that Michael intended to answer for himself.

He deleted the note and sat back in his chair, waiting for the sun to rise. The city outside his window would wake soon. People would move through their lives without knowing that in a penthouse high above them, a man was preparing to use a child as leverage in a war that had nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the power the child’s father had refused to share.

Michael picked up his glass and finished the bourbon that had gone warm while he read the file. The liquid tasted like the future. Bitter, uncertain, and finally for the first time in years something he could shape.

He would meet Dayo. He would make the offer. And whatever Dayo gave him, Michael would decide who truly deserved to receive it.