Chapter 6 - MAYA FIRED HERSELF FIRST
The first person Maya removed from power was not Victoria.
Not Edmund.
Herself.
At the next board meeting, she proposed an independent interim CEO.
The room froze.
Victoria laughed.
“You walked in here claiming control and now you don’t even want to run it?”
“Correct.”
“That’s weakness.”
Maya looked at Amelia Grant.
“Is it?”
Amelia answered:
“No.”
Maya had interviewed six candidates.
Selected Daniel Reyes, fifty-five, former COO of a major infrastructure company.
No family tie.
No Cross loyalty.
No Sterling connection.
Professional.
Boring.
Exactly what Cross Global needed.
The board approved him.
Then Maya established a special committee excluding directors under investigation.
Edmund objected.
Maya voted him out as chair pending findings.
Victoria was removed from all committee leadership.
Not fired from the company entirely yet.
Due process.
Contracts.
Evidence.
She hated that more.
“You’re humiliating my father.”
Maya answered:
“No.”
“I’m limiting authority while allegations are investigated.”
Victoria sneered.
“You learned corporate language fast.”
“I had good teachers.”
Then Maya did something nobody expected.
She addressed the atrium incident.
All security staff involved were interviewed.
Two guards said Victoria directly ordered force.
One admitted he knew the courier had not threatened anyone.
Maya could have fired them instantly.
Instead, the company reviewed policy.
The guards were suspended pending outcome.
Marcus Bell accepted responsibility for a culture where executive preference overrode procedure.
He offered his resignation.
Maya refused it initially.
“Why?”
“Because leaving is easy.”
He stared.
“Fix the system.”
New policy:
No executive could override security use-of-force standards.
Couriers had protected escalation procedures.
Contract staff received direct complaint channels.
Security incidents involving senior executives automatically triggered outside review.
Victoria called it theater.
Maya said:
“No.”
“The theater was you doing it in front of fifty investors.”
Then the audit reached Vantage Succession Partners.
Victoria’s firm.
The $1.8 million in fees included charges for:
executive recruitment.
transition planning.
public-relations strategy.
shareholder messaging.
Some work was real.
Some grotesquely conflicted.
One invoice dated three days before the presumed-death petition:
Narrative preparation — founder succession / absent heir contingency.
Maya stared.
“They billed us to plan what story to tell after declaring me dead?”
Rachel nodded.
“Apparently.”
Then the company’s PR team produced drafts.
One headline:
CROSS GLOBAL ENTERS NEW ERA UNDER STERLING LEADERSHIP
Another:
TRAGEDY CLOSES FINAL CHAPTER OF CROSS FAMILY CONTROL
Maya laughed.
Coldly.
They had written her obituary before the legal petition finished.
Then came a personal file.
A profile of Maya.
Prepared by Victoria’s firm.
Behavioral risks: emotionally avoidant, anti-status, resistant to inheritance, likely to accept cash exit if confronted publicly.
Maya stared.
Victoria had studied her.
Predicted her.
Even the atrium humiliation may not have been planned for Maya specifically.
But humiliation itself was part of Victoria’s operating method.
Break people publicly.
Make compliance feel like relief.
Maya understood now.
The board coup and the lobby cruelty came from the same belief:
People without visible power do not count.
So Maya made one more decision.
She reinstated anonymous employee surveys Nathan had cancelled years earlier.
Then published aggregated results to the board.
The first survey devastated her.
Cross Global employees described:
fear.
retaliation.
nepotism.
executive arrogance.
Maya looked at her father’s portrait in the boardroom.
This was not all Sterling.
Some belonged to Nathan.
Her father had built a company where power accumulated too high.
Then left her fifty-one percent to fix something he helped create.
That was harder to admit.
May you like
Better.
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