FORTY-NINE PERCENT

CHAPTER FOUR: THE FIRST MORNING

(Glory's POV)

She brought the notebook.

It was battered and soft from years of handling, the cover warped slightly at the corner, the original business plan still legible on the inside pages in her own handwriting from six years ago. She had kept it in the bottom drawer of her home desk, under a folder of old contracts.

She walked into the Thaddeus Holdings lobby at eight a.m. on Monday with the notebook in her bag and her face arranged into something neutral, and the receptionist who had looked at her like she was lost last week greeted her by name and pointed her toward the elevators.

Mirabel was waiting at the top floor.

She was a small, sharp-eyed woman with a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other, and she handed the coffee to Glory before saying a word.

"He is already in the conference room," Mirabel said. "He asked me to give you these before you go in." She held out a thin folder.

Glory opened it.

It was her own employment agreement. Executive Director, Supply Operations, Thaddeus Holdings. Her name at the top, her title in full, her operational authority over the absorbed supply division detailed across three pages.

On the last page, in the signature line, his name was already there.

He had signed before she arrived.

She closed the folder. "Where is the conference room?"

Mirabel led her down the hall and pushed open a door.

Thaddeus was standing at the window with his back to the room, a phone against his ear. He said two words into it, then ended the call, and turned.

He was taller up close than he had seemed across the boardroom table. Not in a way that was meant to intimidate. Just a fact of him, like the stillness was a fact of him and the careful way his eyes moved was a fact of him.

"Ms. Mensah," he said.

"Mr. Thaddeus."

"Thaddeus is fine." He gestured to the table and they both sat, across from each other. "Did you review the offer?"

"I did."

"Questions?"

"A few." She set the folder on the table. "The operational authority clause gives me full control over routing, vendor selection, and contract renewal. But it also requires approval from your board for any single contract over two million."

"Correct."

"I want that threshold raised to five million."

A pause. "Five?"

"My largest current contract is three point eight. If I need board approval every time I negotiate a renewal, I lose response time. In the supply world, response time is the product."

He considered this for exactly three seconds. "Done."

She moved to the next page. "The retention clause locks me in for thirty-six months."

"Also correct."

"I want the right to renegotiate my equity position at the eighteen-month mark based on performance."

His eyes were steady on her face. "What metric?"

"Revenue growth against the projected baseline your team sets at signing. If I beat it by more than twenty percent, we will renegotiate."

Another pause, longer this time. He was not hesitating, she realized. He was thinking, really thinking, which was different.

"Twenty-five percent," he said. "And the baseline projection gets set by your team, not mine."

She looked at him.

"You know your operation better than my analysts do," he said simply. "It should be your number."

She wrote nothing down. She just kept looking at him.

"The message," she said. "The one you sent me. The first one."

He did not pretend not to know what she meant. "Yes."

"You told me to ask Jude who gave him Provision 7(c)."

"Yes."

"You knew about the provision before Jude used it."

"Yes."

"How?"

He rested his forearms on the table. "Because the anonymous contact who told Jude about it was not trying to help you. They were working for the consortium that is now preparing to challenge my company's structure. Using that provision to remove the mate bond gave them a legal angle they planned to use later, not to protect your stake, but to argue that the ownership transfer into my acquisition was tainted by prior manipulation of your legal status."

The air in the room felt different.

"They used Jude," she said.

"He was easy to use. He was already afraid for you and he trusted the first person who offered him a solution."

"And the merger documents listing me as a minor stakeholder."

"Were drafted by people the consortium had already placed inside my legal team." His voice was flat and even. "I found out two days before you walked into that room. I could not address it without tipping them off that I knew. So I let you walk in, and when you placed that document on the table, I had grounds to void the proposal immediately without anyone being able to argue I had acted without cause."

Glory sat back.

Outside the window, the city was grey and bright at the same time, one of those mornings where the clouds can't decide.

"You needed me to come to that meeting," she said.

"I needed you to come to that meeting."

"And if I hadn't?"

"I would have avoided it anyway. But it would have looked like a unilateral decision and they would have challenged it within twenty-four hours." He paused. "You showing up made it undeniable."

She pulled the notebook out of her bag and set it on the table between them.

His eyes dropped to it, then came back to her face.

"Nobody knows about this notebook," she said carefully. "Not the board. Not the press. Not anyone I work with. So I need you to tell me how you knew to put it in that message."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "Because I have known about Havilah Supply Co. for longer than you think. And I have known about you for longer than you are comfortable with right now."

She held his gaze.

Her wolf was not still anymore.

Her wolf was paying very close attention to a man who had just said the most unsettling, honest thing anyone had said to her in years, and the worst part was that her wolf did not think it was a threat.

"How long?" she asked.

He opened his mouth to answer.

And his office phone rang.

He glanced at it. Something moved across his face, the first real crack in that composure she had watched all morning.

"I need to take this," he said. "I'm sorry."

He picked it up. "Thaddeus."

His expression changed completely. Gone was the careful, measured man. What replaced it was something harder, colder.

"When?" he said.

A pause.

"Don't let them file it. Not yet. I need one hour." He looked at Glory directly as he said the next words. "And call Mirabel. Tell her to cancel everything."

He hung up.

"What happened?" she asked.

He stood, buttoning his jacket with one smooth motion.

"It appears," he said, "that the consortium filed their challenge this morning. They are not waiting for the acquisition to finalize. They are moving now." He picked up his phone. "And the grounds they are using are built entirely on your mate bond documentation."

Glory was on her feet before the sentence finished.

"Then we are going to fight it," she said.

He looked at her with an expression she could not fully read.

It was not a surprise. It was something older than surprise.

"Yes," he said quietly. "We are."

And neither of them moved for a moment, standing across that table with the old notebook between them and something new and wordless filling up the space, and Glory thought: whatever this is, it is not small.

Her phone buzzed.

She looked at the screen.

It was Jude.

The message read: "I just got served with alliance papers. Glory, I think I know who the anonymous contact was. You need to call me right now.”