FORTY-NINE PERCENT

CHAPTER FIVE: THE THING HIS WOLF ALREADY KNEW

(Thaddeus's POV)

He had known the moment she walked through the door.

Not the boardroom door, not on that first day, but in his memory, the way a man knows a thing before he can explain it. He had reviewed Havilah Supply Co.'s file seventeen months ago. Not because anyone asked him to, but because a small company with no Alpha backing and no pack rank advantage was outperforming every regional competitor and nobody in the industry was talking about it. What this means is that either the numbers were fake or someone was doing something remarkable and keeping it quiet.

The numbers were not fake.

He had read the operational reports three times. The routing efficiency. The vendor network. The contract renewal rates. The way every supply route in the file showed signs of someone who understood relationships, not just logistics. Someone who knew that the woman running the Crestfield depot had a sick mother and needed Tuesdays free, so they scheduled her runs on Wednesdays. Someone who knew that the Omega vendor in the southern territory would only do business with people who paid on the same day the invoice landed, so they set up automatic same-day transfers.

That kind of detail did not come from a system. It came from a person.

He had looked at the co-founder breakdown. Jude Mensah, fifty-one percent. Glory Mensah, forty-nine percent. He had looked at Jude's profile, solid, unremarkable. Then he had looked at the operational notes and understood immediately that the person doing the actual work was not the one with fifty-one percent.

He had not done anything with that information. It was not his business to interfere in someone else's company structure.

And then the group had started moving.

He was standing now at the window of his office, watching the city, replaying the morning's meeting the way he had been replaying it since she left.

"You needed me to come to that meeting."

She had said it without accusation, just arriving at the truth the way someone arrives at a destination they've been walking toward without a map.

Yes, he had needed her. But not only for the legal reason he had given her.

He had needed to see if she was what her files said she was.

She was more.

His wolf had known it the instant she walked into the boardroom last week. A recognition that moved through him like something physical, hitting him in the chest and settling there warm and certain. He had tightened his jaw and held it still because he was in a boardroom full of legal professionals and he was not a man who let his wolf run his face.

But the recognition had not gone anywhere. It sat in him constantly, a steady low pull in the direction of wherever she was in the building, and now that she was going to be in his building every day, he was going to have to be very, very disciplined.

His intercom clicked.

"Mr. Thaddeus." Mirabel's voice. "Jude Mensah is on line two. He says it's urgent."

Thaddeus turned from the window. "Put him through."

A click.

"Jude."

"I need to talk to you about the consortium contact." Jude's voice was tight. "The anonymous one who told me about the provision."

"I know who it was."

Silence.

"You know?" Jude said.

"I have known for six weeks." Thaddeus sat down at his desk. "A paralegal named Reeves who was embedded in my legal team. He fed the consortium everything about the acquisition timeline. He was the one who walked you through the provision because the consortium needed the mate bond dissolved before the acquisition was finalized, so they could use the dissolution as evidence of a compromised ownership structure."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you were already scared and scared people act unpredictably. I needed you to stay still long enough for me to get the acquisition paperwork corrected from the inside." He paused. "I underestimated how fast you would move."

A long silence.

"She found out this morning," Jude said. "About the contact. I told her I think I know who it was. She's going to want everything."

"She already has most of it."

Another silence.

"Thaddeus," Jude said carefully. "What exactly did you tell her in there?"

"The truth."

"How much of it?"

Thaddeus looked at the notebook still on his conference table. He had not moved it.

"Enough," he said.

"She's going to want to know why you've been watching her company for seventeen months."

"I know."

"And what are you going to tell her?"

Thaddeus was quiet. Outside, the city moved in its usual indifferent way, traffic and clouds and the distant glitter of pack towers catching light.

"I am going to tell her," he said slowly, "that I funded the Omega Rights Reform Act because I was tired of watching people like her build something from nothing and then get it taken away by a system that was never designed to let them keep it."

Jude exhaled. "And the other part?"

Thaddeus picked up his pen and set it back down.

"There is no other part yet," he said. "There is only work."

"Thaddeus, your wolf..."

"Is not the conversation we are having right now."

"It's the conversation it's going to force eventually. The recognition already happened, didn't it? In the boardroom last week. Your assistant told me you didn't eat for two days after."

Thaddeus's hand went very still on the desk.

"Mirabel," he said under his breath, "needs to stop talking to you."

"She's worried about you. So am I, for whatever that's worth right now." Jude's voice went quieter. "She deserves to know, Thaddeus. Not everything, not yet. But she deserves to know she's not standing in this alone."

"She is not standing in it alone. I made that clear."

"Did you make it clear, or did you give her contract clauses and strategic information and call it enough?"

Thaddeus looked at the ceiling.

He did not answer that question.

"She called you," Jude said. "She's heading back to the building. She says she has an idea about the consortium filing."

Thaddeus sat forward. "What idea?"

"She didn't say. She just told me to tell you not to accept any settlement calls before she got there."

He was already reaching for his jacket.

"She said one more thing," Jude added.

"What?"

A pause, and Thaddeus could hear the smallest thread of something in Jude's voice, not amusement exactly, more like a man who is watching something large and inevitable rolling toward him and has made his peace with it.

"She said to have coffee ready," Jude said. "She said she takes it without sugar, and if your assistant gets it wrong she's making it herself."

Thaddeus stood up.

His wolf was not sitting still.

His wolf had not sat still since last Tuesday and it was getting less patient by the hour.

He pressed the intercom. "Mirabel."

"Yes?"

"Coffee…Two cups. Glory Mensah takes hers without sugar."

A pause that lasted slightly longer than necessary.

"Of course," Mirabel said, and if there was a smile in her voice, she hid it almost completely.

Thaddeus picked up the consortium's filing from his desk and read through it one more time while he waited.

Page seven, there it was. They had used the mate bond dissolution date to argue that Glory's position in the company had been deliberately restructured to deceive regulatory review, and that the restructuring formed the basis of the entire Havilah acquisition.

It was a good argument. Technically sound. The kind of thing a very expensive legal team built over months of careful preparation.

But it had one hole.

And he had a feeling, a very specific feeling that had been building since Tuesday, that Glory Mensah had already found it.

The elevator down the hall chimed.

He straightened his jacket.

Her footsteps were already in the corridor.