CHAPTER SIX: THE HOLE IN THEIR ARGUMENT
973 Words
(Thaddeus's POV)
She walked in with a folder under her arm and a look on her face that he was beginning to recognize.
It was the look of someone who had found something and was deciding how to carry it into a room.
"Page seven," she said, setting the folder on his conference table and opening it. "The alliance is arguing that the mate bond dissolution was used to deliberately restructure my ownership position before the acquisition."
"I read it."
"Their argument depends on one thing." She pressed her finger to the page. "They need to prove that Jude knew about the acquisition timeline before he filed the dissolution."
"He did know," Thaddeus said carefully.
"He knew generally. He had heard rumors. But the filing date on the dissolution is four months ago." She looked up. "When did the coup officially begin organizing against your company?"
He paused. "Seven months ago. Internally. Their first external communication wasn't until..."
"Three months and twelve days ago," she said. "I pulled the public group registration records this morning. They didn't file their organizational charter until three months and twelve days ago. Which means at the time Jude filed the dissolution, the partnership did not legally exist as an entity."
He looked at the documents in her folder. Then he looked at her.
"They can't prove intent to deceive," she said, "if the thing they claim Jude was anticipating didn't legally exist when he acted."
The room was quiet.
Thaddeus picked up her folder and read through the documents himself, all of it, slowly, the way he read everything. The consortium charter date. The dissolution filing date. The gap between them was eleven days short of three months.
"Your legal team missed this," she said.
"Yes."
"My attorney found the charter date at eleven last night. I was on the phone with her until two this morning." She pulled out a second sheet. "We also found something else. The paralegal, Reeves. The one working inside your firm."
His eyes came up.
"His bar registration lists a secondary employer," she said, "a consulting firm called Maret Advisory. Maret Advisory is named in the union’s founding documents as a strategic partner."
Thaddeus set the folder down.
"You are telling me," he said slowly, "that the man they planted inside my legal team is documented in their own founding charter."
"Not by name. The firm is. And his bar registration connects him to the firm." She sat down across from him. "It is not a smoking gun. But it is a thread. And if your legal team pulls it properly before Friday's hearing, it creates enough reasonable doubt to get the filing dismissed on procedural grounds."
He sat back.
He had a legal team of forty people. Associates, partners, specialists in pack corporate law and territory regulation, people he paid a significant amount of money to find exactly this kind of thread in exactly this kind of situation.
She had done it in one night.
"Why did you come back?" he asked.
She looked at the question, turning it over for a moment. "Because it's my company they're attacking. The acquisition isn't finalized. Havilah is still part of this fight."
"That is not why you came back."
A pause.
"No," she said. "It is not the only reason."
He waited.
"You signed my employment agreement before I arrived this morning," she said. "Before I agreed to any of the terms. Before I walked through the door." Her eyes were steady on his. "You were not covering yourself. You were telling me something."
"What was I telling you?"
"That you had already decided to trust me before you had any reason to."
The city outside the window was loud and distant and entirely irrelevant.
"Is that what I was doing?" he said.
"Was I wrong?"
He looked at her face, at the careful steadiness in it, at the thing underneath the steadiness that she was managing very precisely, and he thought: no, she was not wrong, and she has not been wrong about a single thing since she walked into a boardroom she was not invited to and placed a document on a table with the calm of someone who had already won.
"No," he said. "You were not wrong."
She nodded, once, like she was filing that away.
"Then here is what I need from you," she said. "Total transparency. If you know something relevant to this fight, I need to know it too. No more strategic information gaps. No more messages from unsaved numbers. If we are doing this, we do it together or not at all."
"Agreed."
"And the notebook."
He met her eyes.
"How do you know about the notebook?" she said. "I need the real answer. Not the careful one."
His wolf pressed forward.
He held it still, just barely.
"I will tell you," he said. "Everything. But not today."
Her jaw tightened slightly. "Why not today?"
"Because today we have a team filing to dismantle and I need your full attention on that, and if I answer that question honestly right now, I am not confident either of us will be focused on work for the rest of the afternoon."
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was very, very full.
She held his gaze for a moment that lasted several seconds longer than necessary.
Then she picked up her pen.
"Fine," she said. "Where do we start?"
He exhaled slowly and reached for the team documents.
But her question was still sitting in the room with them, warm and waiting, and he knew it would still be there when the work was done.
When, he thought. Not if.
And his wolf, for the first time in days, was quiet.
Not because it had given up wanting.
Because it had decided to be patient.
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