FORTY-NINE PERCENT

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT FORTY SECONDS LOOKED LIKE

(Glory's POV)

Nobody answered her question.

The grey-suit man looked at his papers. Two other lawyers shifted in their seats. Jude's hands were flat on the table and very still, the way hands go still when the person attached to them is trying hard not to move.

Thaddeus held out his hand without breaking eye contact with Glory.

"Give me that document," he said.

One of his lawyers slid a copy toward him. He opened it to page four. He read.

The room was so quiet that Glory could hear the air conditioning.

Forty seconds. She counted.

Then Thaddeus closed the folder.

"This merger proposal is void," he said.

The grey-suit man's head snapped up. "Sir, we've been in negotiations for..."

"It's void." Thaddeus said it the same way someone says the sky is blue. No argument in it, just fact. "Draft a new acquisition offer. Three times current market valuation. Ms. Mensah is listed as an executive officer with full operational authority over the supply division."

Jude's mouth opened.

Thaddeus looked at him once.

Jude's mouth closed.

One of the lawyers on Glory's side of the table leaned toward her. "Ms. Mensah, did you know he was going to..."

"No," she said quietly.

Because she hadn't. She had come into this room ready to fight for every inch of what she built, ready to argue co-founder rights and pack corporate law until every person in this building was tired of hearing her name. She had not come here expecting someone to burn down his own proposal in forty seconds on her behalf.

Her wolf stirred.

Down, she told it.

Thaddeus was already speaking to his legal team, low and direct, handing the folder back and pointing at specific clauses. He had the focused energy of someone who made decisions the way other people breathed, without drama, without pause, just clean and sure.

Glory watched him and thought: I do not know what this is yet.

"Ms. Mensah." His voice came to her across the table and she met his eyes. "My team will have a revised offer to your attorney by the end of business today. You have whatever time you need to review it."

"Seventy-two hours," she said.

"Take what you need."

She stood and gathered her papers. Jude's chair scraped back.

"Glory, wait..."

"Not here," she said, without looking at him. "Not in front of these people."

She walked out with her back straight and her papers under her arm, and she did not look back at the boardroom, not at the lawyers, not at Jude.

And not at Thaddeus, even though some part of her, the part she kept behind locked doors, wanted to.

She was in the elevator, alone, when her legs decided they were done pretending.

She pressed her back against the elevator wall and breathed through her nose. The papers crinkled against her ribs. She looked up at the ceiling light.

Four months.

Jude had signed that paper four months ago. He had sat across from her at their shared office desk, eaten lunch with her in the break room, asked for her opinion on the Rothmere contract, and said nothing. Smiled at her like everything was normal. Let her wolf carry something she didn't even know had already been cut away.

The elevator doors opened in the lobby.

Glory straightened up, put her face back together, and walked out into the cold afternoon air.

She sat in her car for three minutes. Not crying. Just sitting.

Then she called Penda.

"He killed the merger," she said.

"I heard. My contact in the building just messaged me." Penda's voice was careful. "Glory. Thaddeus Holdings is worth nine billion dollars. He just threw away a prepared merger deal in under an hour. That does not happen."

"I know."

"Do you know why he did it?"

Glory looked at the building through her windshield, at the glass and steel and clean lines of it.

"Not yet," she said.

"Are you going to find out?"

She put the car in gear.

"I have seventy-two hours to decide if I'm signing his offer. I'll figure out his reasons before I sign anything." She pulled out of the parking space. "What else do you have on mate bond dissolution?"

Penda exhaled. "The provision Jude used is legitimate but it's rarely invoked because it carries a condition. The rejecting party cannot enter any new bonding contract for eighteen months after filing, no exceptions. It's meant to prevent people from using it as a quick exit into a new bond."

"So Jude can't form a new mate bond for eighteen months."

"Correct. And there's one more thing." A pause. "The provision doesn't fully sever the bond on the other party's side. It removes the legal and pack-recognized status of the bond, but the biological connection, the wolfish part, doesn't just disappear because of a signature. It fades over time. But for now..." Penda stopped.

"For now, what?"

"You would still feel it, Glory. At some level. You would still know."

Glory's hands tightened on the wheel.

She had known. She just hadn't known she knew.

"Send me everything," she said. "Every case where this provision was challenged. Every loophole. Every exception. Send it tonight."

"Glory..."

"I'm not falling apart, Penda. I'm building a case." She turned onto the main road. "There's a difference."

She hung up.

The road ahead was straight and long, and the city moved around her like it did not know that everything had just changed.

Her phone buzzed on the seat beside her.

She glanced at the screen.

The message was from a number she didn't have saved. But the words underneath it made her pull the car to the side of the road.

It read: "The merger was never about your company. Ask Jude who told him about Provision 7(c)."

Glory stared at the screen.

Then she looked up slowly, back toward the Thaddeus Holdings building still visible in her rearview mirror.

Her heart was beating in a way she had not planned for.