FORTY-NINE PERCENT

CHAPTER THREE: EVERYTHING JUDE SAID

(Glory's POV)

Jude was already at the office when she got there the next morning.

He was sitting in the chair across from her desk with his hands between his knees, the way he used to sit when they first started Havilah and the rent was due and the accounts were empty. Like a man waiting for something unavoidable.

Glory walked in, set her bag on her desk, sat down, and looked at him.

"Talk," she said.

He breathed out slowly. "I know you're angry."

"I said talk, Jude. Please do not tell me what I am."

He nodded. His eyes were red at the edges. Jude had never been a crier but he looked like he had come close recently.

"The acquisition," he began, "Thaddeus had been circling Havilah for almost a year. I knew. I didn't tell you because I was trying to find a way to block it, and then I realized I couldn't block it, and then I started looking at what would happen if it went through."

"And what did you find?"

"That they would challenge your stake." His voice dropped. "Pack corporate attorneys, the ones the big consortiums use, dig through ownership histories. They find things to argue about. And your forty-nine percent, they would have argued it was inflated because of the mate bond. They would have said you leveraged a dormant bond claim to secure your position in the company."

Glory's jaw tightened. "That is not what happened."

"I know that." He leaned forward. "But they don't need it to be true. They just need it to be arguable. And once it became a pack legal matter, your Omega status would have been used against you at every step. You know how those proceedings go."

She did know. That was the worst part. She knew exactly how those proceedings went.

"So your solution," she said slowly, "was to reject the mate bond without telling me."

"If the bond didn't exist legally, they had nothing to argue. Your stake would stand on pure business merit."

"Jude." Her voice was very quiet. "You made a legal decision about my body and my wolf without asking me."

He flinched. It was small, but she saw it.

"I was trying to protect you."

"By signing a paper that erased something that was mine." She pressed two fingers to the desk surface. "I would have fought it. I fight everything. That is the one thing about me that has never changed since the day we opened this company."

"I know," he said. "That is exactly why I didn't tell you. Because you would have fought and they would have used every dirty tool they had against you and I was..." He stopped. He pressed his hands flat on his knees. "I was afraid of what you would have to survive."

The room was quiet for a long moment.

Glory looked at him, this man she had built something real with, this person who had eaten her terrible first-year cooking during late nights at the warehouse and never once complained, who had believed in her business plan when it was still just notebook paper. Who had also, apparently, been making decisions about her life without her permission.

"You should have told me," she said.

"Yes."

"You should have trusted me."

"Yes." His voice broke slightly on that one. "I know."

She stood up.

He started to rise. "Glory..."

"I'm not done being angry," she said. "And you don't get to hurry that along by looking sorry." She picked up her bag. "I'm accepting Thaddeus's offer."

His head came up sharply. "Glory, you don't know what he wants. You don't know why he..."

"Then I'll go find out." She moved toward the door. "You should also know that someone sent me a message last night telling me to ask you who told you about Provision 7(c). So before I walk out of here, I want that answer."

Jude went very still.

"Who told you that provision existed, Jude? Because I looked it up last night. It is not common knowledge. Most pack attorneys have never even cited it. Somebody had to tell you it was there."

He looked at the window. His throat moved.

"Answer me," she said.

"It was a legal contact," he said. "Someone who reached out anonymously. They said they were trying to help. They explained the provision, walked me through the process, and told me it was the fastest way to protect your position before the acquisition landed."

"And you trusted an anonymous contact."

"They knew things about Havilah that only someone close to the deal would know. I thought they were on our side."

Glory's hand rested on the door frame.

"Somebody walked you into using that provision, Jude," she said. "And that same acquisition then showed up on my desk with my name listed as a minor stakeholder. Does that sound like someone who was trying to help us?"

The color drained out of his face.

She left before he could answer, because the expression on his face told her the answer was already landing, and watching it hurt him was not something she had energy for right now.

She had a building to walk into.

She had an offer to review.

And she had a question she had not yet asked: why did the most feared Alpha in the territory send her that message from an unsaved number the same afternoon he killed his own merger deal?

She got in her car.

Her phone screen lit up on the seat.

A new message from the same unknown number.

It read: "Lobby. 8 a.m. Monday. Bring the original notebook."

She read it twice.

Nobody knew about the notebook. She had never told anyone about the notebook.

Nobody except Jude.