13. The Pack Compliance Notice #2
Why does he care? In fact, why is he angry? He barely knows me. We haven’t gotten the privilege to get to know one another…but he’s reacting as if I’m his to protect.
Far better than the men who probably wouldn’t have a backbone to face someone like my Father.
It makes me secretly wonder, if he’s suddenly involved in this, was he involved with the falling of my life at the altar?
I don't call the three men yet.
I make Priya walk every legal alternative to its dead end first, because I refuse to summon them until wanting to is the only option left.
There's no designation-response officer available inside the deadline — the real ones are booked for months. An emergency contractor could file a letter of intent, and the department is under no obligation to honor it. Dropping the services guts the company and sinks the wedding.
Oversight opens my clients' lives, up to and including Sloane's confidential medical planning, to a government that has already decided I'm a hazard.
"They do not," I say, "get to punish me by opening my clients like filing cabinets."
"No," Sawyer agrees. "They don't."
Which leaves the empty fourth line on the support-unit form, and the three names I've spent five years keeping off every document I own.
I make the call.
They arrive fast enough to give themselves away. Cade claims he happened to be on Bellflower Lane. August says nothing at all, which is how I know Cade is lying. Beckett comes through the door, sees Sawyer standing at my shoulder, and goes rigid across the whole width of his back.
I’m coming to realize that Cade really dislikes Sawyer’s existence, Beckett is clearly tolerating it, and August? I actually can’t tell if he’s enjoying the potential of competition.
Then they catch my scent — the sharp hurt of it under the citrus — and the jealousy is as easy to read as all of their scents: Beckett’s Cedar and cold rain rise off him before he pins them down. August's pear and sage go crisp as cut stems. Cade's caramel sours toward smoke.
Not one of them touches me.
"Do you want us here?" Beckett asks.
I hand him the notice.
"Today, yes."
I watch that land in all three of them at once, and I do not have the room in me right now to feel what it does.
They read it shoulder to shoulder, interrupting each other the way they used to over blueprints.
Beckett goes straight at the deadline — travel time, notarization, when the clerk's window opens. August reads the allegations. I watch him find the details my mother knew. I watch him go quiet in the specific way that frightens me more than noise. Cade reads the legal phrasing twice.
"I've seen this shape before," Cade says.
"This is Whitlock House language. It's the clause structure they use to leash contracted Omegas and celebrity staff.
" He sets the page down, careful. "Alistair's not trying to shut you down, Amber.
A closed company he can't touch. He's building a fire you can only walk out of through a door he's holding open. "
"Priya found one door." I put the support-unit form on the table.
Beckett reads the requirement. His frown deepens by a degree. August takes it from him and checks the wording himself, because that is what August does now instead of trusting the room. Cade reads it over August's shoulder.
"Four," Cade says for clarification.
"Not including me," I answer.
The silence that settles is a very particular one. It's the sound of three men who have spent five years believing they are the central catastrophe of my life, discovering that a government form has looked at them and found them numerically insufficient.
Cade opens his mouth.
"You know, I've been insulted by a lot of institutions, but—"
Nobody laughs.
Then, nearly in unison, all three of them turn and look at Sawyer.
He's leaning against the edge of my desk, arms loosely folded, far too composed for a man who has just become the fourth point of a very complicated shape. And I remember what he said yesterday, easy as weather — that his pack was in Honeybell Harbor, that they could help if I got buried.
"You have a pack," I say.
Something moves across his face. Not pain, exactly. Something older, and much better rehearsed.
"I have one on paper."
I wait.
He gives one shoulder a small shrug, as if the answer weighs nothing, while the bourbon in his scent goes quietly darker and says otherwise.
"I haven't been with them in five years."
The room goes still.
Wait…what?
Five years. The same five years I've carried.
The number drops between us and lands with enough weight that, for one full second, I forget there's a government envelope on my desk at all.
Sawyer's smile holds — easy and warm and reaching nowhere near his eyes. For the first time, I see the locked door under all that Charleston charm, because I have the identical one.
I know a fellow architect when I meet one.
Cade starts to ask what happened. August turns his whole body toward Sawyer. Beckett's gaze narrows, and it isn't jealousy anymore.
It's assessment.
"No," I say.
They look at me.
"We have twenty-three hours, an appointment to secure, and a business being held hostage by an envelope. Sawyer's history is not today's emergency."
And frankly, none of them deserve to know something so intimate when they only acknowledge his existence when it comes to their possessive, jealous need to remind him that I “used” to belong to them.
I hold his eyes half a beat longer than the sentence needs, so he understands I am not closing the subject.
I am shelving it.
One crisis at a time. Government discrimination today. Mysterious Southern Alpha with an estranged pack on Thursday, over a drink, assuming any of us still have careers by then.
Priya, brisk, saves us all.
Sawyer qualifies, she says — certified wedding producer, licensed officiant, trained in designation-sensitive ceremony management, formally contracted to the Carroway-Reeve event.
His pack registration counts as a credential, even inactive, which the department will read as stability.
"I'll sign," Sawyer says, before I've asked him to.
The three of them react as one organism.
"Do you understand the legal exposure you'd be accepting?" Beckett asks.
"Why," Cade says, "would a man who met her yesterday sign a government responsibility declaration?"
August's is gentler and lands hardest. "Are you doing this for Paloma's contract, or for her?"
Sawyer looks at the three of them, unbothered.
"Those questions might carry more weight," he says, "if any of you had offered before I did."
That one goes in clean.
Oh this is going to get messy if I don’t interfere.
My heart, and I dare acknowledge my pulsing core, however, are thriving at the obvious intention of an Alpha standing up for me with no questions asked.
"Enough." I stand. "Stop measuring each other's intentions while the building burns. I need an emergency hearing reserved at Town Hall, Dr. Greene's safety confirmation, and this declaration filed before the deadline. That's the whole list."
"Then we walk over together." Sawyer straightens off the desk. "Coordinated matters as much as the paperwork. A department that thinks she's alone should see that she isn't."
"Agreed," Beckett says.
"I hate that I agree with him," Cade says.
"You've agreed with him three times now," August observes.
"Whose side are you on?" He snaps back.
"Amber's," August says. "That was meant to be the point."
Interesting…
Out of the three of them, at least I feel as if one of them is truthfully on my side when they need to be.
I set the rules before anyone's boots hit the cobbles, because I have learned exactly how fast good intentions become a cage.
Nobody speaks for me unless I ask. Nobody calls this romantic. Nobody touches me without permission. Nobody promises an official anything that could permanently rewrite my legal status.
Sawyer signing does not make him part of the old pack. The three of them do not interrogate Sawyer about his estranged one in the middle of my emergency. Every answer given in that building protects Golden Hour Vows without handing over one inch of my autonomy.
Sawyer raises a hand like a schoolboy.
"Does charming the clerk count as speaking for you?"
"Depends," I say. "On whether the charm works."
Cade mutters that he already dislikes him.
"That would trouble me more," Sawyer says pleasantly, "if you had jurisdiction."
He seems to always get a smile out of me.
We have a game plan.
We go out into the morning together, and Honeybell Harbor does what Honeybell Harbor was built to do.
Gossip.
I walk in front with Sawyer. Beckett, August, and Cade fall in behind. Marlowe, Juniper, Priya, and Niall peel off to run documents and phones. We are half a block up the hill before I feel the town turn its head.
This is a place where changing your standing pie order can be a rumor by lunch. One Omega walking toward Town Hall with four striking Alphas at her back is public record before we reach the second corner.
My shoulders climb toward my ears.
I can't help it.
Sawyer notices. He doesn't reach for my hand. He shifts a half-step closer on the street side, putting his shoulder between me and the widening stares, and asks, low, "Would you rather have space, or cover?"
"Cover," I say. "Not contact."
He obeys instantly. He gives me nothing to argue with.
I hate how much the plain competence of that steadies me.
He protects without assuming the protection has bought him anything.
Behind us, Cade is not managing his volume.
"One day. He's been in town one day, and he already knows the correct vocabulary."
"Then learn it," Beckett says.
"I'd rather walk into the harbor."
"Perhaps after we save her business that could be a good call for you to cool the fuck off," August suggests.
Their bickering keeps the walk from turning to lead, and underneath it I notice the thing I'm not ready to notice — that the five of us are already beginning to move like a shape.
Town Hall is not quiet.