13. The Pack Compliance Notice #3
The filing leaked. It was always going to, obviously. A town this small can’t possibly hold secrets for long, and they read records like scripture of new information that needs to be upheld.
Reporters, business owners, a knot of designation-rights advocates, three members of the council, and a scatter of residents who simply enjoy the scene crowd the steps and spill into the lobby. Some faces are on my side. Some only want to know whether the celebrity wedding is about to collapse.
So fucking nosey they are.
A few wear the particular expression of people who believe an unbonded Omega has no business running high-risk rooms without a man to sign for her.
Mayor Florence Hartwell meets us inside, furious in a contained, civic way. She cannot clear the lobby. The preliminary filing is public, and the public has arrived.
Dr. Amara Greene is already here with my records, calm as a tide, confirming to anyone who'll listen that Golden Hour Vows has kept excellent protocols and has no history of a single negligent scent incident.
The complaint, she says plainly, appears politically motivated. The emergency classification stands anyway, until someone with standing knocks it down.
The questions come from everywhere at once.
Is Golden Hour Vows being suspended?
Did I hide my unbonded status?
Are the celebrity clients at risk?
Are Shaw, Bellamy, and Mercer my pack again?
Is the fourth Alpha part of it?
Why would one Omega need four?
Were there incidents at previous weddings?
Did your own parents file the complaint?
The crowd tightens. Beckett moves to my left. August takes my right. Cade turns to put his back to me and his face to the loudest of the reporters, all three of them trying to hold a perimeter without breaking my no-touch rule.
Their scents go up around me — cedar and rain, sage and pear, salt and blood orange — but the lobby is small, packed with other people's Alphas and camera light. It is too much.
My throat closes at the old familiar seam.
The complaint accused me of manufacturing scent panic in public rooms. The complaint has now built me the exact room to do it in and prove their complaint is by far accurate.
Which isn’t fair when I’m being boxed in, being asked multiple questions, and stuck in a situation that makes me claustrophobic.
Someone says, loudly, that I can't claim adequate support when not one of these men is bonded to me.
Someone else says the department is right to question an Omega "working alone.
" A reporter lifts his voice over the rest and asks whether the three runaway grooms are using a celebrity wedding to launder their reputations.
I open my mouth.
Nothing arrives fast enough to fill it.
Sawyer moves before the others do.
Not aggressively. Decisively.
He steps a half-pace in front of me, angled so his shoulder eats the camera line without hiding me behind him, and his scent opens through the lobby — magnolia and warm bourbon with that spine of black pepper, not a dominance flare, nothing that shoves.
It's the scent equivalent of a heavy door swinging shut against weather.
Suddenly, the room feels it and quiets by a degree, and I suddenly notice how prominent his pure aura of masculinity now is as he stands there boldly.
Is this how an Alpha is supposed to project when he’s standing his ground?
"There seems to be a misunderstanding," he says, in the unbothered drawl of a man who has personally defused drunk relatives, famous egos, sobbing brides, and at least one venue on actual fire.
He introduces himself to the room, formal and full: Sawyer Devereaux, senior luxury wedding producer, certified designation-sensitive ceremony coordinator, licensed officiant, currently contracted to the Carroway-Reeve wedding.
A good way to divert attention from Sloan and Nolan’s wedding.
Then he says it, clear enough to reach the back of the lobby.
"Miss Whitlock is my Omega."
And wait…WHAT?!
The room freezes.
My heart stops, restarts, and elects speed over rhythm. The bold declaration is not only loud and firm, but it’s spoken with such strong conviction, I truly believe you wouldn’t have to know Sawyer to believe he’s telling nothing but the truth.
Behind Sawyer, three Alpha scents detonate at once — Beckett's cedar going thunder-dark, August's sage sharp enough to sting the eyes, Cade's blood orange scorching toward smoke — and Sawyer keeps talking before any of them can put a word into the air.
"These three gentlemen work within the event-support structure I coordinate. I work for Miss Whitlock. So professionally, medically, and operationally, we function as a single designation-support unit. That is the only relevant fact this office needs today."
I hear the architecture of it even through the roar in my ears.
He made a possessive claim loud enough to satisfy a hostile room, then bolted it immediately to a professional frame — leaving me every inch of legal room to redefine it later, on my terms.
He didn't take anything.
He built me a door and left it unlocked.
A reporter notes that Mr. Devereaux only arrived in town recently.
"Emergency teams are assembled by credential and contract," Sawyer says. "Not by how long the gossip's had to warm up."
Someone else asks why the men are all here, if it's merely professional.
Sawyer looks slowly around the packed lobby — councilmen, reporters, vendors, the curious.
"Are all of you here to register into packs?" he asks.
Silence.