13. The Pack Compliance Notice
The Pack Compliance Notice
~AMBER~
You can survive almost anything in this business if you see it coming.
Rain on a garden ceremony. A groom who faints at the word "forever." A cake that decides, at the worst possible moment, that gravity is a suggestion.
The disasters that actually end a woman are the ones that arrive looking like paperwork.
I don't know that yet.
It's nine on a Wednesday, and I'm at my desk pretending that agreeing to one drink with Sawyer Devereaux did not send three grown Alphas home to glare at banquet tables as though the furniture had personally wronged them.
Sawyer is already here. Paloma made it official at dawn — secondary planning producer, contract signed, my objection noted and outvoted. He sits across from me in dark trousers and a rolled white shirt, gold watch, no jacket, his magnolia-and-bourbon scent kept low and warm.
There's coffee on my desk.
He brought it.
He asked Priya for everyone's order instead of guessing mine.
He asks before he decides things for people.
Stop noticing that.
"You've color-coded a transportation emergency," he says, studying my wall board, "that has not happened."
"Preventative panic is the foundation of the entire wedding industry."
"Ah. I assumed the foundation was linen samples and a professionally concealed homicide."
I laugh.
It's real, and it's out of me before I can file it under unprofessional.
He looks unreasonably pleased with himself, so I go back to the seating grid to deny him the satisfaction.
The bell over the door ruins it.
Niall comes in with the morning mail and a bakery bag, sorting envelopes onto my desk as he talks. Invoice, invoice, a thank-you card, a heavy cream envelope with a wax-look seal. He taps that last one.
"No envelope with the word 'compliance' on it has ever once contained good news," he says. Then he sees my face, and the joke dies in his mouth.
The seal reads National Department of Designation Welfare and Pack Compliance.
"It's a certification renewal," I say. "They send these."
Sawyer's expression changes before mine does. He isn't looking at the seal. He's looking at the red code stamped in the corner and the little printed line beneath it that requires signed acknowledgment of receipt.
I open it.
Well…this is a new challenge in the midst.
I read the first paragraph, and the office goes very far away.
Golden Hour Vows' designation-sensitive event certification has been placed under emergency provisional review following a credible safety complaint.
Because I offer scent-managed coordination, bonding ceremonies, heat-cycle contingencies, nest preparation, crowd stabilization, and designation-specific guest accommodations, I am required to prove I maintain an adequate registered emergency-support structure.
Not within thirty days. Not within a week.
I check the timestamp twice, because the first time my brain refuses it.
"They want confirmation at Town Hall within twenty-four hours of issue," I say.
My voice comes out flat and even, which is how I know it's bad.
"Or every designation-sensitive service I run is suspended pending full investigation.
" I turn the page over. Nothing softens on the back.
"They gave me one business day to reorganize my entire life. "
Sawyer's answer is quiet.
"Less. The clock started at issue, not delivery."
I find the issue time.
9:17 this morning.
The envelope reached my desk at seven-forty tomorrow's problem, delivered before the sender's own deadline had finished being generous.
I have until 9:17 tomorrow. My apricot cuts sharp through the neutralizer for half a second — bruised, citrus-bright, the smell of something I keep behind a locked door getting its hand on the knob.
I breathe it back down.
Twenty-four hours is not oversight. Twenty-four hours is a hunting technique.
Now I have to wonder who wants the end of my business?
Priya joins on video within minutes, reading glasses on, already grim. Sawyer moves to stand at my shoulder while she reads the legal spine of the thing aloud. He doesn't touch me, but suddenly his presence delivers an odd sense of support. Like a true pillar waiting for me to lean upon if need be.
He’s just being professional…
You think if I repeat it in my head enough, it’ll become true?
Niall shuts the office door.
I send four words to the group chat — office, now, bring lawyers — and Marlowe and Juniper come through the back within the quarter hour, because those two really don’t play around with me and the business I created from scratch.
"There are exit ramps," Priya says. "On paper.
None of them fit through a twenty-four-hour door.
" She lists them fast, so I hear the wall behind each one.
Register a pack-based support household — takes weeks.
Produce a designated emergency officer already under an employment contract — I don't have one.
Surrender the Omega- and pack-specific services outright — that's half my company and the entire structure holding up Sloane and Nolan's wedding.
Submit to provisional oversight — which means handing the government my medical files, my staff's designation records, my scent protocols, and my clients' private event plans.
"Or," Priya finishes, "you declare a temporary support unit and buy time while the review runs."
"Then we declare the unit."
"Amber." Priya takes her glasses off, which is her tell, the thing she does before a true sentence. "Read the classification they've filed you under. The support unit has to contain at least four registered adult members. Not counting you."
The number sits on the desk between all of us.
Four.
Not three.
I had a plan I hadn't admitted to yet — a shameful, folded-away plan where, if it came to my knees, Beckett and August and Cade could at least be a number. Three signatures. Three bodies that already have a professional reason to stand near me.
I built a whole quiet contingency out of the men who wrecked me, and the government just looked at it and called it insufficient.
"Why four?" Juniper's already furious. "Who needs four?"
"Because they've put her in the highest-risk operational category.
" Priya reads it in the department's own voice, which is worse.
"Event scale. Volume of mixed-designation guests.
An allegation that the applicant experiences unstable scent events while working.
" A pause. "Five years, Amber. Not one documented incident in five years.
They built the risk profile out of an accusation and then charged you for the height of it. "
My hand is already in the desk drawer, reaching for the neutralizer spray, before I decide to.
Marlowe takes it out of my hand.
"You're allowed to smell angry in your own office," she says with a huff.
"Anger isn't the problem."
"It is," she says, "when someone taught you to disinfect it."
I don't have a fast answer for that, so I put my hands flat on the desk instead and let the citrus stay in the air where I earned it.
Priya keeps going because she's kind enough to give me facts to hold.
The review wasn't an automated audit. It was triggered by a named confidential complaint.
She reads the allegations, and each one is a small, precise cut.
That I concealed the seriousness of my unbonded status.
That I spike, uncontrolled, at client events.
That I have no reliable Alpha or pack support.
That I use personal neutralizers in place of an approved safety structure.
That I was once attached to a formal pack arrangement that collapsed before bonding.
That I keep running designation-sensitive work anyway, despite what the complaint calls emotional instability.
It's the last cluster that stops my breath.
Some of these details are not public.
The complainant knows about the bond ceremony that never happened.
They know how I used to react to crowd pressure at eighteen.
They know about the neutralizer routine — the exact one, the schedule, the childhood of it — that my mother taught me before I was old enough to spell "designation," so that I would never once embarrass her by smelling like a feeling.
Only three people on earth ever knew that routine.
I was one of them.
"It's my parents." I hear myself say it from a small distance. "Alistair signs nothing himself. They'll have used a lawyer, a board seat, a subsidiary, whoever. But the information is theirs. This is Whitlock House."
Helena had turned up not long ago, cool and cream and full of concern about how small my life looked. I understand now that the visit wasn't the attack. It was the survey.
They came to measure the building before they set the fire, and they timed the fire for the one week my name is finally attached to something big enough to force me home.
Doesn’t my family love to induce drama but wants to avoid the rest of the world from witnessing it if that ruins their perfect image?
Hypocrites.
"Alistair wants me back in the city," I say, "with Golden Hour Vows tucked under Whitlock legal protection where he can steer it. And Helena wants a photograph — me standing in public beside the three men I was supposed to bond, so the family gets to reclaim the story it lost."
Sawyer speaks, and the ease has gone out of his voice.
“Your own parents want to use your trauma against you, after you build your own thriving business by yourself without their aid I’m assuming.
” When I nod, he seems even more disgusted by the whole revelation.
"They didn't report a safety concern. They engineered a deadline to lock you into something you can’t refuse nor ignore. "
I look at him.
He is not smiling. His warmth is intact, but the bourbon in his scent has gone dark at the bottom, and a thin line of black pepper cuts under it. His anger is quiet enough to be useful, which makes it more dangerous than anyone in this room shouting would be.
It’s odd.