My life changed after that meeting with the Alpha, but it wasn’t all bad. As far as we could tell, the shifter who’d gotten this pup on me was a feral—the Alpha had requested help from the other packs, but we all knew what they thought of us. The only one that had any sympathy for our situation was probably Mercy Hills, but they were weird and I didn’t really ask too much about it. Whether they found the alpha or not didn’t really make much difference to me. I was figuring things out, and I didn’t need an alpha poking his nose into my business. A few tried—I fixed that.

This morning I was in the Mate’s family room, putting the last stitches into a skirt to go on my baby’s bassinet. Ma and I had taken some of my apartment money and gone shopping around the enclave for things I would need. I had a nice backpack now to carry baby stuff in, a little wooden fence that could be set up to keep them in one place when he or she got older and busier, and the bassinet. Ma had bought me a dresser to keep the baby’s clothes in and my work here in the mornings was rapidly filling it with shirts and pants and thick, absorbent diapers.

This afternoon, I would go back to my new job in Love the Moon. Floor service—changing sheets, cleaning bathrooms, light maintenance. What I’d done before I’d turned twenty-one and applied to work with the clients. It was harder work in some ways, and easier in others, but my biggest complaint about it was that it didn’t pay as well and so my savings had stagnated, and even gone backwards a bit as I continued to discover new ways this pup was going to cost me.

I was working as many hours as I could scrounge now because I’d be living off savings after the baby came. Ma said it was still possible I could get my apartment once I knew what I’d be spending, but I wasn’t all that hopeful.

One of the other bearers was laughing as she talked about the argument she’d had with her mate last night. “And so, the third time I had to get up and go to the bathroom, he asked if I wanted a mattress and pillow installed on the toilet, so I could just stay there all night. And I told him that if he even thought about it, the only partner his dick would ever have again would be the toilet and it was his fault I was in this state in the first place.”

“Did he say anything after?” someone asked.

“I don’t know. I just crawled over him and went to the bathroom. He was asleep when I came back. Well, at least until I elbowed him getting back into bed.”

We all laughed.

Someone at the other end of the room asked, “Maybe you need a bigger place.”

“We do,” she said. “But credits, you know?”

We all nodded, until the only other male omega in the room looked up from the set of baby socks he was knitting and said diffidently, “My sister worked the houses during the last two months of her pregnancy, said it wasn’t too bad and paid pretty well, and now they’ve got a place out by the aloe gardens.”

My ears perked up at that. The aloe gardens were a nice, middle class neighborhood, a little bit above what I’d been looking at. “Were they saving long before they moved?” I asked.

He shrugged. “About the same as anyone, I guess. They were looking at something by the south wall, but then they heard that the owners were going to put this apartment up for sale and they were a little short. So she went back to work for a couple of months, over in the Mink.”

The Mink. It was a perfectly good house, but a little too much into the costumes and role play for my tastes. Pregnant shifters would be exactly the kind of thing I would expect to find there. “Do they do that every year?” I asked, trying to be casual about it.

“Think so,” he said, holding up the sock he was working on and comparing it to the other. “You should call them if you need the credits. It can’t be easy trying to do this on your own.”

My cheeks flamed and I looked down at my bassinet skirt, stabbing blindly at the fabric and pretending I was still sewing when really I couldn’t see past the embarrassment.

“Now, now,” Verena put in smoothly “It’s not his fault at all. The house did a procedure check and everything was done. There’s not much you can do about a feral who’s that determined to get past us. Though it would have been better for everyone if he could have chosen one of the non-omega males. I wonder sometimes how these parents can look at themselves, the way they raise their pups.”

There were nods of agreement around the room and the topic died, at least for everyone else. But I thought about the price difference between the south wall and the aloe gardens and what a difference it would mean to me, to my standing in the community, if I was a property owner.

Maybe I’d call in over there after work tonight. No harm in asking a few questions, right?