I found Oscar and his cronies down the hall, lounging around the main office area of the gatehouse. One of the guard stood up and put his hand on his gun, so I made sure to waddle a little. Just to make the point of how big an ass he was being.

Oscar waved him down. "I would have thought you'd be a lot longer," he told me as he looked me up and down. "Maybe I should have taken advantage of that booking."

"You couldn't handle me," I said briefly and took an empty chair so I could sit. "I haven't been to bed yet, I worked all day yesterday, I'm tired and this pup has discovered the joys of dancing on my bladder. Let's quit the games."

He nodded and, I thought, seemed secretly amused by the horrified expressions on the humans surrounding us.

I still didn't like him. He scared me, though it was something I barely admitted to myself. "So, how do we do this?" I rubbed my belly where the ligaments were stretching and wondered if I was going to regret this.

"You're agreeing?"

My eyes strayed to the humans scattered about the room. His gaze followed mine and he got abruptly to his feet. “Let’s go talk outside.”

I nodded and stood up again. He started to lead me to the door to the outside of the enclave and I froze.

“What?” he asked. “You want to go hang out in the crowd over there?”

I held up my wrist with the blue bracelet once more hanging around it. “I’ll set off every alarm in the place.”

He snapped his fingers and one of the gate guards came over and did something to the bracelet with something that looked like a large calculator. “He’s good,” the human said and went back to his desk.

Oscar jerked his head at one of the men in the room. “Make sure he gets some medical attention.” Without waiting to see if his order would be obeyed, he opened the door. “After you.”

I ignored the false courtesy and stepped outside the door. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever been outside the enclave but for some reason, I felt like I could just run and keep running and they’d never find me. The temptation was almost irresistible, but I knew better and followed Oscar to the left, to a line of cars parked nose-out at the end of the building.

He sat on the end of one, butt on the hood, heels planted in the cracked soil, and patted the hood beside him. “Take a load off,” he told me, as if we were old friends.

I bared my teeth at him and he laughed, but I noticed that when he settled his jacket again, his gun was pushed a little more forward. Good. Have some respect. Not like you don’t owe us any.

We were quiet there for a few minutes. I was trying to think of ways to say what I needed to say. Who knew what he was thinking about? But I’d found in my work that if I was quiet and listened, clients often told me far more than they ever thought they would. So I waited, and sniffed the scents of brush and dirt and cactus blooming somewhere, and made no noise.

When he did start to talk, what he said surprised me. “He’s a good man. Or shifter. However you put it. I don’t want to lose him. I’ve tried to be his friend, but he keeps to himself a lot.” His voice was level, but underneath his clinical summary of the situation I could hear the hurt in his voice.

“There’s not much reason for us to trust your kind. And too many ways that being over-familiar can hurt us.” I remembered my assumption, that he’d been a human who’d fallen in love with a shifter and been rejected. Maybe the hurt went both ways. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. "I'm agreeing to try it, but I want to add something of my own to our agreement."

"That's not the deal."

I shrugged. "Hear me out first, okay?"

He nodded.

"I want this to be as legal as possible. He’ll want it to be as legal as possible, because he’s already apologized for not being able to mate me because of not having a pack. You need to find some way to fix that.”

Oscar looked startled, but he didn’t interrupt, which was good. I was afraid if he stopped me, I might never get started again.

“Two,” I continued. “I’ve been working my ass off—” He smirked and I snarled briefly at him before deciding to ignore it. “I’ve been saving every penny I could to earn until I had enough to buy my own apartment. I’m not looking for something expensive, but I want to know that we have a home we can retreat to.”

“You can’t live in an enclave,” Oscar said firmly. “That’s off the table. Damian Montana Border is dead, David Walker is the man you’ll be living with. You can’t bring a human into the enclave and he can’t be a shifter here and work for us. There will be no Damian Nevada Ashes.”

I nodded, accepting defeat on that one. I hadn’t really expected them to give me my way on that. “As an investment, then. Or, if something happens to him, that I have a place to come to after, where my family is.”

He watched me as he considered this part of my request. “It can’t be traceable to you as a human, that’s all I’ll ask. What else?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Except to give me room to make a pack with him.”

His surprise seemed genuine. “Do you love him?”

I scoffed. “I hardly know him. Maybe love will come, but this isn’t about love. What he did that night, what you talked him into doing, has poisoned my life here in ways I could never have imagined.” I thought about the misery of spending half my days lying to myself and my clients and let it add steel to my spine. “I know you don’t care, but he does, and you owe him something for that, I think. If you’re truly wanting to be his friend.”

“You don’t like me, do you?” Oscar asked, amused and slightly shocked, I thought.

I slanted a sharp glance up at him. “I can’t say I’d lift my leg to piss on you if you were on fire,” I told him in my sweetest omega voice. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to give him the stability and sense of pack that he needs. What on earth were you humans thinking, cutting him off like that?”

He had the grace to look shamefaced, at least. “We didn’t know. The guys making the decisions didn’t know, anyway. I think we figured it out in the field pretty quick, but it’s tough to get the higher-ups to listen sometimes. They assumed there’d be some that washed out—there’s always a few humans that don’t make it past the first couple of years, why would shifters be any different?”

“You have no sense of pack,” I told him severely. “That was silly.”

“Yeah.” He stared off into the distance, avoiding my eyes. “We lost that a long time ago.”

We stood there until the sun had risen enough to see by without the help of my wolf.

“I have a friend,” Oscar said suddenly. “Well, not a friend. Actually, I expect he’ll want to kill me when he sees me. But he might be able to help us out with a cover story, get you two properly hitched.”

“Yeah?” I wondered what he planned to do. “Not a human wedding. A mating.”

“I know. He’s shifter.” Oscar sighed. “I better break out the riot gear beforehand.”

“I’ll protect you,” I said facetiously, and he laughed.

“You just might be able to do that after all. Last I heard, he’d gotten himself mated to an omega and had four kids. Never really figured him for gay, but still waters run deep.”

“All these years,” I said meditatively. “You still don’t understand us. There is no gay or straight with us, it’s whoever makes you happy. And if you want pups, you search for that happiness in the shifters who can have them.” I glanced up at him. “Don’t be ignorant.”

He nodded solemnly and then looked up at movement off to the side. It interested me to see that he'd stepped a little in front of me as if to offer protection, then relaxed when it turned out to be only Damian and the men escorting him.

I stood up and smiled, then walked out to meet Damian and greeted him with a kiss. “I think things will work out,” I told him. “How are you feeling?” He looked better.

Damian didn’t answer my question, but he did put a hand around my waist and pull me in against his side. “What did you two talk about?”

I shrugged as if it weren’t very important. “Oh, this and that.” The baby stretched, a long lazy movement that made me want to stretch too. “I need to get some sleep. I can’t bring you home with me.”

“Yeah.”

Oscar walked toward us. “We’ll spend tonight in the place in Vegas while I make a few phone calls. Think you can bear to tear yourself away from your Nevada hottie for a few days while I fix this fucking mess you made?”

Damian’s fingers tightened on my waist and I patted his chest to soothe him. “I’m working the next couple of days anyway.” His arm went even tighter. “No, you don’t get to make that call. Not yet. And don’t think I’m going to be a doormat like your Montana Border omegas—this is Nevada.”

A snort of laughter broke the silence behind us and Damian turned his head to glare at whoever had laughed.

One of the gate guards came out their door. “He needs to go back, we’re doing the nightly reset of the system.”

Oscar nodded and waved in a way that could have been acknowledgment, or could have been a fuck you. I know if it had been me which one it would have been, but watching him, it was probably the other.

“I should go,” I told Damian. “I’m tired.”

He kissed me on the temple, a tender gesture that surprised me more than it should have. “Thank you,” he said, his lips brushing against my skin. “If we don’t ever see each other again—”

“Don’t be stupid.” I shrugged out of his grip and frowned at him. “You need sleep too.” I pursed my lips and thought about it for a moment. “If someone has a piece of paper, I’ll give you my phone number. You can call me, between three and four. Otherwise, I’ll either be getting ready or working.”

They found a scrap of paper and a pen inside one of the cars and I wrote my number down. I didn’t sign it, but I did draw a tiny pawprint beside it, then, after a few second’s thought, drew another, smaller one.

I was getting sentimental. Definitely time to get out of the houses.

Oscar sent everyone off to the car ahead of him. “Someone will call you. Not just him.”

I nodded, and let the humans escort me back inside to the sound of their retreating engines.