Page 69 of Labor of Love

Moving back after a decade had been the right call—the only call Giovanni had been able to live with—but it had taken a while to integrate back into the community. The fact that his father had decided to up and retire barely a week after he’d moved back into town hadn’t helped.

It had been almost two years and Giovanni was still dealing with the fallout. The most pressing of which was the fact that he didn’t have an heir, and the elder council was getting pushy about offering up their omega sons and various daughters as potential mates.

“Let her in,” Giovanni set his work aside.

Charity sighed, the sound crackling loudly through the intercom before it clicked off and the door to his office opened.

Giovanni stood, a smile spreading across his lips as an elderly Black woman with a beautiful white afro made her way into the room. It had been a bit of a shock when he’d first seen her, she’d had more wrinkles than he remembered, but other than that she looked just as hale and healthy as ever.

An alpha shifter’s nose didn’t lie, and the old omega didn’t have a whiff of saccharine sweet sickness in her scent.

Grandma Josie walked with a cane, but half the reason she used it was because it had been a gift from Ezra, the grandson. She’d told him all about where he’d found it the last time Giovanni had been over for tea.

“Grandma Josie! It’s good to see you. Please, take a seat,” Giovanni gestured at the plush chair on the other side of his desk. “Did you have something you needed to tell me about, or is this a social call? Because I can come out to visit more often if you’d like.”

He probably couldn’t, given the shit show his current schedule was, but for Grandma Josie he’d try—and deal with Charity’s shouting when it came. He might be able to bribe herwith a box of chocolates… or the weekend off to drive up to her girlfriend’s house in the next territory over.

Grandma Josie huffed as she settled into the chair. “Always the gentleman, Gio—I have no idea how your father managed to sire such a fine young man. He always was a rude little thing—a decent alpha, but he was always a piece of work.”

Giovanni couldn’t help but grimace at the assessment; she wasn’t wrong, but admitting that fact would be gauche. Instead, he sat back in his desk chair and inclined his head towards the pitcher of water he kept on his desk.

The older woman shook her head.

“And, no, this isn’t a social call,” she explained. “Ezra has asked me to take care of matters on this end since he has so much paperwork to take care of on his. He’s coming home.”

Giovanni’s heart leapt into his throat, and he did his best to tamp down the glee that welled up in his chest. He and Ezra hadn’t seen each other since they were in middle school; they’d fallen out of touch almost immediately when he’d moved and had never managed to reconnect.

Giovanni missed his smile, the way he was so practical and optimistic at the same time. No one had understood him as well as Ezra had, there’d been something special there, something more that they’d both been drifting towards. But...

Ezra probably already had a steady partner and wouldn’t look at Giovanni twice. They were in their late twenties and, after all, most omegas found partners quickly, especially if they went into the military like Ezra had. But the irrational crush he’d always nursed wouldn’t go anywhere, so there was no point in letting it linger.

“Oh,” Giovanni sat back and considered that for a moment. “He has leave coming up? How long does he expect?—”

He stopped as the old woman shook her head.

“He isn’t coming home on leave?” Giovanni asked. “I knew he flew you out to New York last time, but… Why would you be coming to me if he was moving you closer to him?”

Grandma Josie smiled at him. “Ezra is being discharged, sweetheart.”

“What?” Giovanni asked. “I thought he had another two years on his current contract? He’s not hurt, is he?”

There was very little that could injure a shifter enough to take them out of military service.

“No, but something came up,” Grandma Josie said. “He’ll be moving back in with me for the foreseeable future, at least until he gets himself a job. And he will likely stay in the territory.”

“Alright, I’ll start the paperwork to establish this as his pack of residence, he’ll need to fill out most of it but we can start it now. Less for him to woory about,” Giovanni opened a drawer, looking for the right forms; he always had a set on hand, just in case. “It shouldn’t take too long given that he’s technically still a member, just abroad for work.”

Many shifters went into military service and there was an established system in place to ensure that they were still considered members of their home pack while serving. Some packs didn’t allow it, but those that didn’t tended to be the more isolationist factions and were, frankly, a bunch of assholes.

Not that Giovanni could blame them. Humans were weird about shifters and tended to fixate on the secondary genders, for some reason. If he got one more asshole asking him if he really had two sets of balls he was going to end up on trial for murder.

Giovanni had absolutely no idea where that urban legend had come from; alphas had two balls, the same as everyone else. It was just that female alphas had a pseudo-cock, and both sexes had a knot… explaining that to random humans was both awkward and traumatizing for everyone involved.

And that wasn’t even considering male omegas. Human men got really fucking weird about male omegas. Maybe it was the self-lubrication, maybe it was the fact that their uterine tract connected to their ass, who fucking knew. But human men got really quiet when you mentioned that male omegas even existed, let alone started discussing the ins and outs of their biology.

When Giovanni looked up, Grandma Josie was smiling at him, the crow’s feet sitting at the corners of her eyes digging deep lines into her face. Giovanni couldn’t help smiling back, the warm lemon cookie scent she put out sending him right back to summer afternoons running around her yard as a human and in his leopard skin.

“He’ll need someone to pick him up at the airport,” Grandma Josie said. “I don’t have a car.”

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