“I’m trying to work here,” I reminded them. It was useless, but it still needed to be said. Ox had a bug up his ass, which meant he was going to say his piece. Ever since he’d become an actual Alpha, he’d been insufferable that way.
“Why are we staring at Gordo?” another voice said, and I groaned. “Lobito, are you giving the boss man shit again?”
“Rico, I know you’re supposed to be doing the oil change on that Ford and the Toyota.”
My friend grinned at me as he squeezed into the office. “Probably,” he said. “But! The good news is that I will get to them eventually. What’s happening in here seems to be far more interesting. In fact, hold on a second.” He leaned out the doorway toward the interior of the garage. “Oye! Get your asses in here. We’re having an intervention.”
“Oh my god,” I mumbled, wondering how my life had become this way. I was forty years old, and I belonged to a pack of meddlesome bitches.
“Finally,” I heard Tanner mutter. “It was starting to get sad.”
“Even I was getting worried,” Chris said. “And you know how I don’t like getting worried.”
The office was small, and I was sitting behind the same old chipped desk that Marty had bought secondhand years before. A moment later five grown men squeezed inside the doorway and were staring at me, waiting for me to do something.
I hated them so goddamn much.
I ignored them and went back to working on the expense invoice.
Trying to work on the expense invoice.
I’d told Ox there was no need to update the software. It was working just fine.
But he said that Robbie said he couldn’t handle a program that had been made in the late nineties. I’d responded diplomatically, saying that Robbie probably hadn’t even had pubes in the late nineties. Ox had stared at me. I had stared back.
The software was updated the next day, much to Robbie’s glee.
I spent the next four days trying to figure out ways to send him back where he’d come from.
The computer chimed another error message as I hit F11.
Rico, Chris, and Tanner all snickered at me.
Maybe if I threw the computer at their heads, it would start working like it was supposed to.
I would certainly feel better.
But chances were they’d come back with their stitched-up, broken faces, and then I would feel bad and maybe actually start to listen to their bullshit—
“He’s pouting,” Rico whispered to Chris and Tanner.
“Aw,” they said.
That was the problem with having your oldest friends as your employees and members of your pack. You had to see them every day and could never escape them, no matter how hard you tried. This was, of course, all Ox’s fault for telling them about werewolves and witches to begin with, a mistake I had yet to forgive him for.
“You realize I could kill you with nothing but the power of my mind,” I reminded them.
“I thought you said you couldn’t do that?” Tanner asked, sounding a little worried.
“That’s because he can’t,” Ox said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“This is your fault,” I told him.
He shrugged.
“Zen Alpha bullshit.”
“Isn’t it weird?” Rico asked. “I mean, ever since that day when he and Joe had mystical moon magic sex and became mates or whatever—”