(nv/az) My Wife Was Offered Free Rent From Her Employer And Now They Are Asking Her To Pay Part Of It Back. Can She Be Expected To Pay?

Location: Nevada. My wife works in Las Vegas for an apartment management company headquartered in Arizona. She was given an apartment to live in rent free at the property she was working at (hereafter referred to as Property A). After working there for about two years, she was moved to a different property (hereafter referred to as Property B). These properties have separate ownership but employ the same management company. She was told that they would work out a free or discounted apartment at Property B. She and I both asked her supervisor multiple times if we needed to start paying rent at Property A in the interim. We were told not to worry about it and they would figure it out. The apartment at Property B never materialized (neither free nor discounted) and so we’ve been living at Property A to this day. We had a few months where we maintained the rent free apartment at Property A, and then agreed to a discounted month-to-month lease at Property A. Almost a year later, the owners of Property A asked the management company to pay for those months we lived there without rent. The management company paid and my wife is now being asked to pay them back (totaling around $10,000 by our estimate because they have yet to tell her how much it is). She pushed back and was told “she should have known because she wasn’t an employee of Property A” which I believe is unacceptable because she and I both asked if we needed to pay rent and were told by them directly to “not worry about it”. It wouldn’t have been an issue for us to pay the rent at the time, but now they’ve dropped a massive bill on us all of the sudden. I’ve implored her to speak to an employment lawyer but she’s afraid that doing so will burn the bridge with the company, so I wanted to post here and get outside opinions. Thank you in advance for your time and any responses.