Chapter 22 Old Habits
Old Habits
~RAFE~
Idrop the last box onto the floor of my new dorm with more force than necessary, the cardboard making a satisfying thud against the bare hardwood.
The room echoes.
Empty walls, empty shelves, empty everything.
The space is identical to the one I just vacated, same layout, same dimensions, same depressing institutional beige that the university thinks qualifies as neutral.
But without my posters, my trophies, my three years of accumulated territory markers, it feels less like a room and more like a holding cell.
A holding cell for one.
The new packmates who are supposedly being assigned to fill this unit have not arrived yet.
Administration assured me they would be here by this evening, two Alphas whose names I did not bother to remember because none of this should be happening in the first place.
I should be in my room, in my apartment, with my pack.
Former pack.
The correction tastes like acid on my tongue.
I spent the entire morning arguing with the housing office, demanding they reverse whatever clerical error had somehow resulted in my eviction from the unit I have occupied since freshman year.
I used every card I had. My family name.
My position as team captain. My three years of residential history in that specific apartment.
The fact that my father donates a considerable sum to the athletic department annually and would be very interested to hear about how his son is being treated.
None of it worked.
The administrator, a gray-haired woman with glasses perched on her nose and zero patience for entitled Alphas, had simply pulled up my file and shown me the screen with the kind of smug satisfaction that bureaucrats reserve for moments when the paperwork is on their side.
"Mr. Beaumont, your original housing assignment was processed incorrectly three years ago. You were never registered to that specific unit. The system has now been corrected to reflect the accurate records."
Bullshit.
Complete and total bullshit.
Either Raphael did this deliberately, pulling strings with the administration to engineer my removal from my own home, or the entire housing department decided to suddenly care about a three-year-old clerical error the exact same week my brother arrived from Paris.
The coincidence is too convenient to be coincidental.
He is taking everything. Showing up after eighteen years of absence, waltzing into my life with his French accent and his captain title and his perfect fucking composure, and everyone is tripping over themselves to accommodate him.
Coach Mercer personally requested him. The administration rolled out the red carpet.
Cal and Etienne welcomed him into the pack without a single objection.
And Mae.
I shove the thought away before it can fully form.
The university has been buzzing about Raphael since yesterday. Every hallway conversation, every cafeteria whisper, every lingering glance in my direction followed by poorly concealed comparisons. I have heard them all.
"Is that Rafe's brother? He is so much taller."
"Did you hear he is a captain in Paris? Like, an actual professional team?"
"He caught that Omega mid-air on the ice. So romantic."
"Honestly? He seems way more mature than Rafe. Like the upgrade version."
The last one came from Vanessa's friend group, spoken loudly enough that I would hear, delivered with the particular cruelty that girls learn to weaponize around middle school and never unlearn.
I absolutely despise it.
The attention. The comparisons. The constant, suffocating awareness that everyone is looking at my brother and finding me lacking by contrast. It makes my skin crawl, makes my jaw ache from clenching, makes me want to punch something repeatedly until my knuckles split open and the pain gives me a focus that is not this.
Almost makes me feel like Etien...
The thought trails off.
I freeze, my hand still on the box I just dropped, the realization settling into my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Is this how Etienne feels?
When I compare him to Bastien. When I call him a replacement.
When I tell him he is only here because his brother left and someone needed to fill the roster spot.
Does he feel this? This crawling inadequacy, this constant awareness that someone else exists who is supposedly better, this pressure to prove yourself to people who have already decided you are not enough?
I huff, shaking the thought off with physical force.
"Those emotions are not my damn problem," I mutter to the empty room.
Etienne's feelings are Etienne's problem. I have my own crisis to manage. I need to figure out how to correct this situation, how to reclaim my position, how to prove that Raphael Calder showing up from across the ocean does not change anything about who I am or what I have built here.
The walls of this dorm are thin.
Thin enough that, with no furniture to absorb sound and no packmates to create background noise, I can hear through to the apartment next door.
My former apartment.
Where they are currently existing without me.
Laughter drifts through the shared wall. Light and genuine and completely unbothered by the chaos of the past twenty-four hours.
Mae's laugh.
I recognize it immediately, the sound imprinted on my memory despite only knowing her for two days.
It is warm and unguarded, carrying the particular joy of someone who is genuinely amused rather than performing amusement for an audience.
She laughs like she forgot people might be listening.
Like she is comfortable enough to let the sound escape without filtering it first.
She never laughed like that around me.
The observation lands with an uncomfortable weight.
I move to the kitchen wall, the one that shares the most surface area with the neighboring unit, and lean my shoulder against the bare drywall. The laughter comes again, followed by Cal's voice, groaning with theatrical distress.
"I ain't the one who burned the bacon, MaeBell! That was a team effort! Etienne distracted me with his boring egg opinions and Raph over there was doing his whole French phone call thing, and suddenly the bacon was on fire! Fire, Mae! I almost died!"
Mae's response is muffled but clearly amused, something about smoke alarms and evacuation plans, and Cal's indignant defense escalates into what sounds like a spatula being brandished as a weapon while multiple people tell him to calm down.
They are laughing.
All of them.
Together.
Without me.
I push off the wall with more force than necessary, pacing the empty room like a caged animal whose territory has suddenly shrunk to a fraction of its original size. My hands find my hair, raking through the strands with an agitation that has nowhere to go.
They are acting like I never existed. Like three years of living together, training together, building something together means nothing.
Cal is cooking breakfast like it is a normal morning.
Etienne is offering his boring opinions like I did not just tell him his friendship means nothing to me.
And Raphael is sitting in my spot, breathing my air, making himself comfortable in the space I carved out for myself.
With her.
I hate that I can hear their domesticity through the walls. Hate that the sounds filter through the thin barrier like a constant reminder of what I walked away from. Hate that Mae's laugh hits my ears and my body responds with a visceral reaction I refuse to name.
I grab my phone from my pocket, scrolling through contacts with aggressive swipes, looking for distraction. Looking for anyone who will remind me that I exist outside of this clusterfuck.
I text Dillon. He responds with a string of emojis and a question about whether the rumors are true that I got kicked out of my own dorm. I do not respond.
I text Marcus. He asks if I am okay and offers to grab drinks later. I tell him maybe and do not elaborate.
I text Vanessa. She responds immediately, asking where I have been and why I did not answer her calls last night and whether I am coming to her practice this afternoon. Her messages carry the particular neediness that used to stroke my ego and now just irritates me.
I do not respond to her either.
The phone goes back in my pocket.
The problem with being the leader, the one who barks orders and sets the pace, is that when you lose your pack, you lose your purpose.
I have spent three years being the center of gravity for Cal and Etienne, the one who decided where we ate and when we trained and how we presented ourselves to the world.
Without them orbiting around me, I do not know what shape I am supposed to hold.
Raphael is nothing like me.
The realization gnaws at my insides with an uncomfortable persistence.
He does not bark orders. Does not demand attention.
Does not fill every silence with his own voice to ensure no one forgets he exists.
He observes. He waits. He speaks when speaking matters and lets the quiet do the work when it does not.
His leadership style is the opposite of mine in every conceivable way, and the worst part is that it seems to be working.
The perfect golden child. The one who left and still managed to succeed. The one who did not have to stay and fight for every scrap of recognition because recognition followed him like a shadow he did not even notice.
He got everything. The academics, the athletics, the European education, the captain title, the natural authority. And now he is here, and within forty-eight hours he has taken my apartment, my packmates, and my...
I stop the thought before it can finish.
The bathroom is small but functional, a mirror and sink combination that every dorm room in this building shares. I walk to it, turn on the cold water, and splash my face with enough force to shock my nervous system into resetting.