Company Manners
Lyra
The towncar pulls away from the curb the second my feet hit the pavement.
The house looms in front of me, four stories of old money and cold marble, every window lit from within like a lantern, except nobody lives inside. I take a deep breath of the warm evening air before I push through the front double-doors.
Calla is crossing the foyer with a stack of folders pressed against her chest. Her chestnut hair is falling out of its clip. It’s the one thing about her that refuses to stay professional.
The beta stops the second she sees me, her amber eyes going warm with relief.
"There you are." She shifts the folders to her hip. "It's past seven." She glances at her watch. "I was starting to think you'd moved to another country."
"I was at the club," I say, gesturing at my white tennis skirt and the racket bag hanging off my shoulder. "I was there all day. Got completely in the zone and lost track of time."
Calla tilts her head exactly one degree, one brow arching. "You weren't hiding from Crispin Maleth?"
"I was working on my backhand," I say.
Calla levels a flat look at me. "You hate tennis."
"I'm learning to love it."
"You have said, and I am quoting you directly, that tennis is a sport invented by people with too much money and aggression, and not enough therapy."
"People change, Calla," I say simply.
"You said it last week."
"It was a formative week."
Her mouth curves into a slow smile.
"My backhand needed a lot of work."
"Right."
"All day's worth."
"Mm." The beta gives me a pointed look. "And it had nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Maleth was scheduled to be here at ten this morning."
"Total coincidence." I press a hand to my chest, pretending to be wounded. "And I am offended that you would even suggest I would deliberately avoid a guest of my father's. I have been nothing but gracious and welcoming to Mr. Maleth at every opportunity."
The beta laughs, that sudden bright bark of hers, which she immediately tries to smother. My father has made his feelings on the subject abundantly clear.
"Fraternizing with the staff reflects poorly on this family, Lyra. These people work for us. They are not your friends."
He's such an asshole.
Calla presses her lips together, but her eyes are still dancing as she falls into step beside me toward the stairs.
"I feel like I should warn you," she says, dropping her voice. "He's still here."
I stop walking, my hand gripping the banister. "Seriously?"
"Yeah." Calla's eyes cut down the stairs. "I think he’s been waiting for you to come home."
"Shit." I press my lips together. "I checked my father's calendar. He was only coming for lunch."
"I know." She shifts the folders against her hip. "But here we are."
"It's past seven." I drag a hand through my ponytail, making my tennis racket slip off my shoulder. I grip the strap, letting it dangle from my hand. "That man has the social awareness of a fucking brick."
"Yeah." Calla grimaces, clearly feeling bad for me.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me." The words jump out before I can stop them. "I cannot sit through dinner with that man. I just—" I drop my voice to something that is embarrassingly close to a whine. "I can't do it tonight, Calla. I don't have anything left."
"It’s okay," she says, her tone kind as she places her free hand between my shoulder blades and pushes, steering me up the stairs. "Go change. You have maybe a few minutes before your father sends someone up to check your room again."
I blow out a long breath through my nose.
"Of course he's been checking my room." I straighten up, hitching my racket back onto my shoulder, and look up the stairs like I'm preparing for a firing squad. "Fine."
Calla falls into stride beside me as we make our way up the wide, curved staircase to the second floor, then down the hall. We walk past the formal sitting room and the portrait gallery with its long row of Van Houten alphas staring down from their frames like a jury.
The carpet up here is thick and cream-colored and so aggressively pristine that I've always been afraid to walk on it in shoes.
My bedroom is at the end of the hall, the largest of the guest rooms. My parents repurposed it for me after I presented as an omega, and officially became the black sheep of our family.
The Van Houten bloodline was nothing but alphas for a little over a century, before I came along, and neither one of my parents have ever let me forget it.
I push open my bedroom door, and something in my chest immediately loosens.
My bed is rumpled and soft in the way my mother would hate if she ever came in here, the ivory linen twisted from where I'd slept poorly the night before.
And in the far corner of the room is my nesting nook.
A pile of heavy blankets and oversized pillows I've been accumulating over the years, tucked between the bookshelf and the wall like a den I built for myself inside someone else's house.
I cross to the desk by the window, stepping over a stack of books I've been meaning to shelve for a month, and lean my racket against the side of it. The surface is buried in library books and loose papers and four empty coffee mugs I keep meaning to take downstairs.
Calla steps in behind me and pulls the door shut, and air seems to instantly settle.
I turn to find her already watching me, her folders lowered, her expression shifted into something that has nothing to do with my father's schedule.
"So," Calla says. Her expression shifts into something very playful. "The librarian."
A smile breaks across my face before I can stop it. "Owen is not a librarian," I say, dropping onto the edge of my bed. "He's an archivist for special collections. There's a difference."
Calla's eyebrows climb toward her hairline.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing," she says with a little shrug. "I saw you talking to the archivist at the fundraiser last night."
I reach down and pull off one tennis shoe, dropping it on the floor.
"We were just talking about the new gallery collection.
He's been cataloging it for months." I work off the second shoe.
"It's actually really fascinating. He verified every text against three different historical registries before it went into the system. "
I look up.
Calla is staring at me with the expression of a woman who has never been less surprised in her entire life.
"What?" I say again.
"Nothing." She sets her folders down on my desk and leans against it, crossing her arms. "He's very handsome, isn't he? Even with the scruffy beard and the glasses."
"He's married," I say pointedly.
"Mm." Calla tilts her head. "Although." She pauses, like she's considering something. "I did notice the new exhibit had some pieces in it that spoke pretty highly of pack life. Someone had to choose those." She raises an eyebrow. "Maybe he and his husband are open to—"
My heart soars straight up into my throat, and I stomp it back down immediately.
"Do not finish that sentence," I say, dropping my voice even though the door is closed.
"Do not even think it out loud in this house.
My father would lose his entire mind if he heard the word pack within these walls.
" I gesture vaguely at the ceiling, toward the portraits down the hall, at the whole suffocating weight of four stories of Van Houten tradition pressing down on us.
"He gave a forty-five minute speech at dinner last Christmas about how pack life was single-handedly responsible for the moral collapse of modern civilization.
I had to sit through the whole thing with a fork in my hand, wondering if it would be rude to stab myself with it. "
Calla presses her lips together very hard.
"It is not funny," I tell her.
"I know," she says, in a voice that suggests she finds it a little funny.
The bedroom door swings open so hard it bounces off the wall. I startle badly enough that I nearly slide off the bed.
My mother steps into the room, immaculate as ever, not a single platinum hair out of place, her pale green eyes sweeping the room once before landing on me with a brand of disappointment she reserves exclusively for my existence.
"It's about time you got home," she says. Then her gaze cuts to Calla like she's just noticed something unpleasant on the carpet. "That will be all."
Calla clutches the folders against her chest, then slips out of the room so fast she's practically a vapor trail.
My mother watches her go, then pulls the door halfway shut behind her.
"I called the club twice today," she says, turning back to me. "Twice. I told them you needed to come home immediately."
"I didn't receive any messages," I say, keeping my voice pleasant. "But you know, if I were allowed to have a cell phone—"
"Omegas," my mother snaps, cutting me off, "do not need cell phones. They need a firm hand and clear expectations." Her eyes move over me. "Clearly you’ve had neither."
She shakes her head slowly, the way she does when she wants an audience for her own suffering. "I have clearly failed as a mother," she says. "But there's simply no helping it now." Her eyes lock onto mine, waiting.
When I was small, I used to rush to fill that silence. You haven't failed, Mama. You're a wonderful mother. I meant it then, or I thought I did. But I was too little to know better.
Now I keep my mouth shut.
The fact is, Lavinia is an awful mother. She has been for a long time. And I’m done playing her games.
"Lyra." Something hardens in my mother's expression. Her jaw tightens, the way it does when a room refuses to perform on cue. "Downstairs," she snaps. "Now."
"I need to shower and change," I say. "I've been at the club all day, I can't sit down to dinner—"
She crosses the room in four steps, and her hand closes around my wrist.
"Come," she commands, and just like that, my body jerks to obey.
My feet move, my legs carrying me forward, every omega instinct I have answering to her alpha command whether I want it to or not.
I hate it.