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 somehowresulted 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 Raphaël 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 Raphaël 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 toprove 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 Raphaël 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.
