She steps closer, closing the gap between us until I can smell her perfume. Floral and aggressive, layered over her naturalscent with the heavy hand of someone who uses fragrance as armor rather than accent. Underneath the perfume, her actual scent is sharp and citric, grapefruit and synthetic musk, the kind of combination that prickles against my Omega senses without offering any comfort.
"Well," she says, her voice dropping to a register that she probably thinks sounds intimidating but actually sounds like a reality television villain practicing in a mirror. "You better not be trying to audition for the figure skating competition."
My spine straightens.
Figure skating. My figure skating. The one arena of my life that exists independent of packs and Alphas and the complicated web of relationships I am navigating. The one pursuit that belongs entirely to me, that I have carried since childhood, that survived every upheaval and every loss and every cold night in shelters where the only warmth I could generate was the memory of gliding across ice with my arms extended toward a ceiling that did not care about my designation.
"A little birdy told me you are leaving soon anyway," she continues, tossing her hair over one shoulder with a practiced flick. "Good riddance. Rafe has been so stressed because of you. I had to ride his cock last night just to appease him from being annoyed with you stealing his pack."
The vulgarity lands with the grace of a brick through a window.
I stare at her.
Not shocked. Not offended. Just tired. Tired of women who wield their sexual proximity to Alphas like credentials, like the act of sharing someone's bed grants them authority over the people that Alpha has wronged. Tired of the implication that Rafe's emotional state is my responsibility to manage, that his stress is a debt I owe, that his discomfort matters more than the displacement he caused.
"I did not steal his pack," I say, keeping my voice level. "He was moved rooms because the housing office assigned him incorrectly. That is an administrative decision, not a conspiracy. If you want to be angry at someone, send a strongly worded email to the registrar."
She rolls her eyes with the full-body commitment of someone who treats eye-rolling as a competitive sport.
"Sure, sure. Whatever makes you sleep at night."
Her gaze travels down my body with the slow, deliberate assessment of someone cataloguing flaws for ammunition. Starting at my face, dropping to my chest, my waist, my legs, my shoes, and then climbing back up with an expression that is calibrated to make the recipient feel like a specimen pinned beneath glass.
"Must be nice to be a whore." She tilts her head, the smile on her face cold enough to frost the air between us. "That is probably all you are good for."
Silence.
The word lands and does not bounce. It sinks into the hallway air with a weight that the lingering students feel, their casual eavesdropping sharpening into rigid attention. The girls behind Vanessa titter, their laughter high-pitched and performative, the sound of people who laugh because the alternative is examining why they are standing behind a bully and calling it friendship.
I do not respond.
Not because the words do not sting. They do. They burrow beneath the armor I have spent years reinforcing and find the soft tissue underneath, the places where every cruel thing ever said about my body and my worth and my designation has left scar tissue that never fully hardened. Whore. The word is a grenade disguised as a label, designed to reduce a woman to her perceived sexual utility and discard everything else she is.
But I have been called worse by people with more power and less manicured nails, and I am still standing.
I stare at Vanessa with an expression I have perfected over years of being targeted. Calm. Unreadable. Offering nothing for her cruelty to grip onto, no tears to validate the attack, no flinch to confirm the hit. I let the silence stretch until it becomes its own response, until the absence of my reaction becomes louder than any words I could deploy.
Then I roll my eyes and turn to leave.
"Oh, and one more thing," Vanessa calls at my back, her voice carrying the shrill edge of someone who is not satisfied with the response she received and is reaching for a final blow. "I am going to be wearing Rafe's jersey tonight at the game. So do not be jealous."
I almost laugh.
Almost. The impulse rises in my throat, buoyed by the genuine absurdity of being told to envy a woman whose primary achievement is wearing another person's laundry, but before the sound can escape, an arm slides around my front.
Warm. Solid. The weight of it settles across my collarbones with a casual possessiveness that is both protective and declarative, and the scent that accompanies it washes over me like a tide. Ocean salt and warm amber, clean and bright, the familiar fragrance threading through my senses before my eyes confirm what my nose already knows.
Cal.
I look up.
He is standing behind me, his arm draped across my front with the relaxed confidence of a man who has been listening to the conversation for longer than his entrance suggests. He is still in his practice gear, a university hoodie zipped over his workout clothes, his blond hair damp at the temples from recent exertion,his amber eyes fixed on Vanessa with an expression that is polite in the way a closed fist inside a velvet glove is polite.
"And why would she be jealous of that," he says, his voice carrying across the hallway with a volume precisely calibrated to ensure the lingering students hear every syllable, "when she is dating me?"
Vanessa gawks.
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. The reaction ripples through her entourage like a shockwave, three faces cycling through identical sequences of surprise and recalculation. A cluster of students near the lockers stops pretending not to watch and starts openly staring.
