He huffs. The sound vibrates against my back through the contact of his chest, carrying the resigned exasperation of a man who has been presented with a problem and has already identified the most efficient solution.
"Let me call Miss Phillip. She handles these things faster than admin."
He is right.
Miss Phillip arrives in under five minutes, her heels clicking across the wet tile with the aggressive percussion of a woman whose patience with institutional infrastructure has been tested past its tolerance and is now operating in the red zone. Her sleek bun has not shifted a millimeter despite what was clearly a rapid transit from wherever she was stationed to the site of the latest residential catastrophe. Her blazer is immaculate. Her expression could curdle dairy.
She surveys the waterfall descending from my ceiling with the clinical fury of an administrator who signed off on a repair order and is now staring at the repair's failure with the specific rage that results from trusting a contractor.
"Didn't we fix BOTH the upper AND lower units?" Her voice carries the measured volume of a woman who is not yelling but is producing syllables with enough force to qualify as a controlled demolition of the plumber's professional reputation. "Why the hell is the upper unit flooding the lower unit?"
The plumber, a stocky Beta in coveralls whose name tag reads GLEN and whose body language reads REGRET, materializes from the stairwell with the reluctant approach velocity of a man walking toward his own tribunal.
"Well, ma'am, I did instruct my team to address both units, but I went on break and didn't personally confirm that the upper repairs were finalized before?—"
"You went on BREAK?"
Glen flinches. The reaction is justified because Miss Phillip's voice has achieved a frequency that could etch glass, and the expression on her face suggests that Glen's break is about to become permanent.
She groans, pinching the bridge of her nose between manicured fingers. The gesture compresses approximately forty-seven profanities into a single facial movement that Glen receives with the appropriate level of terror.
She turns to me. The fury dissolves into genuine apology, her brown eyes softening with the specific concern of a woman who takes personal responsibility for institutional failures that are categorically not her fault.
"I'm so sorry, Holloway. Are you able to gather your valuables and stay in a different dorm in the meantime?" She pulls out her tablet, scrolling through what I assume is a residential database. "I can assign you somewhere, but I can't really be selective about whether you'll be placed with a random pack of guys or an already established pack. The available spaces are limited this late in the settling period."
I bite my lip.
The options assemble themselves in my brain with the rapid-fire efficiency of a woman who has been evaluating contingency plans since her mother's living room and has developed a talent for ranking escape routes by feasibility under pressure.
Option one: Go home. Call Jeffrey. Take the Escalade back to the Holloway estate and sleep in a mansion that has never experienced a plumbing failure because Eleanora Ashford-Holloway would sooner demolish the house than tolerate a dripping faucet. But the commute is ninety minutes minimum.Two hours in morning traffic. Jeffrey would need to have me on campus by five AM for training reps, which means leaving the estate at three, which means Jeffrey's day starts at two thirty, which means I am asking the one man who has never failed me to sacrifice his sleep schedule for the privilege of chauffeuring me through predawn darkness because my university cannot operate its own pipes.
No. Jeffrey deserves better than that.
Option two: Accept Miss Phillip's random placement. Roll the dice on a pack assignment and hope that the Alphas I land with are the friendly, boundaries-respecting variety rather than the territorial, pheromone-flooding, bathroom-hogging variety that constitutes the statistical majority of male pack housing on this campus.
The odds are not favorable.
"Um." I chew my lower lip, the indecision visible in the nervous motion. "I'll have to call my butler and my Dad. But the commute back and forth to my house every day could be a serious issue. It's almost two hours each way, and with morning training at five AM?—"
"She can stay in my dorm."
Archie's voice arrives from behind me with the casual authority of a man issuing a logistical solution rather than making a social proposition. I turn to look at him, my wet hair swinging with the rotation, water droplets scattering from the drenched strands across the lobby tile.
He adjusts his glasses. The gesture is mechanical, practiced, the fidget he produces when he is about to deliver information and wants his hands occupied during the delivery.
"Two of my roommates haven't arrived yet. The dorm is assigned for four but currently occupied by one." He meets Miss Phillip's gaze with the measured directness that I have learned is his default when interfacing with institutional authority."She can take one of the empty rooms until the repairs are finished. It's more practical than a random reassignment, and the commute alternative is unreasonable given her training schedule."
He pauses.
His green eyes shift from Miss Phillip to me, and the analytical assessment softens by a fraction at the edges. His gaze travels downward, cataloguing the state of my clothing: the shirt plastered to my frame from the ceiling waterfall, the fabric clinging to the contours of my torso and my arms and every architectural detail my body possesses that dry clothing normally conceals.
"And she needs to come by and change her clothes anyway." The observation is delivered with the neutral tone of a man reporting weather conditions. "She's soaked."
The blush arrives before I can intercept it. Heat climbing my neck and flooding my cheeks, the warmth competing with the cold of the water still dripping from my hair and puddling in the collar of my ruined shirt.
He is looking at me.
Not the way the Alphas in my mother's living room looked at me, with the evaluative hunger of men assessing a commodity. Not the way the hockey players looked at me during the scrimmage, with surprise converting to respect converting to the reluctant acknowledgment that an Omega had outperformed their expectations.
