Page 21 of The Rust in Her Hair

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.