His Rival Omega

The university had painted the door of Corbin Hall a hopeful shade of green, as though fresh paint could make an experiment respectable.

Rosalia Farinelli stood on the pavement and read the brass plate twice. Co-Educational Residence, Est. 1928. Behind her, Paolo hauled the second trunk off the car and set it down with the reverence of a pallbearer.

“Your father says—”

“My father says a great many things.” She pulled off one glove, finger by finger. “Most of them at dinner, where I can’t escape.”

“He says if you want to come home, you come home.”

“I’ve been here four minutes, Paolo.”

“He wanted it said.”

She looked up at the fourth-floor windows, at the September light sliding off the glass, and felt something in her chest settle into place like a bolt shot home. Three years of law school. Her own rooms. A residence full of strangers who knew the Farinelli name only from newspapers, if at all.

“It’s been said. Take the trunks up.”

Apartment 4A sat at the end of the corridor, past doors propped open on other people’s chaos—a girl weeping over a broken gramophone, two boys arguing about Coolidge. Her key turned smoothly. She stepped inside.

The scent reached her before anything else did—cedar and whiskey and cold rain, laid through the rooms like a flag planted in fresh ground. Her body knew it a full second before her mind caught up, and that second was unforgivable.

Conan McDermott was standing at the window with his shirtsleeves rolled, hanging his coat on a peg as if he had lived there all his life.

Rosalia stopped. The trunk in Paolo’s arms hit the floor behind her.

Six years. Six years of boarding school debates that had to be adjudicated, of stolen essays and sabotaged dances, of his grin across every room she had ever tried to own. He had got bigger since June. That seemed unnecessary.

He turned. His eyes went from her face to her luggage and back, and she watched the whole future arrive in him at the same moment it arrived in her.

“No,” she said.

“Agreed.”

They took the stairs separately and reached the housing office within a minute of each other, which was humiliating for everyone involved.

The registrar, a soft-jawed man named Flores, looked from the omega in the burgundy coat to the alpha filling his doorway and visibly wished himself elsewhere. “There has been,” he began, “a clerical—”

“Fix it,” Rosalia said.

“Reassign her,” Conan said.

“Reassign him."

Flores consulted a ledger with trembling dedication. “The difficulty is that the experiment is fully subscribed. Every apartment is taken. There is one alternative.” He brightened as though offering them the moon. “A single room. Ground floor. Beside the boiler.”

Silence took the office by the throat.

Rosalia considered the room beside the boiler. One of them could take it. One of them could pick up their luggage, walk downstairs, and concede—in front of the registrar, in front of God, in front of the other—that they could not hold a position.

She looked at Conan.

Conan looked at her.

He was already smiling, the bastard, because he had done the same sums she had and reached the same total.

“We’ll manage,” he said.

“We will.”

Flores blinked. “You’ll—both of you—you’re certain? The two of you together, given—” He stopped himself just short of naming what everyone in New York knew better than to name.

“Given what, Mr Flores?” Rosalia asked pleasantly.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Welcome to Corbin Hall.”

They climbed the four flights in single file and did not speak until the door of 4A closed behind them.

The apartment was decent, she granted it that. A sitting room with a fireplace and two armchairs that had never met each other socially. A kitchen the size of a confession booth. One bathroom, which she refused to think about yet. Two bedrooms.

His trunk was already on the bed of the larger one.

“You’ve been here an hour,” she said.

“Forty minutes.” He leaned in the doorway of his stolen territory with his arms crossed. “You’d have done the same.”

“I’d have done it faster.”

“You’d have measured both rooms first. With a tape.”

She had, in fact, intended to measure both rooms. She turned away and began drawing off her other glove so he couldn’t see her face. “Keep it. It faces the street. You’ll get the trolley bell at five every morning and I want you to think of me each time.”

“Farinelli.”

“McDermott.”

“Ground rules.”

She placed her gloves on the mantel, aligned them at the edge, and gave herself a moment. Somewhere below, Paolo was carrying up the last trunk and, no doubt, composing the report he’d deliver to her father—the McDermott whelp, in her apartment, Don Farinelli—and by Friday there would be a family council about it, and she would survive that as she survived everything, by arriving with a better argument than anyone else in the room.

“No ground rules,” she said, turning. “Rules are for people who intend to behave.”

Something flickered through his face that on a less irritating man she might have called delight.

“Kitchen’s shared,” he said. “Bathroom’s shared. Your study group stays out of my—”

“You don’t know that I have a study group.”

“You’ve had a study group since you were fourteen. You collect followers like a saint’s day procession.” He nodded at the wall of her room. “That side’s yours. I won’t cross it.”

“You crossed the Connecticut state line in ’24 to put an eel in my rowing boat.”

“That was never proven.”

“It had your handwriting on it, McDermott. The eel arrived with a note."

“Circumstantial.” He tipped his head, studying her, and she stood still under it because flinching was a currency she never spent on him. “You know what the housing office thinks is going to happen here. Rival packs. An alpha and an omega under one roof. Flores’s probably drafting his resignation as we speak.”

“Flores thinks you’ll bite me or I’ll shoot you.”

“And you let him keep thinking it.”

“It seemed kinder than the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That whatever’s left of you when I’m finished won’t be worth burying.”

He grinned at her then, wide and easy as a Sunday, and it was the same grin he’d worn at sixteen when the debate master had ordered them to separate podiums for the good of the school. Neither of them had ever needed teeth or commands. He’d tried the alpha voice on her exactly once that first term, and she’d looked at him as if he’d offered her a wilted flower, and something in the pack-order of the world had quietly rearranged itself around the two of them ever since.

He picked up his coat, then paused with it half on, as though a thought had strolled into him casually off the street. “The professors here don’t know us. The students don’t either. Clean slate, if we wanted one.”

The offer hung there, so obviously a trap that she nearly applauded.

“A truce,” she said.

“An economy. War costs money. Ask either of our fathers.”

She crossed to her own bedroom door—the smaller room, the quiet one, and she would find a use for that eventually, she always did—and looked back at him with her hand on the frame.

“My father can afford it,” she said. “Goodnight, McDermott.”

His laugh followed her through the closed door, and she stood in the dark of her new room among her stacked trunks and let herself smile where no one could bill her for it.

She unpacked until midnight. Below her window the city went about its evening—a trolley grinding past, a newsboy crying a late edition, two drunks harmonising about a girl named Peg. Somewhere south of here her father was sitting down to dinner with men whose loyalty he weighed nightly like a jeweller, and somewhere west the McDermotts were doing the same in a different accent, and the son of that house was hanging his shirts twelve feet from her bed.

She’d write to her mother that the experiment was going well. It was even close to true.

The silk went into the wardrobe, the law books onto the shelf in order of jurisdiction, and the small flat pistol into the drawer of the nightstand, beneath a copy of Blackstone that her father had inscribed: To the future. Aim carefully.

Through the wall she could hear him moving around—a trunk lid, a window sash, the creak of a man too large for university furniture. It should have grated. She had spent years engineering entire seasons of her life to avoid that sound.

She fell asleep before she could examine why it didn’t.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

Morning came in grey through unfamiliar curtains, and she rose with the plan already ordered in her head: coffee, then the registrar’s final papers, then the law faculty at nine to begin her real life. The coffee mattered. It had come from her mother’s own supplier in the old neighbourhood, dark as sin and twice the price, packed in a red tin she had carried up four flights herself because Paolo could not be trusted with anything that rattled.

The kitchen smelled of it already.

She stopped in the doorway. The percolator sat on the stove, still warm. One cup, washed and drying on the rack. And in the exact centre of the table, placed with a precision that no accident could counterfeit, stood her red tin.

Empty.

Propped against it was a card, cream stock, and his handwriting had improved since the eel but she’d have known it in her sleep.

Welcome home, Farinelli.