Reject Me Again

Chapter3:Ask Me Nicely

Valerie's POV

My office doors opened with that quiet, expensive click that only comes from hardware worth more than most people's houses back where I grew up.

I didn't look up right away. Kept my eyes on the datapad, let the silence sit there and do its job. In pack politics, whoever talks first is the one who's already lost, and I'd learned that lesson the hard way, more than once, in rooms far less comfortable than this one.

I smelled him before he made it halfway across the room. Pine, ice, and underneath all of it, that sour edge of pure desperation. Northern Pack, unmistakably.

"My Queen," someone said, smooth, rehearsed.

I lifted my head. Lord Silas stood in front of my desk, a few new lines on his face but otherwise exactly the man I remembered — head secretary and chief diplomat to the Alphas of the North.

Six years back, I'd slipped on ice hauling a tub of boiling water toward the kitchens, scalded both arms badly enough to blister the skin raw. Silas stepped right over me while I was still shaking on the ground, sobbing probably, though I don't remember that part clearly, annoyed that a filthy Omega was in his way and slowing him down.

Now he was standing in my penthouse, an ocean away from home, bowing his head to me like his life depended on it. Which, honestly, it kind of did.

He had no idea who I was. Not a flicker of it.

He was probably expecting some hulking Alpha behind this desk. Instead he got the suit, the manicured hands, the stillness that reads as danger if you know what you're looking at. An elegant stranger. Not the slave he used to step over on his way to somewhere more important.

"Lord Silas," I said, keeping my voice flat. "You skipped every diplomatic channel we have and demanded an immediate audience. You've got three minutes to convince me my guards shouldn't throw you off this balcony."

He swallowed hard, and for half a second the polish cracked.

"My Queen, forgive the intrusion," he said, stepping closer. "The Northern Pack is facing something we've never dealt with before. We need the Dominion's military."

I leaned back, fingers laced together. "The North has the best defenses on the continent. What could possibly rattle you this badly?"

His hands weren't quite steady as he pulled an encrypted tablet out of his briefcase and set it on my desk.

"We're being attacked by something we can't see," he said, voice dropping. "Supply routes are collapsing one after another. Border villages aren't being raided, they're vanishing entirely. No bodies. No blood. Just empty houses standing there like the people inside just walked off mid-meal."

He wiped his forehead.

"Three of our elite patrols have disappeared in the last month alone. We're losing territory, my Queen. The Alphas are stuck holding the inner walls, and if the outer borders aren't secured soon, the entire pack starves before winter's over."

His eyes went wide, pleading. "We need your army."

I didn't answer right away. Let the clock on the wall do the talking for a while.

"I have three questions," I finally said.

"Anything," he said, too fast.

"How many wolves have died?" Clinical. No warmth in it at all.

He hesitated, weighing what the truth would cost him politically, then decided against lying to me. "Over two thousand across the outer territories, by our estimate."

"How many Omegas?"

That one caught him off guard. Alpha rulers never bothered counting the lower ranks — collateral, nothing more. "I don't have an exact figure. But the border villages skewed heavily toward the lower ranks. Hundreds, at minimum. Possibly over a thousand."

I didn't let anything show on my face. Hundreds of Omegas, left unprotected on the edges of the territory while the elite sat safe behind the inner walls. Some things about the North hadn't changed one bit.

"How many Alphas?" I asked, quiet now.

He shifted his weight, uncomfortable. "None of the high-ranking Alphas have fallen yet. They're well guarded."

I let out a slow breath. Somewhere inside me, my wolf growled, low, a sound I felt more than heard.

"So your leaders finally know what loss feels like," I said.

The words just hung there. Silas actually shivered, his brow pulling together like he'd caught the edge of something old and personal in my voice, some history he couldn't quite place. His mind wasn't built to connect the woman in front of him with a slave he'd forgotten existed.

He cleared his throat and tried to steer the room back.

"We're prepared to compensate the Dominion generously," he said quickly, pulling a leather-bound ledger from his bag. "Access to our silver mines. Ten thousand pounds of gold. Exclusive rights to northern lumber for a decade."

Enough to buy a small country outright.

I looked at the ledger. Then at him.

I laughed — soft, and cold enough that Silas actually flinched.

The sound made every instinct in his body go off at once. He could feel he'd stepped wrong somewhere, even if he couldn't say where.

"Gold isn't what I want," I said quietly.

I opened my top drawer and slid a black folder across the desk until it stopped just short of his shaking hands.

"These are my terms."

He opened it. Watched the color drain out of his face as he read the single page inside.

"This is madness," he said, voice cracking. "You're asking for half the outer territory. Permanent voting rights on the Alphas' private council. Control of every major trade route until the debt's cleared?"

"Those are the terms," I said. "Take them or don't."

He was shaking outright now. "The Alphas will never sign this. It's a surrender of their sovereignty. It's an insult."

"Keep reading," I told him. "You haven't reached the part that matters."

He forced his eyes down the page and found it, small elegant print at the bottom. The only line I actually cared about.

*The three Alpha Kings must present themselves before the Silver Queen in person to sign this treaty.*

He dropped the folder like it had burned his hand.

"Absolutely not," he said, all the polish gone now. "The Alphas don't leave the capital mid-war. They're kings. They don't travel like beggars to some foreign court."

The temperature in the room dropped. My aura pushed out into the space around us, heavy enough that the windows groaned under it.

Silas grabbed at his throat, forced to his knees under the weight of it.

I stood, slow, and looked down at him with eyes that had once looked into the face of a dying Goddess.

"Then let them die," I said, quiet.

I didn't need volume. The certainty in it did all the work.

"The terms don't move," I continued, looking at the man who used to step over me like I wasn't there. "Twenty-four hours. Tell your kings that. When the clock runs out, my borders close for good. Tell Caspian, Cassian, and Ronan — if they want their people alive come winter, they'll walk into my court and ask me nicely."

I pulled the aura back and he gasped for air, scrambling up, grabbing the folder without a word, without a bow, and bolting out the door hard enough to slam it behind him.

The penthouse went quiet, the kind of quiet that only exists after a fight nobody threw a punch in.

I walked to the windows and looked out over Silverfall, all that glittering neon spread beneath me, millions of wolves living their ordinary lives with no idea the ghosts of my past had just walked out my front door and probably wouldn't sleep tonight.

For the first time in six years, my skin started to burn.

The runes across my collarbone and down my spine lit up faintly, pulsing. Not the old ache from the broken bonds. Something else. A hum sitting somewhere deep in me I didn't have a name for yet.

Deep in my mind, my wolf stirred, and her eyes opened, glowing with that same living moonlight.

*One of them remembers,* she said.