Reject Me Again

Chapter 4:The Beggar in Her Court

Valerie's POV

The armored SUV wound through mountain roads on the way into the heart of the Silver Crescent Dominion. In the back seat, Caspian sat completely still, the kind of stillness that takes effort, the kind that comes from holding something down.

He'd read the treaty a dozen times since Silas dragged it back to the North in a panic. Cassian wanted to declare war over the insult of it. Ronan kept saying they should wait, think it through, weigh their options before doing anything rash. Caspian, the one who actually did the thinking for all three of them, saw something the other two hadn't.

The terms were brutal. They were also perfect.

Every clause landed exactly where the Northern Pack was weakest — the trade routes, the border concessions, the council seat. It read like a plan built by someone who understood the North better than the North understood itself. Running his finger down the parchment, Caspian couldn't shake the thought that kept circling back: *this could've been written by me.* Whoever built this treaty thought the way he thought. That was the part that unsettled him.

He'd volunteered to make the trip alone. He wanted to look this Silver Queen in the eye and understand her before he signed away half of everything his people had.

The SUV slowed at the gates of Silverfall. He expected a fortress, something built out of fear the way the North was.

What he got didn't make sense.

No cages. No Omegas kneeling in mud. Instead, a pack of kids — Alpha and Omega both, no separation between them at all — chasing a ball through a garden right outside the government building, laughing like none of them knew what a hierarchy even was, like the idea of rank had never once been explained to them.

He stepped out into the cold morning air and found an honor guard waiting. Not hulking Alphas. Female Omegas, armed, in tactical gear, watching him with the kind of eyes that didn't flinch and definitely didn't bow.

Inside, a woman with a faded slave brand still visible on her neck was giving orders to a cluster of wealthy Alpha merchants — men who, back home, would never have let an Omega speak first, let alone tell them what to do — and they were listening to her.

Something tightened in Caspian's chest. This unsettled him more than any army could have. This wasn't just new territory. This was proof that everything the wolf world believed about how things had to work was wrong, that the whole structure he'd spent his life defending was optional. Whoever ran this place wasn't just a queen. She'd rewritten the rules entirely.

A silent escort brought him up to the top floor, to a pair of heavy mahogany doors.

"The Queen expects you," the guard said, already pushing them open.

Caspian straightened his jacket and pulled the mask back on, the same cold, unreadable one that made him the most feared diplomat on the continent. He walked in ready to face down a tyrant.

A woman sat behind the desk, head down, signing something. Tailored charcoal suit, effortless in a way that made the power obvious without her saying a word.

Then she looked up.

He stopped moving. His heart slammed into his ribs hard enough to hurt. Whatever air was in his lungs left all at once, and the mask he'd built over decades just came apart.

He knew those eyes. He'd watched them look up at him from the frozen ground of a courtyard. He'd watched them break as he tore his soul out of hers.

It didn't make sense. None of it added up, no matter how many ways his mind tried to reassemble the pieces. But there she was — the woman holding his entire kingdom hostage — and she had the same face as the slave he'd thrown away like garbage.

"Valerie..." Her name came out of him like something ripped loose.

She didn't gasp. Didn't stand. Didn't give him a single flicker of satisfaction at watching his composure fall apart in front of her.

She set her pen down, glanced at the watch on her wrist, and looked back at him with eyes that gave nothing away.

"You're late."

He took a step forward, and the ache from the broken bond — buried under six years of duty and control — clawed its way up and grabbed him by the throat. He wanted to drop to his knees. He wanted answers.

"Valerie, I..." He raised a hand that wasn't steady. "I don't understand. Six years ago, you were—"

"Business first." Her voice cut clean through the room, and it left no room for argument.

She pushed a blue dossier across the desk toward him.

"Sit, Alpha Caspian. We're not here for the past. We're here because your empire is burning."

He sat, mechanically, his mind still spinning from seeing her, but her tone left no room to disobey. He opened the folder.

"Your border villages aren't being hit by rogues," she said, leaning back. "Page three."

He forced himself to focus. Intercept logs. Patrol routes. Troop movements only the high council should ever have had access to.

"Someone inside your own leadership is handing your schedules to whoever's attacking you," she said, no pity in it at all. "They know when your borders thin out. They know where your Omegas hide. This isn't attrition, Caspian. This is someone dismantling you from the inside."

He stared at the reports. Dates, times, missing patrols — all of it lined up too well to be coincidence, too clean to be random bad luck. The scale of the betrayal turned his blood cold. But what actually terrified him was her. He was supposed to be the best strategist alive, and she had better intelligence inside his own home than he did. She understood his pack's weaknesses better than he understood them himself. She'd been playing a game he hadn't even realized had started, let alone that he was already losing it.

"Who is it?" His voice came out tight, furious. "Who's the traitor?"

She closed the folder and rested her hands on top of it.

"That's information for my allies. Right now you're a beggar in my court." She tapped a finger against the black folder Silas had carried home days earlier. "Are you signing the treaty or not?"

He looked at the terms again. Looked at the woman he'd rejected to protect his people, and realized — he was the one who'd built her into this.

"Valerie, these terms will cripple us," he said, reaching for whatever diplomatic ground he had left, trying to find the girl underneath all of it. "Half our territory. The trade routes. I can offer you something else. I can offer—"

"I don't negotiate." Her eyes locked on his, and that was the end of it. "You accept every condition exactly as written, or I sit here, drink my coffee, and watch your beloved Northern Pack fall apart. Your choice."

There was no bluff behind her eyes. No warmth hiding underneath the cold. Whoever had wept for him once was gone, and the woman in front of him had built her throne out of the wreckage of that rejection.

He stood slowly. He couldn't sign it, not without bringing this back to Cassian and Ronan first.

"I'll take this to the council," he said, gripping the folder hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

She didn't respond. Just picked her pen back up and returned to her paperwork, dismissing him like he was staff.

He walked out through the oak doors.

In the elevator, he looked down and realized his hands were shaking — actually shaking, for the first time in his adult life. The great Caspian, the man who ran on pure logic, the man who had never once let an emotion touch a decision, couldn't get himself steady.

Back in the office, the doors clicked shut behind him.

A section of the bookshelf slid open, and Anya stepped through — tall, scarred, dressed for war even in an office. Valerie's chief military adviser, commander of the Omega forces.

She walked up and glanced at the chair Caspian had just left empty.

"He took the bait," Valerie said, not looking up.

"For the Alphas?" Anya asked, arms crossed.

Valerie paused, and a slow, dangerous smile pulled at her mouth, lit up by the city lights outside the window.

"No," she said. "For whoever's hiding behind them.”