Reject Me Again

Chapter 5: Bound to Her Again

Valerie's POV

The war room in the North was hot enough to sweat in, but somehow the air still felt like ice.

Tactical maps covered the ironwood table, red markers scattered across them marking every outpost they'd already lost. Cassian stood at the head of the table, hands braced on the wood, eyes burning with the kind of fury that comes from being exhausted for too long, from watching things fall apart faster than anyone could patch them. Ronan sat off to the side, a casualty report in his hands that he'd clearly read three times without a single word of it landing.

The doors swung open.

Caspian walked in, and he didn't look like the man who'd left a week ago. Rigid posture, sure, but his face had gone pale in a way that said something worse than bad news was coming.

Cassian straightened, crossed his scarred arms, and let out a scoff.

"Well?" he said, mocking. "Did she send you home crying, brother? Tell you we weren't worth her precious mercenaries?"

Caspian didn't answer. He walked to the table, slow, deliberate, and pulled the black folder out of his coat, dropping it onto the maps with a dull thud.

He looked up at both of them.

"It's her," he said.

The room went silent enough that even the fireplace seemed to quiet down.

Cassian's smirk died. "What are you talking about? Who?"

"Valerie." Caspian said the name like it cut on the way out. "The Silver Queen. Whoever's holding this continent by the throat. It's Valerie."

"That's not possible," Cassian snapped, slamming a fist into the table hard enough to c***k the wood. "That little Omega is dead. We threw her out into the snow six years ago. She was nothing. A slave. She can't be dictating terms to kings."

"She's not just dictating terms." Caspian's voice had gone hollow. "She has spies in this room, Cassian. She knew our patrol routes better than I do. She's not a frightened Omega anymore. She's something closer to a god."

Cassian started pacing, back and forth like something caged. "No. It's a trick. Has to be." He dragged a hand through his hair, and underneath the denial was something he wasn't ready to look at — if the Silver Queen really was Valerie, then the woman tearing their enemies apart was the same girl he'd treated worse than dirt.

Across the room, Ronan hadn't moved at all.

The color had drained out of his face completely. He was staring at nothing, at the wall, while a memory he'd buried for six years clawed its way back up — the blood in the snow, the gates slamming shut, standing there watching her shiver in the dark and wanting so badly to go after her, his whole body straining against the decision he never made.

He never did. He stayed behind those walls because he didn't have the nerve, and that particular failure had followed him into his sleep for two thousand nights straight. Now it was sitting on a throne.

"We were wrong," Caspian said.

Nobody said anything after that. For a man whose whole identity was built on getting things right, on cold, flawless calculation, admitting that out loud probably cost him more than any battlefield order ever had.

"We threw away our mate," he went on, voice tight. "And we handed the most powerful weapon on this continent straight to the people we were supposed to be protecting ourselves from. She hates us. She's earned that."

Before Cassian could get another denial out, the doors slammed open again.

A scout stumbled in, armor cracked, face streaked with soot and dried blood, and dropped to his knees in front of the table, out of breath.

"Alphas," he choked out. "Ironhold's gone. Breached an hour ago. The whole battalion, wiped out. They're marching on the capital."

Dead silence. Ironhold had been their last real line of defense.

This wasn't about a hard winter anymore if they refused the treaty. This was about whether the North survived at all.

Caspian didn't hesitate. He grabbed a pen off the table, flipped to the final page, and signed. It wasn't only about the army. He wanted to see her again, wanted the chance to prove, with something more than words, that he wasn't the man who'd broken her.

He passed the folder to Ronan.

Ronan's hand shook as he took the pen. Something else was burning in him as he signed — if she'd become this powerful, then the prophecy that forced them to reject her had to be a lie. Someone had manipulated that prophecy, stolen his mate, and wrecked her life doing it. He wasn't just signing for troops. He was signing himself up to find whoever had pulled the strings.

The folder went to Cassian last.

He stared at his brothers' names on the page, jaw clenched tight enough to hurt. Then he grabbed the pen and slashed his signature onto the parchment. He wasn't interested in sitting in guilt. If Valerie was alive and sitting on a throne, then she was a prize, and he'd win her back the same way he won everything — through sheer stubbornness.

All three of them, bound to her again.

Hundreds of miles away, the lights of Silverfall dimmed into that quiet stretch of hours right before dawn.

I sat alone in my office, the only light coming off the datapad in my hand. The city was asleep. My mind wasn't — running through troop deployments I'd send north the second that treaty came back signed.

A knock broke the quiet, soft, evenly spaced.

Something in my wolf stirred, hackles rising before I understood why. "Enter," I said, one hand resting near the dagger hidden under my desk without really thinking about it.

Anya walked in. Not carrying a report this time. Carrying a small, worn wooden box.

"Courier showed up at the lower perimeter ten minutes ago," she said, suspicion thick in her voice. "Hooded. Got past three layers of alarms without tripping a single one before he even reached the guards. Said this was for the Queen."

I stood up, frowning. Nobody got past my alarms. Nobody.

She set the box down and stepped back, hand resting near her sidearm.

I unlatched the rusted hook and the lid creaked open.

I stopped breathing for a second.

Sitting on black velvet was a broken iron collar, rusted, chipped, dark stains soaked deep into the metal where they'd never quite come out. My blood. The exact collar that had snapped off my neck the night of the Choosing, six years ago, the one I'd assumed had been melted down or thrown into some forgotten pit.

My hands started shaking. I reached in, fingers brushing the cold iron, and found a folded piece of parchment underneath it.

I pulled it out.

Jagged, elegant handwriting, silver ink that seemed to shimmer even in the low light.

*The man who sold you into s*****y knows you've returned.*

All the blood left my face. My heart was slamming against my ribs hard enough that I could feel it in my throat. I knew that handwriting. I'd seen it once before, a long time ago, scrawled in the margins of forbidden spellbooks buried in the deep archives, back before the war, before the chains, before I even had a name people used out loud.

The Alphas were never the real threat. The rogue armies hitting the North were just noise, a distraction dressed up as a war.

Someone with real power had been orchestrating every terrible thing that ever happened to me, and he'd been waiting patiently in the dark for me to finally take the throne.

"Anya," I said, and just saying his name in my head turned my blood cold. "Lock down the city."

"My Queen?" She looked alarmed. "Who sent it?"

I looked back down at the silver ink, at everything I thought I understood about my own past collapsing in on itself.

"Lord Kaelen," I said.