Chapter 3: Judgement 

Roxie shoved through the office doors, blind with tears, rage, blind with the kind of grief that swallows every other sense of her.

She didn't see him until she'd already jam him.

Her shoulder slammed into him, he didn't move, didn't give an inch like running full speed into a stone wall dressed as a man. The impact knocked her back a step, jarring pain up her arm, and for one disoriented second all she registered was heat and size and the low, electric hum of danger pressing against her skin.

She looked up.

He was massive. Broader through the chest and shoulders than any wolf she'd ever seen in the pack, standing with a stillness that felt more threatening than any snarl. Dark eyes, sharp as knives, studied her with an unreadable calm. Behind him stood a wall of warriors, six of them, all dressed in black, all radiating the same coiled, silent violence.

She should have been terrified.

She wasn't.

There was nothing left in her tonight for fear. Jaxon had taken that. Chloe had taken that. Her father had taken whatever scraps were left. So instead of flinching, instead of dropping her gaze the way instinct screamed she should, Roxie stared straight into the stranger's eyes, furious, wrecked, defiant and held it a beat too long.

Then she shouldered past him and kept walking.

She didn't apologize. She didn't look back.

Behind her, she heard something she had never once heard in her entire life.

Her father's voice was cold, commanding, arrogant Alpha Thomas Blackwood but now shaking.

"Y-Your Majesty." The words came out strangled, pitched with a terror she'd never known him capable of. "Forgive me, I didn't realize you'd arrived so soon, I would have…."

Roxie kept walking. Whatever had her father's voice trembling like a pup in a thunderstorm wasn't her problem anymore. Nothing was her problem anymore. She just wanted to disappear into the dark and never come back.

At the office doorway, the man Roxie had walked straight into turned his head, dark eyes tracking the direction she'd gone.

"Who is that girl?" Alpha King Magnus asked. He didn't even acknowledge Alpha Thomas Blackwood courtesy, His voice was quiet. Quiet in the way that made grown warriors go still.

Thomas swallowed hard enough that Magnus could probably hear it. "She…she is my daughter, Your Majesty."

Magnus said nothing for a long moment. His gaze remained fixed down the empty corridor, as if he were still turning something over in his mind, cataloguing it.

"Your child lacks discipline and morals," he said finally, flat and final, like a verdict already carved in stone.

Thomas's face went the color of ash.

"Your Majesty, please, I…" He was already stammering, already unraveling in front of his own warriors, in front of his own pack. Roxie's proud, cruel father, who'd never once bowed his head for her, was bowing it now, fast and low, for a stranger's displeasure. "She's unranked. Wolfless. She doesn't understand proper conduct, I swear to you she will be corrected."

He spun toward the two warriors flanking his office door, voice cracking with panic.

"Go bring Roxie back here right now!"

The warriors moved instantly, boots pounding down the corridor after her.

Magnus said nothing. He simply watched, arms loose at his sides, letting Thomas scramble and grovel without offering a single word of reassurance. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, broken only by Thomas's increasingly desperate voice.

"She will apologize, Your Majesty. Face-to-face. Immediately. I promise you, this will not happen again, I will have her disciplined myself, I promise."

Magnus's expression didn't shift. He was still displeased.

It took less than two minutes for the warriors to drag Roxie back.

They hadn't been gentle. One gripped her arm hard enough to bruise, hauling her back down the same corridor she'd just fled through, ignoring her attempts to twist free. She didn't fight very hard. What was the point? There was nowhere left to run to, no one left who wanted her, nothing left to protect.

They shoved her forward, and she stumbled into the space between her father and the towering stranger, catching her balance at the last second before she could fall.

She lifted her head.

Alpha Thomas stood rigid beside her, jaw clenched, eyes darting between his daughter and the King like a man watching two live wires about to touch. Across from her, Alpha King Magnus stood exactly as still as before, dark eyes settling on her face with the same unreadable calculation from the hallway.

Roxie didn't bow.

She didn't drop her eyes, didn't soften her shoulders, didn't do a single one of the things terrified pack members were supposed to do in front of an Alpha King. She just stood there, bruised cheek and split lip and grease-stained dress, staring back at him with the last, stubborn ember of defiance she had left.

"Roxie." Her father's voice snapped like a whip, urgent and furious. "Apologize to His Majesty this instant, for your disrespect, or so help me—"

"I don't want her apology," Magnus said.

The words cut clean through Thomas's sentence, quiet but absolute, and the entire hallway seemed to hold its breath at once.

Thomas blinked, thrown completely off balance. "Your Majesty?"

"I don't want it," Magnus repeated, dark eyes never once leaving Roxie's face. "An apology means nothing from someone who clearly doesn't feel remorse for her action.."

Thomas's composure cracked wide open. Sweat beaded along his hairline despite the cool night air. "Then…then what would please you, Your Majesty? Anything. Name it. I will see it done immediately, whatever you require, I'll make sure to see it done."

For the first time since he'd stepped into that hallway, Alpha King Magnus's gaze sharpened, locking onto Roxie with an intensity that made the air around them feel thinner, heavier, like the moment right before a storm broke.

Roxie held that gaze. She didn't know what else was left to lose tonight. She'd already lost the mate bond, the man she loved, the sister she used to trust, and whatever illusion she'd carried about her father actually caring what happened to her. There was nothing this stranger could threaten that hadn't already been taken from her in the last hour.

Magnus's voice, when it finally came, dropped low, flat, final, absolute. A guillotine falling in slow motion.

"She should be banished.”