All Chapters of DENY ME IF YOU CAN: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

She went.Zara told herself it was strategy. That walking into a private meeting with the Alpha of an enemy pack, alone, at midnight, was simply the most efficient way to neutralise the problem. Acknowledge the bond. Agree to ignore it. Return to her duties.She was a warrior. She didn't run from problems — she walked toward them and ended them.That was what she told herself.The Ironfang fortress at night was a different creature entirely. The torches had burned low, casting long amber shadows across the stone corridors. The servants had vanished. The other delegates were in their assigned quarters. Zara moved through the dark with the silent ease of someone who had trained for exactly this — heel to toe, breathing controlled, every sense open.Kade's message had come via a folded scrap of parchment slipped under her door. No signature. Just a location: the east tower, midnight. Come alone.She had her blade at her hip. Two more strapped to her thighs beneath her dress. She was not

The summit's second day began with a body.One of the Silverblood delegates — a junior diplomat named Fen, twenty-three years old, who had laughed too loudly at dinner and spent the evening writing letters home — was found dead in his quarters at dawn. No wound. No sign of struggle. His face was peaceful, as though he'd simply stopped.Poison. Everyone with a working nose could smell it.By the time Zara arrived, the great hall had become a court of accusation. Six packs, six Alphas, and the specific, ugly energy of frightened wolves looking for someone to blame."The vial was found in the Silverblood guest quarters," said Alpha Renwick of the Stoneclaw Pack, his voice carrying across the stone hall with practiced authority. He was older, silver-haired, politically ambitious in the way of men who had survived three decades of pack politics by always being on the winning side. "The poison is a Silverblood compound. I think the question of responsibility is fairly clear."Zara kept her

The Silverblood Pack's great hall had never felt smaller.Zara stood before Alpha Reyn and said it plainly, the way she said everything — no softening, no political cushion, just the facts laid bare like weapons on a table. The forged letter. Lena's disappearance. The rogues in the east tower. The coordinated precision of it all, the intelligence behind it, the conclusion she had spent three sleepless days on the road turning over until it was smooth and irrefutable.Someone engineered this war. Someone close to us.Alpha Reyn listened. He was a large man, silver at his temples, with the kind of face that had learned to give nothing away in sixty years of leading wolves. He'd been Alpha since before Zara was born. She respected him the way she respected a cliff face — ancient, immovable, and dangerous if you forgot to pay attention.When she finished, he was quiet for a long moment."You're telling me," he said finally, "that you met privately with the Alpha of the Ironfang Pack. Alon

The ceasefire lasted six hours.It was called at dawn by mutual, unofficial agreement — the kind that happened between exhausted armies when neither side had the numbers for another push and the wounded needed collecting before they died in the frost. No formal declaration. Just the fighting stopping, by consensus, the way weather sometimes did.Zara was in the field before full light.She worked with her healers, moving through the no-man's-land between the lines where the previous day's fighting had been thickest. Silverblood wounded first, then any others she found breathing. Her wolves watched her do it without comment. They'd served under her long enough to know she didn't leave people in fields.The frost had come in hard overnight. Her breath made ghosts in the cold air.She was crouching over a young Stoneclaw wolf — alive, barely, a chest wound she'd have her healers see to — when she heard the footsteps. Controlled. Deliberate. Coming from the eastern side of the field.She

The evidence took four days to reach her.Lena's records were hidden in a hollow beneath the floorboards of an inn three miles outside Silverblood territory — a dead-drop she'd been using for two years, maintained with the discipline of someone who had always known, somewhere in the cold interior of her heart, that the day would come when she needed an exit. Dorin's team retrieved them on the third day. Zara spent the fourth studying every page by lantern light in her tent while outside the ceasefire frayed at its edges and both armies shifted and watched each other with the coiled energy of something about to spring.The records were meticulous.Names. Dates. Payments routed through three proxy trading houses. Correspondence carefully preserved, in which Drest's coded language — once you had the key, which Lena provided — was devastatingly clear. Instructions for the summit. The forged letter's template. The identity and payment records of the rogue wolves from the east tower.And at