All Chapters of DENY ME IF YOU CAN: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The message came at midnight on the second day.Not from Reyn. From Dorin, whose handwriting Zara knew as well as her own, in the short clipped code they had developed over six years of working together in situations where full sentences were a luxury.RC compromised. DA knows. Run.RC — Reyn's Council. DA — Drest's agents.Zara was on her feet before she'd finished reading.She had prepared for this. Some cold, unsentimental part of her had known from the moment she'd walked out of Reyn's hall with his two-day promise that two days was two days too long, that Drest had survived nine years in the inner circle of a canny Alpha by being faster than the people trying to expose him, and that the moment Reyn began verifying the records — the moment he made even one quiet inquiry — someone in that process would carry the word back.She had prepared. It didn't make it easier.She strapped her blades on in the dark, muscle memory doing the work while her mind ran ahead. The records — she had

They made camp in the ruins of an old watchtower two miles east — far enough from both lines that neither army would find them before dawn, close enough that they could be back before anyone realised they were gone.Sera was shaken but unhurt. Lena had a deep cut on her cheekbone and two cracked ribs from the handling she'd received and endured both with the grim stoicism of someone who had decided pain was irrelevant to the task at hand. Kade's two wolves — who had appeared from the eastern treeline like shadows once the fighting was done — tended the wounded with quiet efficiency.Zara sat on a broken stone and let someone clean the burn on her left forearm where the farmhouse wall had gotten her on the way out, and watched Kade across the small fire they'd permitted themselves.He was talking to Sera in a low voice — not an Alpha to a subordinate, just a man making sure an old woman was warm and breathing and had not been broken by the night. Sera was responding with what appeared

The room emptied the way rooms did after long, consequential things — slowly, by degrees, with the particular reluctance of people who had been present at something significant and were not entirely ready to stop being present at it.Reyn passed her on his way out. He did not look at Kade. He did put his hand briefly on Zara's shoulder — not approval, not instruction, just acknowledgement — and then he was gone.The Ironfang Beta General followed, with a nod in her direction that she returned. The last two coalition Alphas. The guards, at a discreet signal from Kade that she caught from across the room.And then there was no one left except the two of them, in a stone hall in a neutral town, with the war three hours dead between them.He crossed the room. She stood where she was.He stopped six feet away, and she looked at him in the clear grey daylight coming through the high windows — the cut on his brow, healed now to a thin pink line. The scar at his throat. The pale eyes that had

Kade's pack was less diplomatic about it.He had expected this. He had ridden back from Ashford with Hadrik — his Beta General, who had the blunt, patient quality of someone who had served an Alpha long enough to be able to say the difficult thing without softening it — and Hadrik had said it approximately three miles from camp."The wolves are going to take it badly," Hadrik said."I know.""Not all of them. But enough.""I know, Hadrik."A pause. "She's Silverblood, Kade.""I'm aware.""She killed four of ours in the Tuesday engagement.""She killed four of ours in a war that Drest built from the inside of both our packs. And she pulled two Stoneclaw wolves out of the field during the ceasefire when she had no obligation to." He kept his eyes on the road. "I'm not asking the pack to love her. I'm asking them to accept the situation.""They might ask why they should accept a situation their Alpha created without consulting anyone."Kade was quiet for a moment. This was the thing Hadr

She hadn't planned to stay the night.That was the truth of it — she had ridden to the Ironfang camp with three days' provisions out of habit, not intention, and when the sunset meal at Brix's fire stretched into an hour and then two and the cold came down hard and fast off the ridge, it was Sera who said, with the authority of a woman who had decided to have opinions about this situation: "Don't be foolish. The road back is ice by now. Stay."Zara had stayed.Kade had said nothing when Sera made the pronouncement, which she was coming to understand was his version of agreement. He'd had a tent prepared — her own, not adjacent to his, not symbolic of anything except logistics — and she'd accepted it with the same practicality she applied to all field arrangements.She lay in the dark at the edge of the Ironfang camp and listened to the sounds of a different army settling into night, and found they were not as different as she'd expected. The same voices, in different registers. The sa