บททั้งหมดของ DENY ME IF YOU CAN: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

They divided the work the way they divided everything — by instinct, without lengthy discussion, each taking the piece that matched their particular skills.Kade took Arren.He did this through twelve years' worth of inter-pack political records, which his delegation had brought in seven crates that now occupied most of the floor space in their private room, and through Hadrik, who had the specific gift of finding the thread that connected things that appeared unconnected. By the end of the first day they had mapped Arren's voting record across thirty years of Council decisions and found a pattern — not dramatic, not obvious, but consistent: in every case where Drest had a stake, Arren had found a procedural reason to rule in his favor. Seventeen times in thirty years. Quietly. Never the deciding vote. Always the supporting one.It was not proof of conspiracy. It was proof of alignment, which was a different and more slippery thing, and the question was whether it was enough.Zara too

Lena's formal statement took three days.Zara sat in on none of it. That was the correct thing — the statement needed to be Lena's, unmediated, given directly to Sellane's clerk with Sellane present and no friendly faces in the room to influence the telling. She understood this. She also found it very difficult, in the way she found all things difficult that she couldn't control or move through quickly, and she managed it by spending the three days working through the border committee documents with a focus that Dorin described privately as alarming.On the second day, Kade found her in the small private room at the end of the evening.She was on the third revision of a supply route analysis. She was aware this was excessive.He sat down across from her without announcing it and looked at the papers and then at her."She's all right," he said."I know.""Sellane is careful with her. The clerk is—""I know, Kade." She set down her pen. "I know she's all right. I know Sellane is careful

The internal review took six weeks.Zara spent the first two in Valdenmoor, the next two between Valdenmoor and the Silverblood pack house, and the final two entirely at home for the first time in three months, sleeping in her own bed and eating food that wasn't field rations and training with her wolves in the morning the way she had for fifteen years before any of this had started.It was good. It was also strange, in the way that returning to a familiar place after a long time away was always strange — the place was the same and you were different and the gap between those two facts required adjustment.She adjusted.The review body, under Sellane's quiet and precise authority, moved faster than inter-pack legal bodies traditionally moved, which Zara attributed to Sellane's apparent decision to treat the investigation as a personal mission and the review body's apparent decision not to argue with her. By the end of the first week they had confirmed Vaine's connection to Drest — the

The deliberations took four days.Zara spent them in the city because there was nothing else to do with the time — the testimony was complete, the evidence submitted, the proceedings in the hands of four judges in a closed room. She walked. She ate. She slept more than she had in months. She visited the city registry once, for no professional reason, simply because the archivists had been unexpectedly kind during the three days she'd spent in their stacks and she had brought them a small and probably inadequate token of recognition that they received with more genuine pleasure than she'd anticipated.She spent the evenings with Kade.Not the courtyard every night — the city was full of other places, and they worked their way through them with the methodical thoroughness that was apparently a shared characteristic and which she was finding she liked: a covered market on the second evening, a quieter tavern on the third, on the fourth night simply the rooftop of the building where the I

The village had no name that anyone outside it used.The locals called it Endmere, which meant something in an old dialect that Kade translated as approximately where the land runs out, and Zara thought this was either the most depressing or the most honest name for a place she had ever heard, and concluded it was probably both.They arrived on a Thursday, two days after the Ashford ceremony, having ridden west with no escort — a decision that Dorin had registered an opinion about and that Hadrik had received in silence, which from Hadrik was the equivalent of a strongly worded objection, and which both of them had overruled on the grounds that four months of constant observation had earned them two days without it.The western coast in winter was not the western coast of summer — she understood that, intellectually, but the reality of it was something different. Vast and grey and cold, the sea hitting the stone cliffs with a force that you felt in your chest more than heard, the ligh