All Chapters of DENY ME IF YOU CAN: Chapter 21 - Chapter 25

The Inter-Pack Council chambers were nothing like a battlefield.Zara had been in enough of both to know that this was worse.Battlefields were honest. The threat came at you with a face and a direction and you met it or you didn't. The Council chambers in Valdenmoor — the neutral city, the ancient seat of inter-pack law, all cold marble and high ceilings and the accumulated weight of seven centuries of decisions — operated on different principles entirely. The threat here had no face. It moved in corridors and whispers and the careful language of people who had spent their lives weaponising procedure.She had been here four days and she already missed the ridge.Drest's trial had been formally convened three weeks after Ashford. Six judges — one from each of the major packs, selected by a process she had spent two days studying and still found opaque — and a Council Advocate who would present the charges, and a Defence Counsel who would contest them, and the slow, grinding machinery

Judge Sellane was sixty-one years old, from the Ashenvale Pack, and had the face of someone who had spent four decades making difficult decisions and had not yet found one that broke her.Zara liked her immediately.They met in Sellane's private office at the seventh hour — before the primary testimony, before the chamber convened, while the city was still grey with early morning and the rest of the delegation was sleeping. Kade was beside Zara at the table, his presence formal and deliberate, the signal that this came from both packs. Hadrik had the Arren documentation. Zara had the Vaine ledger evidence.They presented it in twenty minutes. Sellane listened without interruption, which was itself a form of intelligence — she didn't need clarification because she was already three steps ahead of where the presentation was going.When they finished, she was quiet for a long moment."Councillor Vaine has served on this body for thirty-five years," she said."Yes," Kade said."This evide

The courtyard was small and warm and entirely real.Stone walls on three sides, a brazier in the centre burning steady against the winter night, a handful of tables occupied by city wolves who had no interest in inter-pack politics and showed it by not looking up when Zara and Kade came in. A woman behind the small bar who brought wine without being asked and food without lengthy discussion and then left them alone.Zara sat across from him and looked at the brazier and felt the specific unfamiliar sensation of having nowhere to be and nothing to defend and no decision pending that required her immediate attention.She was not good at this. She had known she was not good at this. She was discovering that the extent of her not-being-good-at-it was somewhat larger than she had estimated."You're doing it," Kade said.She looked at him. "Doing what.""Cataloguing the exits."She was. She had done it when they walked in — two exits, the bar entrance and a side door near the east wall, sig