Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Siren Cross sat alone in Steel Protection Headquarters long after everyone else had gone up to their apartments.
The shops on Main Street were all closed, and traffic had thinned to a trickle.
The coffee in her mug was cold when she sipped it.
She then pulled up another financial record on her computer.
High Timber Holdings. Incorporated in Delaware. No Physical Address. No Listed Officers. It owned a smaller company that owned a smaller company that had made payments to a security consulting firm that didn’t seem to exist anymore.
The money moved in circles. Every time she thought she’d found the center, it dissolved into another layer of offshore accounts. She’d been building this case for eighteen months. Ever since Steel Protection arrived in Fate Mountain and her alpha, Dominic Steel, had been accused of murder.
Siren, who was an ex-military intelligence officer, had started seeing patterns no one else could see.
The sabotage attacks on the local businesses had been too coordinated for small-time actors.
The fire at Hampton Orchard. The contamination at the brewery.
The equipment failures at the construction sites.
It was professional work. Done by operators that required serious funding and serious expertise.
The corporate face of Crown Mountain Development, Jason Prescott, had been exposed and prosecuted. After the murder of Becca Matthews and the apprehension of Frank Dalton, law enforcement believed the threat was over. Siren knew better.
Prescott was a front man. And the fact that Becca Matthews was still looking for the connections and had been eliminated for it, meant the real money came from somewhere else.
Siren sensed the shape of the conspiracy like a shadow at the edge of her vision. Every time she reached for it, her fingers closed on air. The mercenaries who’d carried out the attacks had never been identified. They were still out there. She could feel them operating.
The pattern was there. Properties were purchased at below market prices in the months after each attack.
Someone was profiting from the destruction, buying up distressed assets and sitting on them.
But the buyers were shell companies, and the shell companies led to other shell companies, and eventually the trail disappeared into offshore accounts she couldn’t access.
Siren closed the laptop with a dull thud and took the stairs to the second floor, frustration cold in her chest. The building was quiet as she passed Hunter’s apartment.
His mate Brie had moved in with him a few months back, after everything with the Winter Festival.
Just last week, Hunter had told the pack he and Brie were expecting their own bundle of joy.
Dom’s corner unit was dark. He was probably asleep with Velaria. Baby Adrian was five months old now, and Dom had become the kind of father who left meetings early for bath time and carried baby photos on his phone to show anyone who would listen to him gushing.
Siren’s apartment was next to Dom’s. She unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The space was sparse. There was a simple living room set, an open floor plan with a serviceable kitchen.
No decorations on the wall. No evidence that a person lived here.
She was ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Ready to become someone else if the situation required it.
Siren had been an operative for so long, she didn’t know how to be anything else.
She pulled a bottle of Maker’s Mark from a cabinet and poured two fingers of whiskey. Taking a sip, she crossed the room to the window that looked out on the street and let the burn settle into her chest.
It had been fourteen years since she’d walked into the Army recruiting office in Bakersfield on her eighteenth birthday. She’d had a duffel bag with everything she owned and a need to be anywhere other than where she was.
Her father had died when she was twelve. He was a wolf shifter from a small pack in the Sierras. He’d mated with her mother, a human who never wanted to be changed, and they tried to build a quiet life together.
Siren remembered his warmth and the safety she felt when he was at home.
The rumble of his voice when he read to her.
The way his wolf let her curl against his fur when she couldn’t sleep.
He taught her to track, to hunt, to trust her instincts.
Then a logging truck had crossed the center line on Highway 178, and he was gone.
Her mother had shattered. That was the only word for it.
A human who’d lost her shifter mate, the bond severed like a limb being torn away.
She’d tried to fill the emptiness with other men, a parade of boyfriends who ranged from useless to dangerous.
The last one, when Siren was seventeen, had looked at her in ways that made her wolf bristle and snap.
When she told her mother, she chose him.
There had been nothing left for her to stay for.
The Army had given her structure, purpose, a place where being cold and calculated was an asset.
The military valued what shifters brought to the table—enhanced senses, faster healing, endurance that humans couldn’t match.
And recruiters actively sought shifters out for combat roles and special programs.
Her wolf had made her a good soldier, and for the first time in her life, the thing that made her a freak among humans became an asset.
She’d started in military police, but her instructors noticed something in her.
The way she could read people. The way she stayed calm when others broke. They then moved her into intelligence.
She’d been good at her job. Good enough to get noticed by people who were looking for a special kind of talent.
The cultural support team selection had nearly broken her.
It was designed to wash out anyone who couldn’t keep up with special operations.
It pushed candidates past exhaustion into something primal.
Something her inner beast almost relished.
They experienced sleep deprivation, forced marches, psychological pressure designed to find the cracks. 60% of the women who started didn’t finish.
Siren finished. Her wolf gave her reserves of endurance that human women couldn’t tap, and in CST selection, that edge was the difference between washing out and making it through.
They attached her to a ranger battalion in Afghanistan.
She went on night raids into compounds where the women and children held secrets the operatives couldn’t access.
She’d searched the women, talked to them, gathered intelligence while the rangers cleared rooms around her.
Sometimes the missions went smoothly. Sometimes they didn’t.
She remembered the first time she had to shoot someone. A compound outside Kandahar. A fighter had come through a doorway she was supposed to be covering. She’d put two rounds in his chest before her brain caught up with what her hands were doing.
She’d completed night raids and interrogations. The kind of work that didn’t make it into official reports. She learned to read a room for threats in the time it took to blink. Learned that she could do terrible things and still sleep at night.
Dom had been running a team she worked with on her third deployment. Special operations. He was another wolf, and she knew it. Scented it immediately. And he’d clocked her just as fast.
He’d treated her like an operative. When a mission went sideways in Helmand Province, and she’d dragged a wounded ranger two hundred meters to extraction while returning fire, Dom had been the one to debrief her after.
He’d looked at her with those steady eyes and said, “You’re wasted in support roles. ”
The nickname Reaper had come from an interrogation that had broken open an IED network responsible for killing eleven Americans.
The detainee had been a hard target, trained to resist. She’d broken him in six hours without leaving a mark.
The intel had led to fourteen kills in a single week.
One of the rangers had started calling her Reaper and it stuck.
When Dom left the army to start Steel Protection, he’d called her.
She was burned out on deployments, and tired of military bureaucracy.
He’d offered her a place in his pack. He wanted to build something new.
Something real. They were wolves who protected shifter communities from the threats the human world didn’t want to deal with.
She followed him without hesitation. It was the first time since her father died that she’d belonged anywhere.
Six and a half years later, Fate Mountain had become their forever home. Steel Protection was her pack. Her family. A family she’d chosen instead of the one that had failed her.
But none of the men in her pack knew what she looked like when the walls came down. None of them ever would because she’d built those walls for a reason. The things behind them weren’t meant for sharing.
She’d watched her mother crumble after losing a mate. Watched her try to replace something irreplaceable and destroy herself in the process. Siren had promised herself she’d never be that vulnerable. She’d never need someone so much that losing them would break her.
At thirty-two years old, she was sitting in the dark, wondering if being alone was protection or just another cage.
Her thoughts drifted the way they did when she was tired and let herself have a drink.
When Dom had mated with Valeria, something had softened in him.
He was still their alpha. Still commanded the room without saying a word.
But he smiled more. Laughed more. Talked about the future like it was something to look forward to, instead of just another mission to plan for.