Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
On the second Tuesday of every month, Axel removed his pack and their families' personal information from the internet.
Certain websites collected people's private data, full name, age, current home address, and the names of their relatives. They then sold that information to anyone with twelve dollars.
He went down his list one person at a time, every pack member, every mate, every parent and sibling and baby attached to Steel Protection.
When he found one of them listed, he filed the request that took the listing down, then flagged it to check again later.
Axel worked from the corner desk on the ground floor of the Steel Protection Building at 1019 Main Street. He had multiple monitors, a laptop and a tablet and coffee going cold at his elbow.
Near the front, Valeria Reynolds-Steel ran the phones with Adrian's playpen behind the desk. Adrian threw a plastic dinosaur over the rail for the fourth time that morning. Axel stood, grabbed the dinosaur, and placed it back in the little wolf's hands.
He went back to work and found a broker site with a fresh listing.
Adrian Steel, age one, indexed as a relative under Dominic Steel, Fate Mountain, Oregon.
Fourteen months old and already for sale.
Axel filed the removal, set a recheck flag, and added the site to his watch list. Nobody was buying his alpha's son's information for twelve dollars.
He ran his own name through these sites every month too. Axel Rivers, born in Denver, Colorado. No results found. Because Axel had been scrubbing his information as long as he knew how. And he had no relatives that would put him back on these sites.
He'd been days old when someone left him at a fire station a few blocks off the South Platte River.
No note, no name, no one ever came to claim him.
The state named him that week. Axel, for the fire truck, because that was where they found him.
Rivers, for the South Platte that ran past it.
It'd been his name for thirty-two years.
His first shift came at age five in a backyard in Aurora.
The foster placement ended that day. After that, his placements rarely lasted long.
He kept his things where he could grab them fast because he knew he'd be leaving soon.
Somewhere in Colorado there might have been people who shared his blood, but no one ever came for him.
He'd had a knack for computers since second grade.
If there was a computer lab in whatever school he landed in, he would make it his second home.
A caseworker handed him a secondhand laptop when he was twelve.
When the state was done with him at eighteen, he taught himself to become a hacker.
By twenty he was paying rent with gray hat work and making people disappear. He was good at it.
Dom found him after Axel had scrubbed a client Dom was protecting. He and Siren traced the work back to its source, and Dom offered him a job that day. Axel had been with Savage Steel for nine years now, and it was the first pack Axel had ever belonged to.
The front door of Steel Protection opened, and Ryder and Hunter walked in.
"Blaze bought Stella new shoes and changed them for her in the middle of the diner," Ryder said. "On one knee. In front of the whole breakfast crowd. A tourist took a picture. He's embarrassing the whole crew."
"Get a mate," Hunter said, and went past Axel to the door to the stairs. On Tuesday afternoons, Hunter picked up his daughter from Brie's mother, Maisie, while Brie ran Sweet Summit Bakery.
Everyone in the pack was pairing up and having children. Dom had Valeria and Adrian. Siren had Reed and a cottage, and Saturday night folk music at the Fate Mountain Brewery. Blaze had Stella and a baby coming at the end of summer. Axel's wolf huffed inside him. It was an old lonely ache.
Blaze came in twenty minutes later and set a diner container on Axel's desk. "Burger and fries. How's the data site scrubbing going?" Blaze leaned on the desk and looked at the monitor. "Is my mother-in-law on there?"
"Lily's clean. Shane had two listings that popped back up from his TV years. But they're dying now." Axel opened the container. The burger smelled delicious. "Thanks for lunch."
"Family rate." Blaze knocked twice on the wood and walked toward the door to the basement gym.
Axel ate at his desk and felt the familiar comfort of being remembered by the pack. Underneath it, he felt the loneliness he usually kept buried until he was alone. Dom came into the room, picked up Adrian, and stood at Axel's shoulder, looking down at the screens.
"You get them all?" Dom asked.
"I did. I'll add Stella and Blaze's baby when he comes." Axel had already built the placeholder entry.
Dom shifted Adrian to the other arm. "Valeria wants me to tell you, her mom invited the whole pack to their house for Sunday dinner. The zucchini and corn came in all at once, so Rosa is making calabacitas to use it up. Come hungry."
"I'll be there."
Adrian leaned out from his father's arms and drooled on Axel's desk.
"Sorry," Dom said. "He's teething."
Axel just laughed. In all the years he'd known Dominic Steel, he'd never imagined him holding a drooling baby. Until he found Valeria on mate.com.
Axel had joined the shifter dating app soon after arriving in Fate Mountain.
The questionnaire had asked what vegetable he would be.
He'd typed asparagus. You plant it and wait three years before it gives you anything.
Then it comes back every season for decades.
For the photo he had used one Ryder took at a Fourth of July barbecue a few years before.
Axel had watched everyone but Ryder find their mates. Hunter had avoided his match during a stakeout. Siren pretended she made a mistake. Blaze had charged down to the diner for Stella, even though he'd been banned.
As Axel was stretching, he realized it had gotten dark outside. Then he looked at the time on his computer. It was long after closing, so he shut down his computers and prepared to leave.
He spotted Adrian's dinosaur on the floor near his desk, got up, and set it on the front desk where Valeria would find it in the morning. He'd been the dinosaur's night custodian for about a month now, and he liked the job.
He went upstairs to his apartment at the end of the hall. The living room flowed into the kitchen in an open layout. A deep charcoal sofa faced a walnut coffee table.
Floating shelves along one wall held his collection of soul, blues, and jazz records. He pulled a record from the wall, Sam Cooke's Night Beat. He bought it in Denver the same month he bought his first record player. Axel put it on the turntable and went to the kitchen to make dinner.
He cooked chicken thighs in a steel pan and rice in a rice cooker. He ate on the small café table by the window. Main Street was growing quiet below, shop lights turning off one at a time. While he ate, he picked up his phone and opened the mate.com app.
He scanned his matches. Ninety-one percent, a woman holding a fish. She had messaged him once, two years ago. But the truth was, only a one hundred percent match was a shifter's fated mate. Eighty-seven, a sunset photo with no face in it. Eighty-four, a human who'd been inactive for over a year.
After he finished eating, he washed his dishes and tried not to listen to the lonely sound of his inner wolf's lament.