Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Nell’s phone pinged beside her laptop. Evening traffic moved below the tall windows, tires rushing over pavement still wet from the afternoon rain. The mate.com icon appeared on the screen with an alert.
Congratulations! We’ve found your fated mate.
Nell’s eyes widened as she tapped the screen. She’d signed up years ago, when she’d started at the Bright Institute. For all that time, she’d been waiting.
100% MATCH: Young Wolf
A small picture of Ryder appeared beside the match percentage.
Nell stared at the screen. Ryder? How could it be? She tapped the match, and his full profile opened. The photograph came from a family barbecue. His broad shoulders and thick muscles filled out a gray T-shirt. Her wren hurtled toward Ryder with such force that Nell almost dropped her phone.
She caught it against her chest, and the contact only gave the frantic wingbeats beneath her ribs somewhere to pound.
Her wren wanted out. She wanted to fly across the miles between Portland and Fate Mountain.
She wanted Ryder close enough to touch, close enough to breathe in. Nell needed his arms around her.
“Ryder.” His name broke out of her with a laugh.
Joy rushed in behind it, hot and enormous.
Of all the men mate.com could have found, it had found him.
The person she called when she had news.
The person who could make her laugh on a bad day.
Her eyes flooded. She pressed her fingertips to his face on the screen, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.
Ryder was her mate.
Nell pressed the phone to her chest. The fierce need she felt now collided with the memory of the day they first met.
That night, after she’d escaped her captors and flown to the hotel, Ryder had sat with her while Steel Protection rescued the rest of the girls.
Her wren had always felt safe with him. But she’d never felt the mate pull before now.
Her happiness turned painful at the thought of all that missed time.
Ryder was her mate. Ryder, who’d been there at the worst moment of her life.
Ryder, who could make her laugh when she least expected to and smile even when everything else felt awful.
How could she have known the comfort of his voice, the shape of his arms, and the loss of him leaving without ever feeling mate recognition? Nell opened their messages.
Nell: Apparently you’re my mate.
The typing indicator appeared almost at once.
Ryder: Do you feel it?
Nell: Yes. My wren recognized you as soon as I opened your profile. This is crazy.
His answer came back before she could write more.
Ryder: Yeah. Me too.
Nell looked at Ryder’s photograph again.
Nell: I’m really overwhelmed right now. I need to understand how we could have known each other all this time without either of us recognizing the mate bond. Give me a little while to research. Talk soon.
Ryder: Okay. Tell me when you’re ready.
Nell set the phone down, turned to her laptop, and made her first search.
Why didn’t I recognize my fated mate? It brought up advice columns about fear of commitment, arguments over whether distance weakened the bond, and people insisting that a real mate response could never be missed.
A mate.com help page explained what to do if a match notification failed to load.
None of it answered how two shifters could know each other for eighteen months without recognizing the bond.
Nell searched again. Finally recognized mate after knowing him for years. Then suddenly recognized longtime friend as mate.
This time she found forum threads from shifters describing delayed mate recognition.
One woman had known her mate since college before recognition hit years later.
Another man claimed he and his eventual mate had worked together for nearly a decade before either animal reacted.
Half the replies contradicted the other half.
Nell scrolled through the rest of the forum’s search results. A thread titled Didn’t recognize my mate for three years had more than four hundred replies. The original poster was a doe shifter who’d met her eventual mate after an apartment fire.
He was the firefighter who carried me out of my burning building.
He stayed with me while the paramedics checked me out.
But as soon as he left, I almost had a panic attack.
I thought it was just anxiety from the fire and thought nothing of it as I recovered.
I went back to work, found another apartment, and went back to my life.
Three years later, I was on a date with a guy who’d kept pestering me to go out with him.
I saw the firefighter across the restaurant.
Suddenly it hit me that he was my mate all along.
The thread wandered through arguments, stories that didn’t fit, and people diagnosing each other.
Near the bottom, the original poster linked the shifter-health specialist who’d treated her.
The specialist called the condition context-masked mate recognition.
That search led Nell to a clinical review.
The review had other stories like the doe’s.
A wolf met his mate during a flood evacuation, a lynx while recovering from an assault, and a bear after an accident.
Each had felt drawn to the person during the crisis but had mistaken that response for trust, safety, or dependence.
Mate recognition happened only later, when something changed or they saw that person differently.
Nell looked at Ryder’s picture again. Mate.com made Nell see Ryder as a possible mate for the first time. Until then, she had only ever thought of him as her best friend. She called him and he answered.
“Tell me what you found.”
“There’s a documented shifter mate recognition condition called context-masked mate recognition,” Nell said. “It can happen when mates first meet during severe trauma.”
“Okay. Sounds relevant.”
“The medical review said the animal can respond to a mate without the human side understanding what the response means.” Nell looked at his picture again. “After the rescue, I thought the way my wren responded to you was because you made me feel safe.”
“So why now?”
“The mate.com match put us in a new context.”
Her wren trilled inside her, demanding she drive to him in Fate Mountain.
“Why did you make the profile tonight?” she asked.
“I was at a wedding gig. It got to me. I spent all day watching two people start a life together, and I kept thinking about you. I thought there’s no way I could have you, since you weren’t my mate.
I figured I should find out who is. So, I signed up.
” Ryder was quiet for a moment. “I need to see you. I’m coming to Portland. ”