He ended his set with “Take Me Home Country Roads.” The John Denver classic that never failed. By the second verse, everyone was singing, clapping along. The room was full of voices and warmth and joy that came from making music together. He sent them out with a high note.
The applause at the end was loud and warm. Reed thanked the crowd, thanked Danny, and thanked Max. A few people drifted toward the front door or out onto the patio.
“Good stuff tonight,” Danny said, handing him the memory card from the board recording
“I can’t wait to mix it at home.”
After he’d finished packing up his things, he went out onto the patio to collect his recorder. The night had turned cool with the late spring chill from the mountains. His recorder was right where he’d left it. The red light was still blinking. He stopped the recording and tucked it into his pocket.
Chapter
Two
Siren Cross sat alonein 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. Itwas 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 timeand 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.
