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.
Hunter. The loner of the pack. The one who’d always kept himself apart, even when he was standing right next to you. Now he had Brie. The baker from Sweet Summit, who smiled like sunshine, made gooey pastries, and looked at Hunter like he’d hung the moon. Siren had watched them together.
She’d seen the way Hunter’s whole being oriented towards Brie when she was in the room. Like she was magnetic north and he was helpless to point anywhere else. It should have been ridiculous. The hardened bounty hunter and a woman who decorated cupcakes for a living. But it wasn’t ridiculous. It was real and it was changing him. Siren couldn’t pretend she wasn’t envious.
Both Hunter and Dom had found their mates through mate.com. It was a shifter dating site that found fated mates with 100% accuracy. She’d dismissed it for years. Why would she let an algorithm decide her fate for her? It seemed ludicrous and impossible.
But her pack mates had found their fates through the app. And Dom and Hunter were happy in a way that Siren had never seen before.
She reached for her phone before she could think better of it and opened the app store. She typed mate.com in the search bar and downloaded the app. While it loaded, she thought about howstupid and weak this was. What would a match even look like for someone like her? For someone who’d done the things she’d done. For someone who had become a reaper.
After the app downloaded, the welcome screen glowed in the dark room, cheerful and inviting. “Find your perfect match,” it promised. She laughed and almost closed it. Instead, she crossed the room and poured herself another drink before sitting down on her small couch.
She created an account before she could talk herself out of it and moved through the prompts like she was executing an operation. Quick, efficient, minimal exposure. For her username, she chose Reaper Wolf without hesitation. That was who she was. For her bio, she said, “Security specialist. Not looking for games.”
It was a warning more than an introduction. If that scared someone off, good. It should.
The vegetable question made her pause. It was weird and quirky. “If you were a vegetable, what would you be?” She wrinkled her forehead and almost swiped off the app but instead typed jalapeño.
When she finished the questionnaire, she had to choose a profile photo. She scrolled through her camera roll and found almost nothing. No selfies. No candid shots with friends. No record of her life outside of work. Finally, she found one Valeria had taken at Steel Protection a few months back and then sent to her.
Siren was in conversation, not looking at the camera. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders, and her sharp eyes were focused on Blaze. She was wearing a leather jacket and dark jeans. She wasn’t smiling, but at least she didn’t have a scowl on her face.
She uploaded the photo, and her finger hovered over the submit button. Everything in her wanted to delete it and pretend this never happened. Signing up for a dating app was not who she was. It wasn’t what she wanted to be. She didn’t put herself out there or make herself vulnerable. She certainly didn’t let an algorithm decide her destiny. But she’d come this far, and she wasn’t a quitter. She hit submit.
As soon as the profile loaded, the app pinged.
She stared at the screen. This wasn’t possible. She’d been on the platform for thirty seconds. There was no way the algorithm had already matched her with her fated mate. But the notification was there, glowing on her screen. 100% match. Her wolf surged inside her, need flooding her senses. She tapped the notification, and his profile filled her screen.
Username: Folk Bear.
The photo showed an attractive young man with shaggy blonde hair. He was on stage somewhere, an acoustic guitar in his hands, playing and singing a song. His blue eyes were crinkled at the corners. His face was warm, open, and welcoming.
Her wolf whined inside her mind, her instincts telling her that Folk Bear really was her mate.
