“Morning.”
Dom gave him an appraising look. Blaze knew that Dom saw everything. It was one of the reasons he’d followed him out of the fighting pits in Thailand without asking questions. The other reason was that Dom had been the first person in seventeen years who looked at him without flinching.
“Where am I today?” Blaze asked.
“I need you to check in with the Cascade Timber account.”
“What’s it about?”
“Some kid is pissed off about losing his job. He’s been sending threatening letters. Knock on his door, look big, talk slow. Take Ryder along on the doorstep visit. He needs to see one done right.”
A few minutes later, Blaze was riding shotgun in one of the company’s Suburbans. Ryder had a podcast on, something about cryptids, and he kept trying to make Blaze weigh in on whether Bigfoot was a shifter cover-up.
“Bigfoot is humans seeing bears,” Blaze said.
“That’s what they want you to think.”
They did the south-end loop. Ryder kept up a steady stream of commentary the whole drive. Half of it was funny. The other half, not so much. The kid was all right. But he was young and talked a lot.
Cascade Timber was a forty-minute drive up the highway, then up a logging road that climbed into the hills. The smell of cut cedar filled the air when they stepped out of the car. There were stacks of milled lumber under tarps and the whine of the blades through the open bay door. The foreman, a bear shifter named Hal Beckett, met them in the parking lot. He was Blaze’s height, gone soft in the middle, sawdust on his jeans, and his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He shook Blaze’s hand.
“Appreciate you boys coming up,” Hal said.
Hal walked them through the latest letter in his office. It was the same as the others. Threats against the mill, threats against Hal’s wife, a vague line about the saw line. Hal wasn’t sure if it was a real threat or just talk. Blaze read it once and decided it was talk.
“He’s not going to do anything,” Blaze said. “He’s writing letters because it’s all he can do. But I guarantee the talk stops today.”
They drove back down the logging road and out to the kid’s address.
“You’re quiet on this one. Just watch,” Blaze said.
The letter-writing kid lived in a double-wide in a trailer park outside of town. The smell of stale weed wafted through the door when he answered it. His eyes went to Blaze, then to Ryder, then back to Blaze. Blaze told him who he was and who he worked for. He told him what the letters had said. He told him that the letters were going to stop.
The kid started to argue. Blaze let him get two sentences in. Then he took one step forward, and the kid went silent.
“The letters stop,” Blaze repeated. “You’re not going to drive past the mill. You’re not going to call. You’re not going to email. If we have to come back here, it’s not going to be a conversation.”
The kid nodded. His hands were shaking by the time Blaze turned to go. They got back to Steel Protection in the early afternoon. Axel was at his bank of monitors with his headphones on. Valeria was on the phone with someone, voice low and patient, the way she talked to clients. Adrian was asleep in the playpen with a teddy bear Blaze had given Valeria for her baby shower.
Blaze finished the report on the kid with the letters. When he was done, he headed to the break room for water. He heard Siren laughing halfway down the hall and stopped in the doorway. Her mate, Reed Bright, was at the counter making sandwiches. Siren was bent over the counter beside him, leaning on her elbows, watching him with puppy-dog eyes.
Blaze had known Siren for seven years. He had seen her shoot a man between the eyes, point-blank. He had seen her interrogate a hostile in a basement in Memphis and walk out with everything they needed in under an hour. He had seen her go three weeks without saying a full sentence to anyone. He had never seen her look at anyone likethat.
Reed said something Blaze couldn’t hear. Siren blushed and giggled. Siren “Reaper” Cross… giggled. She then leaned up and smooched Reed on the cheek. Reed grinned and ran his thumb over her cheekbone, gazing into the eyes of a killer.
Something shifted in Blaze’s chest that he couldn’t identify. The deadliest woman he’d ever known was acting all lovey-dovey with a computer nerd who wrote love songs. Blaze’s wolf sat up and paid attention, the way a wolf watches another animal that has something it wants.
He turned around and went upstairs. His apartment door shut behind him, and he sat down on the couch. He thought about Siren and Reed. Dom and Valeria. Hunter and Brie. They’d all met on mate.com.
Blaze pulled out his phone.
He thought about going for another run. He thought about a lot of things. Anything that would make him stop feeling whatever he was feeling. Anything that would make him forget Reaper Wolf making googly eyes at that folksinger in the breakroom. He opened the App Store and searched for mate.com.
After downloading, he opened the app. The signup screen was bright and friendly and hit him like a small physical assault, all those smiling shifter couples in their soft clothes living their soft lives. He almost closed it. But he made himself start a new profile.
Username: Fighter Wolf. Age: Thirty-four. Species: Wolf shifter.
Photo. He scrolled through the few pictures he had. Most of them were taken on jobs. He chose one Ryder had snapped of him at the brewery that summer.
