Bear by Zoe Dawson

He listens to the silence. She was born to break it.

Dakota “Bear” Locklear walks like a shadow, grounded, watchful, and steeped in the quiet strength of his Lakota bloodline. As a SEAL, he doesn’t waste words. But when his team is deployed to South America on a joint-agency rescue op, the land stirs beneath his feet…and silence becomes impossible.
Bailee Thunderhawk is the team’s embedded CIA liaison, sharp, relentless, and trained to keep her distance. But distance gets complicated when a missing journalist and an undercover CIA operative vanish on sacred ground tied to a string of Indigenous disappearances no one is talking about.
The official intel is sparse. But the whispers on the ground speak of something older and far more dangerous.
What begins as a search and extraction spirals into something far more personal forcing Bear and Bailee to confront the history they carry, the secrets they’ve buried, and the fire that still burns between them.

Because some truths don’t want to stay hidden. Some spirits don’t rest. And some love stories are written in the blood of those who vanished, waiting to be found.
Sometimes the path home isn’t a place. It’s a man whose silence speaks in the language of the ancestors.