Space fiction novel about a woman who finds an alien who later may become attached to her as a soulmate

Question

1. First character I remember is a woman (on a planet setting) who finds or defends from an alien who later may become attached to her as a soulmate.
2. Setting moves to space/space stations- The alien love interest (perhaps name similar to hawk or hawk like behaviors?) is animalistic, gives her a secret formula to mate her to him, and prolong her life. Potentially DNA altering.
3. Alien is a secret, deadly, powerful race that may be in hiding or gone.
4. Space politics involved, bounties.
5. Storytelling perspective possibly switches from woman.
6. Book was read in the last 10-12 years, and is part of a larger series.
7. No "Earth" setting recalled.

Answer 1

This sounds like David Weber's novel The Path of the Fury 1992, which he later expanded and published as In Fury Born in 2004.

Path of the Fury and the later re-issuance with new material and a full prequel novel as In Fury Born.

The alien was actually one of the Greek spirit/god/myth furies, and was the last of its kind, the others having just faded away.

Later she steals a high tech one of a kind AI controlled spaceship. (Thus the bounties on her.)

UNLEASH THE FURY!

Zhikotse. Shallingsport. Louvain. Sacred fields of battle on far-flung worlds where warriors of the Imperial Cadre spent blood and lives defending human civilization. Alicia DeVries was there; she led the charge. Her reward? Betrayal by a deceitful empire. Retirement to obscurity.

Now Alicia is the only survivor of a brutal attack on her frontier-world family. Not since the mighty Achilles has the ancient spirit of the Fury Tisiphone taken up residence inside a human being. But not since Achilles has a warrior so skilled, so implacable, and possessing so much battle sense sprung up among the mass of humankind. Hero of the Empire. Holder of the Banner of Terra. There is a blood price to be paid. The Fury has awakened.

The Fury is more or less a spirit, who is able to keep her alive until help arrives to heal her, and then reactivate her super soldier implants/augments which had been deactivated when she was forced to retire.

She goes on a personal mission of vengence against the pirate/organization that raided the frontier world her family had settled on, killing her family (and a lot of the small population) in the raid.