Page 10 of Prospect’s Curvy Beekeeper

The Ignition. That's what the gossip network calls it. Christie at the Cozy Cup whispered it to me once when Kevin Reyes first dragged Lexi out of the weekend market. A click that happens to the prospects in the Broken Halos MC. A soul-deep lock that rewires their existence around one person.

I told Christie it sounded like a psychiatric condition.

Now, holding a frame of brood in the shadow of a fortress built by a man who looked at me like I was the only breathing thing on the mountain, the psychiatric condition sounds terrifyingly real.

I slide the frame back into the box and pull the next one. The queen is there, a long, dark abdomen moving gracefully over the comb. She's laying winter bees. The fat, healthy workers that will keep the cluster warm until spring. She's secure. Guarded. Safe.

I slide the frame back and replace the lid, pressing my palm flat against the wood. The vibration hums through my skin.

I look south, toward the tree line. The dense pine corridor that leads to the Ridge Road, and eventually, to Crimson Hollow.

The Syndicate has been marking my trees with neon orange tape for fourteen months. Every time I find a marker, I scrape it off. Every time they cut a wire on my fence, I patch it. I’ve called the sheriff, filed the reports, and been ignored. The men from Crimson Hollow use my land as a thoroughfare, a strategic chokepoint into Pine Valley, and I’ve been standing in their way with nothing but a hive tool and a stubborn refusal to yield.

Alas is out there right now.

A knife-wielding prospect who found a place to aim his rage.

My stomach tightens. A low heat coils in my center, distinct from the cold morning air. It’s the memory of his frame filling the doorway. The dark intensity in his eyes when that single bee landed on his thumb and he didn't flinch.

He didn't claim the property. He claimed the war.

I pick up my smoker, the metal handle warm against my canvas glove. I move down the line to the next hive. Box after box, frame after frame. The routine grounds me. The smell of wax and smoke settles my racing pulse.

By the time I finish inspecting the twentieth box, the sun is fully over the eastern ridge, casting long, golden shadows across the meadow.

I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist. I’m exhausted, but the creeping, icy dread that usually accompanies my morning inspections is gone. The windbreak does what it was designed to do. My bees are safe from the downdraft.

I start walking back toward the honey shed, my boots kicking through the tall grass.

Then I see him.

Alas emerges from the southern tree line.

He moves in silence, his shoulders rolling with a fluid, terrifying grace. He’s wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, exposing the ropes of muscle and the dark ink crisscrossing his forearms. He’s carrying a coil of neon orange surveyor's tape in his left hand.

He pulled down their markers. Every single one.

He doesn't walk toward the farmhouse. He walks straight toward me.

I stop by the uncapping tank just outside the shed, my hand tightening on the smoker. My heart hammers against my ribs, a fast, frantic rhythm that has nothing to do with fear.

He closes the distance, his boots crushing the grass. His face is a hard, emotionless mask of stone, but his eyes—dark, burning with an unanchored intensity—are locked onto my face. He doesn't look at the hives. He doesn't look at the windbreak he spent the night building. He just looks at me.

He stops two feet away. He drops the ball of crushed orange tape onto the ground between us.

"South trail is clear," he says. His voice is a low scrape that vibrates through every bone in my back.

He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't boast. He just states a fact. The boundary is held.

I look down at the tape, then up at his face. The dark circles under his eyes give away his exhaustion, but his posture is rigid, ready to deploy violence at a moment's notice.

I think about the isolation I’ve clung to for two years. The desperate, suffocating need to do everything myself.

I look at the windbreak behind him.

"You built a wall," I say, my voice embarrassingly breathless.

He doesn't blink. He just stares down at me, his chest rising and falling in slow, measured breaths.