Page 33 of Prospect’s Curvy Beekeeper

I look at the hive line. Two hundred colonies of bees. Millions of lives depending on me. I look at the farmhouse where my grandfather taught me how to smoke a hive without burning my fingers. I look at the honey shed where, just days ago, Alas shattered my isolation against the uncapping tank and vowed to bury anyone who stepped on this grass.

Retreating means losing. Running means giving the Syndicate what they want.

I turn back to Alas. The protective rage vibrating under his skin is anchored to my decision.

"Tell Logan we're staying," I say, my voice ringing clear and steady in the cab. "We hold the line."

A dark, lethal smile spreads across Alas's face. The pride radiating from him is unmistakenable. He clicks the button on the side of the radio.

"Negative, VP," Alas growls into the mic. "The farm stays occupied. Anyone comes up the south trail, they don't go back down."

"Copy that, prospect," Austin replies, a hint of dark amusement in his tone. "Give 'em hell. Out."

Alas clips the radio back to his belt and hits the gas, driving the truck the rest of the way up to the farmhouse.

We spend the afternoon fortifying. Alas moves with military precision. He boards up the lower windows of the farmhouse. He checks the sightlines from the front porch. He cleans his combat knife, the scrape of the whetstone echoing across the quiet meadow. I work the hives, moving methodically down the line, checking the frames, and making sure the sugar syrup feeders are full.

By the time the sun dips below the western ridge, painting the sky in violent shades of bruised purple and blood orange, the temperature plummets. The cold howls, crashing against the windbreak Alas built. The structure holds perfectly, sheltering the hives in a pocket of still air.

I fire up the smoker, the scent of pine smoke filling my lungs. Dusk is the most dangerous time to open a hive, but I need to check Colony D—the stubborn Russian hybrids.

Alas walks out of the tree line and joins me at the boxes. He doesn't wear a veil. He doesn't wear gloves. He simply stands beside me, an immovable object.

I pull the lid off Colony D. The bees boil up instantly, an angry, buzzing mass of protective heat. They form a dark cloud, circling the air, hunting for the threat. But the threat is standing right next to me, still.

The bees drift toward his bare arms. They land on the fresh white bandages covering his knuckles. They crawl across his scarred forearms, their tiny wings vibrating. They don’t sting. They recognize the apex predator in their territory, and they accept his presence. He’s their newly appointed guardian.

I slide the frame back into place and close the lid, puffing a final stream of smoke to calm the stragglers.

Alas watches the bees crawl off his skin and return to the wooden box. He turns his head, his gaze locking onto mine in the fading light.

"Mine," he says quietly, gesturing to the hives, to the dirt, to me.

"Yours," I confirm, the word slipping past my lips without a single ounce of hesitation.

The bond clicks into place, snug as a hive lid settling home. The two years of crushing, lonely responsibility finally lift off my shoulders, transferred onto the shoulders of the man standing beside me. I step closer, leaning my side against his solid arm.

Alas wraps his good hand around my hip, pulling me flush against his side. His thumb digs possessively into my waist. We stand there in the mountain dusk, watching the south trail. The Syndicate is coming. The war is at the doorstep. But as the smoke drifts over the meadow, I know with bone-deep certainty that I’m where I’m supposed to be, and I’m finally not fighting alone.

10

Alas

Dusk falls over the bee farm. The sun bleeds out behind the jagged spine of the western ridge, leaving the sky bruised purple and cold. The temperature drops fast at this altitude. The mountain wind howls down the southern trail. The same trail I cleared last night with bare hands and a combat knife. The same trail the Silver Serpent Syndicate tried to claim with paper and surveyor stakes. They failed. I erased their claim. I shattered their wood and crushed their neon plastic. This land is clean again. This land belongs to her. Which means it belongs to me.

Susan walks beside me. We leave the fortified farmhouse behind, but not the perimeter I bled to build. The honey shed sits inside my defensive line—clear sightlines, the south trail dead, every approach crossing ground I cleared with my own hands. I swept it while she worked the hives. Nothing reaches that door without going through me. This isn't carelessness. It's a choice. The bond first caught fire in that shed. I'm taking her back to finish what started there. We leave the radio silence and the dread of the coming war.

She chose to stay. The club offered her an evacuation. Logan offered her the iron gates of the compound. She looked him in the eye and refused. She chose her grandfather's land. She chose her hives. She chose my protection.

That choice anchors a beast inside my chest. All my life, my blood ran on pure, unadulterated rage. I was a weapon without a target. Nothing worth bleeding for. Nothing worth keeping alive. My hands only knew how to break.

Then I walked onto this property. The bees swarmed me. They didn’t sting. They landed on my knuckles. They recognized the stillness in my marrow. They knew I was the lid to the hive. And she knew it too.

Now, she leads me down the dirt path away from the farmhouse. We walk past the windbreak I built for her in the dead of night. The Russian hybrid bees are asleep inside their white wooden boxes. The air smells of scorched pine smoke from the cold smoker she used minutes ago. It smells of dried clover. It smells of her.

We reach the honey shed. The single-room wooden structure sits twenty yards downhill from the main house. Her sanctuary. Her domain. The only place she truly retreats to when the weight of her two-year isolation becomes too much to carry.

She pushes the wooden door open. The rusted hinges groan in the quiet twilight. She steps inside. I follow. I pull the door shut behind me, sealing us in the dark.