Page 38 of Prospect’s Curvy Beekeeper

The vow settles into my bones. It quiets the last remaining static in my head. The Ignition that sparked in this shed days ago is complete. The fated bond welds shut in the same cold air where the first spark caught.

I press my lips to the soft skin of her jaw. I bite down gently, tasting the salt of her sweat.

The Silver Serpent Syndicate thinks they can take this mountain. They think they can file paperwork and claim the south trail. They think they can push past the hive line.

They’re wrong.

I’m Alas. I’m the weapon the club uses when diplomacy fails. And now, I have a home. Now, I have a queen to protect.

I remain buried deep inside her wet, slick heat. I stare out the open window into the pitch-black darkness of the ridge road. I make a silent, blood oath to the mountain wind.

Any man who steps foot on this property will die by my bare hands. I’ll bleed them into the dirt. I’ll feed them to the pines. This shed, this farm, this woman—they’re mine, and mine alone.

Epilogue

SUSAN

The smell of warm beeswax is baked into my skin.

It never washes out. It lingers in the cuticles of my fingers, settles deep into the fabric of my clothes, and lingers in the air of the honey shed. I scrape the last of the propolis off the edge of the cast-iron uncapping tank. The metal is freezing against my hip, where Alas held me two days ago.

A deliberate boot step thuds against the wooden floorboards behind me.

Alas doesn’t sneak. He doesn’t tread lightly. He occupies space with the weight of a falling rockslide. He leans against the doorframe of the shed. His frame blocks out the fading afternoon sun, casting the room into deep shadow. He wears a plain black t-shirt and his leather cut. The bottom rocker on his back still reads Prospect.

In three hours, that word will be gone.

"You're scraping the iron bare," he grunts. His voice is low. It vibrates right through the floorboards and up the soles of my boots.

"I have to get the wax off before it hardens. Otherwise, the frames will stick next season."

He crosses the room in two strides. He doesn’t ask permission. He wraps his scarred hand around my wrist and pulls my arm away from the tank. His knuckles swallow my wrist. Dried blood and angry red scratches map across the back of his hand—the violent receipt from the hours he spent in the dark, tearing a legal county easement out of the dirt with his bare hands and a combat knife.

"It's clean," he states. A command, not an observation.

"You don't know the first thing about honey extraction."

"I know when you're stalling."

He drops his chin. His mouth hovers an inch from the soft skin right beneath my jaw. The bees never sting him. They land on him like he belongs to the earth itself. I’m starting to understand why. His stillness is bone-deep. It demands submission just by existing. He bites the tender flesh beneath my jaw, dragging his teeth hard enough to leave a mark.

A sharp gasp punches out of me. My fingers flex against the cold iron of the tank.

"We need to leave in twenty minutes," Alas murmurs against my skin. The vibration of his words sinks straight into my bones. "Unless you want me to lock this door and keep you pressed against this tank until tomorrow morning."

The threat is genuine. The heat rolling off his body proves it. My jaw locks. The urge to stay right here, hidden in the dim light of the honey shed with the cold howling outside the window, is dangerously strong. For two years, this farm was a fortress of soul-crushing isolation. I fought the mountain. I fought the Silver Serpent Syndicate. I fought the ghost of my grandfather. Asking for help was a weakness. Letting someone in meant admitting I was losing the war.

Then this volatile, unanchored prospect walked into my hive line, let the Russian hybrids land on his bare knuckles, and refused to leave.

I turn in his grip. I press my hands flat against his chest. The solid, unyielding muscle beneath his shirt is hot. "If you make me late for your own patch ceremony, your club president is going to ride up here and drag you to the bonfire by your boots."

Alas snorts. It’s a harsh, dismissive sound. "Logan can try. He won't make it past the tree line."

"Because you'd fight him."

"Because you'd set Colony D's shock troops on him."

Laughter bubbles out of me, bright and free. He says it with terrifying military conviction. His catastrophic naming system for my bees is absurd, yet he refuses to change it. Drones are kamikazes. The Russian hybrids are shock troops. The queen is the commanding officer. He operates on terms of war, and somehow, it perfectly anchors the peace on my farm.