Bee Epilogue #2
His hand presses a little more firmly to my back. “I would pull you into a supply closet if you had not specifically forbidden supply closets during professional events.”
“I said no supply closets during working hours. This is clearly after hours.”
His growl vibrates against my skin, low and promising, and my pulse answers like the loyal traitor it remains. Loora’s voice cuts through the moment with the timing of someone who has never respected romantic privacy.
“No one believes he’s behaving,” she says, passing with a fresh plate of demolished appetizers. “Just so you know. The investors are terrified. It’s excellent for our brand.”
She disappears into the crowd, and Skylor’s laugh follows her, low and surprised, the sound I have learned to treasure for its rarity.
“Your friend lacks boundaries.”
“My friend is why your wife did not emotionally implode before the launch, so choose your next words with care.”
“I adore Loora.”
“Better.”
“She remains terrifying.”
“Best.”
His thumb strokes once over my spine. “Are you happy?”
The question is quiet. No ceremony. No dramatic balcony.
No speech polished by princely training.
Just the check-in he has learned to ask because assuming the answer is no longer allowed in this marriage, no matter how strongly his instincts insist they already know.
He asks it in bed, in cars, before decisions, after arguments, sometimes in the middle of a perfectly normal dinner when my face apparently does something he cannot interpret and he would rather face a firing squad than guess wrong.
I look around the room before I answer. At the campaign I built.
At Loora flirting with a photographer near the dessert table.
At writers laughing too loudly because they know something beautiful is happening and do not yet trust it to last. At the displays showing Mack’s face, Mack’s work, my edits, Athena’s spine.
At the alien prince beside me who once thought love meant shielding me from the room and now asks whether I want the window open.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m happy.”
His breath leaves slowly, as if the answer still matters every time.
Good.
It should.
“I love you,” I add, because I like watching the words hit him.
They still do. His pupils widen. His hand flexes against my back. The gold in his eyes warms.
“I love you,” he says, rougher. “Every morning I wake beside you. Every night you choose my bed. Every time you argue with me until I become better or angrier, often both. I love you, Beatrice Watson Ak Layn.”
“There’s the full government name.”
“You enjoy it.”
“I enjoy parts of it.”
His mouth lowers to my ear. “I know which parts.”
I steal a coffee bean from his bowl and pop it into my mouth, mostly to give myself something to do besides melt in public. The bitterness hits my tongue, sharp and earthy, and his growl follows it.
“Save that for home,” I tell him, then wink because I have learned that winking drives him crazy. Is it weird that I know him and am still discovering him? Maybe that is marriage. Knowing the map and still finding hidden rooms.
Before he can answer in a way that endangers my professional reputation, the room shifts.
Not dramatically. Not enough for most people to notice. But attention has weight, and this room’s attention bends toward the entrance as Dr. Kenzie MacArthur arrives.
Mack does not make an entrance in the ordinary sense.
She simply appears, as if she got tired of being absent and corrected the problem.
She wears black, no jewelry except small silver hoops, her curls pinned back in a way that suggests practicality rather than event styling.
She is brilliant, intense, not easily impressed by glamour, and more interested in the science than the spotlight.
She finds me immediately with the directness of someone who has never learned to waste time on social choreography.
“Your article did not soften the hard parts,” she says, her handshake firm and brief, her gaze assessing. “I expected compromise. Editorial caution. The usual reduction of complex research into something digestible.”
“I don’t do digestible. I caught that typo before print, by the way.”
Her smile is sharp and brief, the acknowledgment of one fighter recognizing another. “Good.”
Skylor moves beside me, polite and alert. Not intervening. Present. It should not still thrill me when he gets it right, but it does.
Mack turns to him. “Prince Skylor.”
“Professor MacArthur.”
“I want to continue the work.”
His expression does not change, which means every alarm in his head just stood up and formed a committee.
Mack continues, because she did not build a career by waiting for powerful men to invite her into sentences.
“The article opened a door, but the science behind it is still hidden behind classified protocols, partial briefings, and conference calls where three different Layn males tell me what I am not cleared to know in three different tones of royal obstruction.”
I press my lips together.
Skylor’s jaw tightens. “The calls were preliminary and appropriately restricted.”
“They were maddening,” Mack says. “Useful, but maddening. I have spoken by phone with Prince Zymlor twice and with your Brazil logistics team often enough to know they have strong opinions, incomplete Earth context, and an allergy to direct answers. I know Bryklor moves plants, people, equipment, and paperwork better than anyone I have ever seen. I know you manage political risk as if sleep is optional. I know Zymlor is the scientist closest to the cure research on Layn.” Her gaze sharpens. “What I do not know is enough.”
Skylor’s hand settles more firmly at my back, not to steer me. To steady himself. Progress can be adorable when it is suffering.
“The research is classified,” he says. “Zymlor’s work is not available for open review.”
“I am not asking for open review. I am asking for access under ethical partnership terms, controlled publication boundaries, and mutual oversight. My expertise in human biological response, my institutional credibility, and my ability to translate Earth-facing science into language that protects rather than exposes your operation could be useful.” She pauses, head tilting.
“Or you can keep holding conference calls where everyone pretends partial information is collaboration.”
I glance at Skylor. “I like her.”
“I noticed.”
“You sound pained.”
“I am experiencing strategic discomfort.”
“Sure, husband.”
His eyes cut to me, heated and warning. He loves when I say it. He hates when I weaponize it in professional settings. I consider this balance healthy.
Mack’s gaze flicks between us. “Have I interrupted something personal?”
“Yes,” Skylor says.
“No,” I say at the same time.
Mack does not blink. “Excellent. Then no one will mind continuing.”
The ring on Skylor’s finger pulses before he can respond.
His expression closes. “Not now.”
The ring pulses again.
“Skylor,” I say.
He looks at me, and I raise one brow. We have had entire marital arguments inside that eyebrow. He exhales through his nose and activates the projection.
Zymlor appears above the ring in blue light, mid-motion, one hand lifted as if he has been arguing with three screens and a plant at the same time.
His lab on Layn shimmers behind him: hydroponic arrays, red grow lamps, thin-leaf coffee cultivars sulking in soil they apparently dislike on principle.
“—and tell Bryklor for the fourth time that a living root system is not cargo simply because he is emotionally attached to shipping manifests.” Zymlor stops.
His ears rotate forward, then flatten slightly as he registers the room, the launch, me, Mack, and Skylor’s expression. “This is not the lab.”
“No,” Skylor says. “This is my wife’s launch.”
Zymlor’s gaze swings to me. “Beatrice of Earth. Congratulations. Father wants to know why he was not invited.”
“Because your father sent a twelve-page protocol for how I should be introduced as royal consort to the American media, and page three used the phrase subordinate Earth household.”
Zymlor grimaces. “Correct decision.”
“Thank you.”
Then his eyes find Mack.
Something shifts.
Not recognition in the romantic, fated, lightning-strike sense.
Not yet. He has heard her voice before, argued with her through restricted calls, probably labeled her difficult in at least one encrypted note.
But seeing someone is different from hearing a disembodied voice push against classification barriers.
His focus sharpens with the wary attention of a scientist encountering a variable that refuses to remain where placed.
“You are Professor MacArthur,” he says.
Mack steps closer to the hologram without awe, which I appreciate. “Dr. MacArthur, technically. Mack professionally. Professor when someone wants me to do committee work.”
Zymlor’s ears lift a fraction. “You asked twelve unauthorized questions during our last call.”
“You refused to answer eleven.”
“One was not classified.”
“One was obvious.”
His mouth almost moves. “You are more irritating in person.”
“I’m not in person yet.”
The yet lands.
Skylor mutters something in Layn. I catch enough through the bond to understand it is not complimentary about destiny, scientists, or human women with opinions.
Mack ignores him. “I understand you are conducting research into coffee’s biological effects on Layn physiology, particularly its connection to neural deterioration and thermal regulation.
Earth science has barely asked the right questions because Earth science did not know it was studying an interspecies medical intervention. ”
“That statement is dangerously incomplete.”
“Yes. That is why I want the complete version.”
“You do not have clearance.”
“I want a path to clearance.”
“That path is not simple.”
“Good. Simple paths are usually underfunded and poorly reviewed.”
Zymlor studies her. The irritation in his face does not fade. It focuses. “You think Earth science can improve Layn research?”