5. Bee #4
His eyes flash. “The problem is exposure. Your Brazil reporting connects too closely to supply routes and cultivation zones that protect children on Layn. The coffee is not luxury, Beatrice. It is medicine. It slows neural deterioration in millions of children while Zymlor searches for a cure. If Earth governments, corporate competitors, or the wrong press channels find the operation before Bryklor stabilizes alternate routes, we lose access. Children die.”
The anger inside me stumbles. Not collapses. Stumbles.
Because that is the worst part. I believe him.
I believe the strain in his voice, the gold burning through his eyes, the maps behind him, the way every line of his body holds back terror.
I believe there are children on Layn whose lives depend on coffee plants in Brazil and a scientist prince I have never met. I believe the stakes are real.
That does not save him.
“You should have told me.”
“I attempted to tell you. I said, Let's talk about work and you shut it down. You said, and I quote. 'Work is for another place and time. There is no work here.'”
“No.” The word cuts through the room. “You attempted to tell me in pieces, when it suited you, after you had already decided what I was allowed to know. That is not the same thing.”
His mouth tightens. “You wanted work and the bond kept separate.”
“I wanted not to receive classified planetary trauma while naked and newly claimed. I did not ask to be excluded from decisions about my career.”
“I had to act quickly.”
“You always have to act quickly.”
The sentence hits him harder than I expect. I press my hand to the mark at my throat. It throbs beneath my fingers, tender and hot, married and not married, chosen and not chosen enough. “This morning you told me I was your wife.”
His expression changes. “You told me I am your mate, your Omega princess, your family. You told me this claim is permanent. Fine. Terrifying, but fine, let us put that horror show on the shelf for one second.” My voice shakes.
I let it. “You made me your wife in bed and a stranger in the room where my future was being decided.”
“I did not see it that way."
“I know.” My eyes burn, but the tears stay back through sheer spite. “That is the problem.”
He takes one step toward me. “Beatrice.”
“No.” My hand lifts between us. He stops instantly, and that obedience hurts because it proves he can do it when the line is visible enough. “Do not touch me.”
His hand curls into a fist at his side. “You believe I used the bond to manage you.”
“I believe you like me best when I am close enough to hold and not close enough to question your plans."
Pain moves over his face before he can hide it. “That is not true.”
“Then why was I the last person let in on them?”
No answer comes.
There it is. Not because he lacks reasons. He has reasons stacked floor to ceiling, medical, logistical, royal, planetary. But no answer to that. No answer that does not still leave me outside the door while his brothers speak my name with more honesty than he does.
“I have spent my whole life trying not to be ornamental,” I say.
“Not the pretty face. Not the soft body. Not the woman men choose when they want comfort and ignore when they want counsel. You saw my aura. You saw my ambition. You saw all the pieces of me I thought made me too much. Then you claimed me like all of it mattered.” I swallow hard.
“But when the first real pressure came, you treated my work like something you could move around to protect your real life.”
“You are my real life.”
“Then act like I belong in it.”
His breath leaves him. The bond shudders between us, desperate for contact, for repair, for the easy lie of mouth and hands and the body solving what words have broken. He feels it too. His eyes drop to my mouth, then snap back to mine. The restraint costs him. Good. It should.
“I chose Layn,” he says quietly. “I chose the children, the supply routes, the secrecy, the mission. I chose it because I believed the alternative was unacceptable. I chose it before I understood the cost to you.”
“And now?”
His eyes burn. “Now I understand the cost. But understanding doesn't change the choice.”
That is almost enough to break me. Almost. “I’m going home,” I say.
His head lifts sharply. “No."
My laugh comes out broken. “Careful.”
He closes his eyes, jaw flexing. When they open, the gold has banked but not vanished. “Your home is with me.”
“I don't know that, that's true.”
His face flinches.
“I need space.
“From your mate.”
“From the man who keeps deciding what I need after he has already taken the choice.”
He goes pale beneath the violet undertone of his skin. I turn before the sight can ruin me. At the door, his voice stops me.
“Beatrice.”
I don't turn around.
“I will fix this.”
The promise should comfort me. Once, maybe it would have. Right now, it sounds like a male reaching for tools before he understands the wound. “Don’t fix me out of the room,” I say.
Then I leave. His text arrives when I reach the elevator.
Please tell me you arrived safely when you are home.
I stare at it until the doors open. Safe is a strange word from an alpha. Still, when I reach my apartment, when the lock clicks behind me and the first cramps of separation begin low in my abdomen, I text him one word.
Safe.
Then I place the phone face down, curl around the his stolen scent of on my blouse, and let the bond ache.