2. Alas #2
She locks the padlock on the honey shed door. She turns and walks up the hill toward the farmhouse. She sees me sitting on the cot. She sees the cot. The radio. The magazines of ammunition.
She doesn't stop. She walks right up the steps. She stops two feet away from me.
"You're actually staying."
"Yes."
"I don't have food for you. I eat toast and honey for dinner."
"I don't need your food."
She crosses her arms over her chest. The wind whips a strand of dark hair across her mouth. "The Syndicate has ten guys operating out of Crimson Hollow. They drive armored SUVs. They carry rifles. You have a radio and three magazines of bullets."
"I only need the knife."
She stares at me. She’s looking for the lie.
She’s looking for the bravado, the macho posturing that men usually deploy when they want to impress a woman.
She doesn't find any. She just finds the flat, dead-eyed certainty of a man who’s fully prepared to butcher ten men in the dark to keep her from losing a single wooden box.
Her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. The exhaustion catches up to her.
"Suit yourself," she whispers.
She turns, unlocks the front door, and steps inside. The wooden door clicks shut behind her. The deadbolt throws with a solid thud.
I lean back against the siding of the house. The temperature plummets as the sun vanishes. The wind howls down the ridge, tearing through the pine trees with a vicious, lonely sound. The cold bites into my skin, but I don't feel it.
I’m burning alive.
The hours drag. The darkness is total, broken only by the pale light of a crescent moon.
I track every shadow. I memorize the layout of the timberline to the south.
The Syndicate's infiltration route. A mile down that trail, someone signed a piece of paper claiming this land. Claiming her access point.
Let them try to enforce it.
I want them to try. The feral part of my brain begs them to step out of the tree line. I want the excuse to unleash. I want to show her what kind of monster is guarding her doorstep.
But the other part of my brain—the part anchored by the bond—rejects the chaos. I need to keep her safe. If I start a war on her property, the hives get caught in the crossfire. The bees die. The grandfather's legacy burns.
The two instincts fight a bloody battle inside my head until they finally merge. I won’t bring the war to her doorstep. I’ll take the war to them, in the dark, where she doesn't have to see it.
The radio hisses. Midnight comes and goes. Below the porch, the wind off the northern ridge keeps slamming into her hive line, clawing at the lids of the white wooden boxes. That downdraft will gut her colonies long before the Syndicate ever sets foot on the trail. I can kill that threat tonight.
So I leave the cot. I haul the stacked lumber and old fence posts from behind the honey shed down to the hive line and drive them deep into the frozen ground, raising a staggered windbreak board by board, reading the lay of the land by the thin crescent light.
The labor burns the static clean out of my skull.
The hours bleed past. When the wall finally stands solid against the downdraft, I climb back to the porch and take up the watch again—knife in reach, eyes on the black tree line.
At four in the morning, the deadbolt clicks.
My hand is on the handle of the knife under the pillow before the door even opens an inch. The metal is warm from my proximity.
The door swings inward.
Susan stands at the threshold. The farmhouse behind her is dark, lit only by a single yellow bulb over the kitchen sink. She’s still wearing the worn jeans and the thick sweater. She hasn't slept either. The dark circles under her eyes are bruised with grief and relentless work.
In her hands, she holds two mismatched ceramic mugs.
Steam rises in white ribbons in the freezing air. The sharp, bitter scent of dark roasted coffee cuts through the smell of pine and wax.
She steps onto the porch. She doesn't hesitate. She walks to the cot and holds out the mug with the chipped rim.
I look at the mug. I look at her hands. Bare skin. Small marks across her knuckles from years of prying wooden frames apart. Calluses on her palms. Beautiful, capable, stubborn hands.
I reach out and take the mug. Our fingers brush.
A jolt spikes up my arm, locking every joint. The connection flares, a blinding white heat. My jaw locks so hard my teeth grind.
She feels it too. Her breath hitches. Her eyes widen slightly in the dark, the pupils blown wide, turning her irises black. She stares at me, the air between us suddenly charged.
She doesn't back away.
She takes a sip from her own mug. The steam curls around her face.
She doesn't say thank you for standing guard. She doesn't apologize for the cold. She doesn't offer a blanket or a guest room or a single concession to my comfort. She accepts my presence as it is. A weapon on the porch.
I don't say you're welcome.
I lift the chipped mug to my mouth and drink. The coffee is pitch black, scalding hot, laced with a dash of cinnamon. Her percolator brew, strong enough to strip paint. It burns all the way down into my stomach.
I drink it, and I watch her.
She sits down on the wooden steps, wrapping both hands around her mug to steal the heat. She looks out over the dark meadow, toward the invisible line of wooden boxes humming in the cold.
I stay on the cot. Guarding her back.
The wind howls. The Syndicate waits in the dark. The war is coming to Pine Valley, and I’m the wall it's going to crash against.
I drink her coffee. I stare at the curve of her neck.
Mine.