3. Susan
Susan
The biting chill of the pre-dawn mountain air seeps through the floorboards, curling around my ankles like ice water.
It’s five-thirty. The sky outside my bedroom window is a bruised, indigo purple, right on the bleeding edge of morning.
My boots hit the worn hardwood with a dull thud.
A thin gray tank. The stiff canvas suit zipped up over it, then Grandpa's oversized, wax-coated jacket that still faintly smells of old pipe tobacco and propolis. I yank the zipper up to my chin.
An hour and a half ago, I stood outside and handed a mug of black cinnamon coffee to a giant who sleeps with a knife under his pillow. We didn't speak. He just took it, his fingers brushing mine, the heat of his skin ignoring the cold.
I step out of the kitchen and push the front door open, expecting to find him sitting on the edge of the military cot, radiating that terrifying, coiled-spring violence.
The front porch is empty.
The cot is made. The wool blanket is folded with a sharp, ninety-degree military precision that looks absurdly out of place against the peeling paint of my farmhouse. The ceramic mug sits on the railing. Washed clean.
He’s gone.
A sharp, irritating prickle flares under my skin.
Disappointment? Please. I don't get disappointed over brooding mountain men who communicate exclusively in glares and silent intimidation.
I have two hundred boxes of stinging insects that require my attention, the armed Syndicate using my south trail as a scenic byway, and a farm that will swallow me whole if I stop moving for five seconds.
I don't have time to pine over a man who disappeared before the sun came up.
I grab my smoker from the hook by the door and trudge down the frost-crunched grass toward the honey shed.
The wind off the northern ridge is a living thing in October.
It howls down the mountain face, slicing across the twelve acres of my property, dropping the temperature by ten degrees the second it hits the meadow.
For two years, ever since I was left alone on this farm, I have fought that wind.
I’ve dragged frozen tarps, stacked rotting hay bales, and tied down ratchet straps with numb, bleeding fingers just to keep my girls from freezing inside their boxes.
I brace my shoulders, ducking my chin into my collar, waiting for the familiar, ice-pick blast of the downdraft as I crest the small rise overlooking the hive line.
The wind never hits.
I stop dead.
The air around the hive line is still. It’s cold, yes, but the slicing gale is gone. A gentle, diffused breeze rustles the dry meadow grass, soft and harmless.
My boots stop moving. My jaw goes slack.
A perfectly constructed windbreak stands between my two hundred hive boxes and the northern ridge.
It spans the length of the apiary. Staggered wooden slats, anchored deep into the frozen earth with reinforced posts. The wood is fresh-cut pine, the scent of sawdust hanging in the damp morning air.
I drop my smoker in the grass. It hits the dirt with a dull thud.
I walk forward, my boots moving on autopilot, my lungs refusing to expand. I reach out and press my bare hand flat against the rough wood of the nearest slat. It's rock-solid. Immovable.
This isn't just a fence slapped together in the dark. It’s engineered.
The boards are staggered with precise, two-inch gaps.
Any first-year beekeeper or idiot with a hammer would build a solid wall, thinking it blocks the wind better.
But a solid wall creates a vacuum on the leeward side, causing a turbulent downdraft that rips the lids right off the hives.
This staggered design diffuses the wind, breaking its back while allowing a gentle airflow to pass through.
It protects the flight paths of the Russian hybrids.
It shields the queens. It takes the topography of my twelve acres into account.
He built this.
Sometime in the dead of night, Alas built a fortress for my bees.
He didn't ask me for permission. He didn't ask for a blueprint. He didn't demand a thank you or wait around to receive one. He just looked at my property, saw a threat to my colonies, and neutralized it with his bare hands.
My throat tightens. A hard, jagged lump forms right behind my collarbone.
Two years. Two solid years of doing every single thing alone.
When Grandpa died, the silence of this farm became a living thing—it filled the rooms, pressed against the windows, waited in the honey shed for someone who was never coming back.
Every broken frame, every sick colony, every snapped fence post, every freeze warning—it all landed squarely on my shoulders.
I refused to ask for help. Asking for help meant I was weak.
Asking for help meant the town would look at me with pity, whisper that the little beekeeper girl couldn't hack it, and advise me to sell the land to the developers circling Pine Valley like vultures.
I’ve fought, bled, and exhausted myself into a hollow shell of a human being just to prove I can hold this ground by myself. I built armor out of stubbornness and isolation. No one gets in. No one carries the weight but me.
And now, staring at this towering, flawless structure of fresh pine, that armor cracks.
A ragged breath punches out of my lungs. Heat crawls up my neck.
He didn't fix a broken pipe or change a tire. He learned the wind patterns of a Russian hybrid honeybee. He researched the angle needed to protect a queen he doesn't even own. The meticulous care hidden beneath his exterior is terrifying. It’s a threat to every boundary I’ve meticulously constructed.
I trace the head of a galvanized screw, driven flush into the wood.
"You arrogant, high-handed bastard," I whisper to the empty meadow.
But the words lack bite. They sound suspiciously like awe.
I turn my back on the windbreak, wiping a stray, traitorous tear from the corner of my eye before it can fall. I don’t cry over carpentry. I don’t cry over prospects with calloused hands and beeswax scents clinging to their leather.
I pick up my smoker and head toward the honey shed. The single-room wooden structure sits twenty yards downhill from the farmhouse. It’s my sanctuary. The door protests with a familiar squeak as I push it open.
The smell hits me instantly. Warm beeswax, raw clover honey, and the faint, lingering scent of scorched pine from the cold smoker. It coats the inside of my lungs, grounding me.
Inside, the room is as I left it. The cast-iron uncapping tank squats in the center of the floor. Rows of empty supers are stacked neatly along the left wall. My bench, stained with decades of wax drippings and gouges from my hive tool, runs under the single window facing the mountain ridge.
I pull the string on the bare bulb overhead.
Yellow light floods the cramped space. I grab a handful of dried pine needles and a twisted piece of burlap, stuffing them into the belly of the smoker.
I strike a match. The flame catches, curling the edges of the burlap.
I pump the bellows, watching the white smoke billow out of the spout.
Pump. Breathe. Pump. Breathe.
I need to focus. I have twenty hives to inspect before noon.
The crunch of tires on gravel cuts through the morning silence.
I release the bellows and step out of the shed, my hand instinctively dropping to the steel hive tool hooked to my belt. The Syndicate has been getting bolder.
A familiar, battered sedan rolls to a stop near the farmhouse.
The driver's side door opens, and Carol steps out.
She looks tired, but there’s a distinct, unbreakable steel in her spine that wasn't there a month ago. She shuts the door and walks toward me, carrying a large stainless-steel thermos and a canvas duffel bag.
I relax my grip on the hive tool. "Carol. It's early."
She stops a few feet away, her eyes scanning the property, lingering on the new windbreak down by the meadow. A faint, knowing smile touches the corners of her mouth.
"Early is the only time the kids are quiet," she says, her voice steady. She holds out the thermos. "Christie sent this up from the Cozy Cup. Black coffee, heavy on the cinnamon."
I take the thermos. The heat bleeds through the metal into my cold palms. "You didn't have to drive all the way out here."
Carol drops the canvas bag at my feet. "Clean work clothes. Denim. Flannel. Valerie washed them at the compound."
My jaw tightens. My instinct to reject the charity flares up, sharp and defensive. "I have a washing machine, Carol. I wash my own clothes."
She doesn't flinch. She just looks at me, her gaze steady with a shared, unspoken understanding.
"I know you do, Susan." She crosses her arms over her chest. "A month ago, I was where you are.
Fighting everyone off. Refusing to take a single inch of help because I thought it meant I was failing my daughter.
I thought if I let someone carry the bag for even a second, I would forget how to stand up. "
She nods toward the windbreak. "They don't ask, do they? The men from that club. They don't ask for permission to tear your walls down. They just do it. And it pisses you off."
I swallow hard, my grip tightening on the thermos. "He built it overnight. I didn't ask him to."
"River paid off my brother's fifty-thousand-dollar debt to the Syndicate and told him never to come back," Carol says, her tone matter-of-fact. "I screamed at him for an hour. Then I slept through the night for the first time in four years."
She steps closer, her eyes locking onto mine.
"Alas is on your south trail right now," she says quietly. "He built that windbreak in the pitch dark before dawn, hauled every board down to the hive line by hand, and then walked straight into the tree line to hold the boundary against the Crimson Hollow scouts."
My chest caves in. He hasn't slept. He stood guard, built the windbreak, and went straight to the perimeter.