Free Awakened by His Touch by Nikki Logan Page B

born and die without ever facing such responsibility.’
    Jeez—if he’d waited for opportunities to come to him he’d have withered and died right there in his tiny alley-facing office.
    ‘So a new queen hatches and the hive is happy ever after?’
    Her laugh was overly loud even in the busy plant. ‘No, multiple virgin queens emerge and fight to the death until only the strongest is left standing.’
    Okay, that hadn’t been in any of his pre-reading. ‘That’s very...Machiavellian.’
    ‘Once the victor emerges she has a couple of days to gather her strength and then she mates with as many drones from unrelated hives as she can in a day in a special yard we set up.’
    ‘Bloodied and hepped up on battle frenzy? I’m amazed she gets any takers at all.’
    ‘The drones are highly motivated. Every egg a queen will ever produce in her lifetime comes from that single blazing day of sexual excess.’
    ‘When I come back I want to be a drone,’ he said. ‘Sounds like they have it best.’
    ‘Sure. If you don’t mind getting your genitals torn out for your troubles.’
    His, ‘Sorry...?’ was more of a choke.
    ‘When the drone yard is littered with disembowelled corpses she flies back to her starter hive and then lays for the rest of her months-long life.’
    Lucky she couldn’t see his gape.
    ‘I thought you were this gentle, sweet farm girl. I take it all back. You are as ruthless as they come, Helena Morgan.’
    She didn’t look the slightest bit put out—if anything she looked pleased. ‘Surely that’s a compliment, coming from you? Besides, if you don’t like that then maybe we shouldn’t show you how Royal Jelly is produced.’
    ‘What could possibly top pimping, disembowelment, sanctioned orgies and virgins fighting to the death?’
    One of Laney’s staff busied himself melting the wax seal on the rest of the queen cells with a heat lamp and then scooped out the Royal Jelly onto the edge of a collection container, plucked a tiny grub out and squashed it on the table.
    Laney’s face was comically grave. ‘Bee-o-cide.’
    For some reason that shocked him more than anything else she’d done or said. In his mind Laney was as peace-and-love as any hippy, so bee-slaughter didn’t sit comfortably. ‘But you go to so much trouble to save the other bees?’
    ‘Has it only just dawned on you that we’re farmers, Elliott? These ones would have fought to the death anyway. We just pre-pick the survivor.’
    ‘So you play God?’
    ‘They’re essentially clones. The ethics get a little murky. Besides, the grubs are tiny when they’re swamped in Royal Jelly. Virtually insentient.’
    ‘Wow.’ He shook his surprise free. ‘Here I was, feeling sorry for the worker bees who slave away keeping the voracious Queen and her royal young in riches, but I think they might actually have the best of the lot. They spend their days seeing the world, scooping up nectar in the warm sunshine, stretching their wings.’
    Her pretty face tightened. ‘I thought you would have identified more with the Queen.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Entombed in your office cell. Growing large on gathered riches. Fighting for supremacy against your colleagues until you run the show and then working yourself to death until you either create your own replacement or someone knocks you off.’
    That dismal view of Ashmore Coolidge really wasn’t all that far off reality. On its worst days. ‘You make my job sound a lot more exciting than it is. I just sit in an office and try to be smart.’
    ‘Bees have a system. It’s worked for them for a very long time. We don’t mess with it—we just work with it. And we birth a heck of a lot more bees than we kill.’
    And this was a farm, after all. Primary production. They did the dirty work so the rest of the country could eat. Had he really expected it to include no death at all just because it was bees and not beef?
    He watched the process a few times over and got a sense of how fast the two