Swarm Season

Last summer I stole the taste. This time, he gave it to me — and the season came for us both.Wren Calloway learned restraint the hard way. So when Stellan Broud finally cracks his gate open again, she doesn't reach — she lets him come to her. And he does. He offers the nectar himself this time, mouth to skin, the binding made the right way at last: the hum at full body-resonance, the most explicit, most complete thing they've ever shared.It's a fragile, golden high. Underneath it, swarm-season is already pulling.Because the man she bound herself to goes away in the season — language first, then everything human after — and Wren has to follow him into the meadow and learn to be his anchor without becoming his keeper. The feral hive-mind isn't a mask. It's who he actually is. Loving him means loving that too.And while the season takes him, the town's co-op moves against his hive — a relocation vote that could exile the swarm from the only land it's ever known, with Wren's own bakery caught in the fallout.Cozy and filthy and aching, with bee-shifter anatomy named with wonder and the heat dialed past book one.