Until the Dawn by Elizabeth Camden

bank vault, but the fact that he made Marten leave the room was a sure sign it wasn’t aboveboard. She shouldn’t have anything to do with this, but as he lifted the lid off the first box, it was impossible not to peek.
    Old papers.
    The same with the next box and the next. On some level, Sophie was disappointed not to see golden Spanish doubloons or a stash of pirate treasure, but her father seemed delighted.
    “Never underestimate the power of a paper trail,” he said with relish as he lifted the first set of documents from a box. They were loose pages written in the spindly handwriting of the eighteenth century.
    Paper trails might fascinate a lawyer, but Sophie just wanted to save Dierenpark, and it was going to take more than old pieces of paper to do it. It was going to require figuring out the strange, hidden, and deeply complex attitudes of Quentin and Nickolaas Vandermark, and given Quentin’s determination to avoid her, she still didn’t know how to accomplish it.

    Sophie wished that dealing with Quentin Vandermark were as easy as dealing with the twenty thousand honeybees that lived in the eight-frame beehives on a patch of land at Dierenpark. She had no idea who first built the hives, but they seemed to have been here forever, tended by generations of Broeders, who had served as groundskeepers at Dierenpark for as far back as anyone could remember.
    The groundskeeper’s cabin was the first structure at Dierenpark, built by the original Vandermark brothers in 1635. Caleb Vandermark soon began building the main house, eventually turning the cabin over to the groundskeeper. Until last week when Quentin had fired Emil, members of the Broeder family had lived in that cabin for centuries. Emil lacked the patience for beekeeping, so Sophie had taken over the task years ago.
    Beekeeping required care to establish a mutually beneficial relationship, and over the years it seemed the honeybees had become accustomed to her. She never dropped her guard around the bees and always treated them with the respect they deserved, and in return, they supplied Dierenpark with golden, sweet honey.
    Complete concentration was needed to extract the honey, and she welcomed the chance to take her mind off the questionably obtained Vandermark documents her father thought might be the key to saving Dierenpark. While her father might be willing to wade into the legal quagmire, Sophie wished she could merely find a way to live peaceably alongside the Vandermarks, much like she had learned to do with the bees.
    Wearing a gauzy veil to cover her face, she waved a smoker beneath the hives to lull the bees into complacency. It was a delicate task to lift each frame and drain the golden sweetness from the honeycomb, but she soon had a small bucket of honey still warm from the hive.
    As she approached the mansion with her honey, she spotted Quentin sitting on the front steps of the house, peering into a small mirror while he dragged a razor across his soapy face. It was a little unnerving to see a man at such an intimate moment.
    “What were you doing back in the woods?” he asked, distrust heavy in his voice.
    “Gathering a bit of honey. We’ve got a couple of eight-frame beehives behind the juniper trees.”
    “Bees?” he asked. “You’ve been harboring a colony of dangerous bees on my property without permission?”
    She supposed it was natural for people to fear things they didn’t understand, but the alarm in his voice made her worry he’d try to dispose of the hives. “Honeybees are a wonderful blessing,” she said calmly. “If you treat them gently and with respect, they are usually harmless. And look around you! None of the apple trees, the cherries, the roses, or the herb gardens could propagate without the cooperation of the bees. They are one of the reasons the plants at Dierenpark have always been so abundantly healthy. And their honey is divine.”
    “Miss van Riijn,” he said tightly, “do you actually believe