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He’d rather eat his own foot than engage directly with Atwood, but the only option for getting food outside of mealtimes is buying from the store. Anxiety courses through him as he grabs a turkey sandwich and cup of cut vegetables from the fridge, figuring they’ll be the easiest to eat while walking to his next scheduled task. Though he tries to calm down, Avery knows he’s projecting fear pheromones, and there’s no way a shifter won’t pick up on it. Damn them and their heightened perception.

Avery ignores the fact that healsohas heightened perception, focusing on begging his hands to not shake when he sets his selection on the counter in front of Atwood. “Can I buy this?”

It’s a moment before Atwood looks away from his phone. He considers the food, raises his eyebrows, then flicks an unimpressed look at Avery. The silence stretches, making it more and more difficult for Avery to hold still instead of squirming.

“You got money?” Atwood finally asks.

“Yeah.” Avery tugs his wallet out of the shorts he didn’t have time to change out of, even though full-length pants are recommended. It was legally required for a pamphlet on safety protocol to be made available, but nothing from it isenforced. Farmer Dennings already said medical emergencies are none of his business, even work injuries.

Avery waits for Atwood to scan the items to retrieve his total, but all Atwood offers is more of that damn staring. Becoming impatient, Avery asks, “How much do I owe?”

“Twenty dollars.”

Jaw dropping, Avery looks down at the prices on both items. The sandwich is nine, and the vegetables are four. “These only say?—”

“I know what they say,” Atwood snaps. “I’ve had to watch your incompetent ass all morning. You’ll pay what I say you’ll pay.”

Avery already knows he doesn’t have twenty dollars in his wallet, so he grits his teeth and says, “Just the sandwich, then.”

“Twenty dollars.”

This isn’t the first time a shifter has tried to take advantage of him, and it’ll be far from the last, but at this point Avery ishangry, so he doesn’t consider the consequences before smacking his palm against the counter. “The sandwich is nine fucking dollars. You can’t just demand?—”

Atwood’s hand shoots out faster than Avery can react. His enhanced senses allow him to see every inch of the gesture in slow motion frames, but his reflexes aren’t there yet, so he doesn’t manage to dodge before Atwood snatches the collar of his t-shirt and drags Avery half over the counter. “I’ll demand you do whatever the fuck I want, you pitiful shit. You’re here, you do what you’re fuckin’ told,were-bitch.” He holds on a second longer before shoving Avery back. “Get out of my sight.”

This time, Avery is more than willing to comply.

CHAPTER

THREE

Avery

The door leading upstairs to the mess hall opens at 11:30 AM. By then, Avery’s physical form has burned through the last of his endurance. He trudges to the horse barn, dragging his feet. Fortunately, lunch shifts are staggered, so unlike with breakfast, there’s no threat of being locked out.

The food is just as disgusting as it was the first day he arrived, and the store sandwich he had to abandon would have tasted miles better, but he’s too desperate to even taste the slimy green beans as they go down. The only good thing about meals here is that they give large portions and additional helpings—not out of charity, but because werecreatures can’t work without enough calories to fuel them. Avery, fittingly, eats like a bear ripping apart a minivan to get to a box of fruit snacks. He takes a second plate and is eyeballing a third when the cooks begin to clean up the long table, and shifters move to hover in an intimidating fashion.

From that moment on, the drudgery of farm work takes over his higher brain functions. The only time Avery feels somewhat aware is when he’s interacting with the animals, but ‘giving cows nose scritches’ isn’t a task he’s beenassigned, so he spends hours numb, mechanically weeding in the vegetable gardens. At least this time, others were there to educate him on unwanted plants, so he didn’t ignorantly rip out any important sprouts.

Avery takes the eight PM meal with much less enthusiasm than lunch. Now that he’s not starving, the food is back to tasting like cardboard and mush, and he has trouble swallowing some of it.

He snags two water bottles on the way out, shoving one in the pocket of his baggy shorts. Curfew is technically at midnight but isn’t enforced until two AM because time can be difficult to keep track of when you’re shifted. After that, you risk a write-up. The only reason Avery didn’t get caught by a door monitor today is because he was gone overnight—otherwise, he would have been targeted when he tried to return to his bunk. Escaping punishment other than Atwood’s power trip was pure luck, and Avery isn’t keen to risk it again.

But he’s frustrated. All the emotions he suppressed during repetitive assignations are coming out to hiss at him.

If it hadn’t been for that ill-timed hook-up, he’d still be in his cozy condo, within walking distance from his parents. They were free-spirited pagans who’d accepted their only child coming out as a transgender man, but turning into a werecreature was too much. Their new-age spiritual practices led them to believe Avery had surrendered himself to dark magic, and they kicked his ass to the curb. Nothing would convince them that he hadn’t gotten infected due to individual fault. It was deeply cruel, considering Avery didn’tchooseto get fucked by parahuman magic.

Then again… maybe he had. He’d known Melissa was a werecreature from the start, but trusted her safety precautions.

She was a good fuckbuddy. Cute, only a little bit taller than him, skilled with her mouth. They used barriers to avoidcontact between skin and saliva, and didn’t kiss. Except that night when she propositioned him, Avery didn’t know Melissa wasn’t herself. She was under the influence of some delirium caused by the werevirus, compelling its host to spread it to more victims. Maybe if Avery hadn’t had his eyes closed he would have noticed the fangs she was about to sink into his neck, but again. Good with her mouth.

Melissa had been beside herself. She’d taken care of him while he turned and promised over and over again that her were-pack would accept and protect him—and, at first, they did. The pack alpha, a were-vulpine, had even let Avery stay in their pack house while he recovered from the initial infection.

Then, the night of his first full moon arrived.

Avery screamed through his first shift, bones breaking as they lengthened, his face extending into a fanged snout, dark hair bursting from his follicles until his stretching skin felt like it was on fire. Before he’d even caught his bearings, the alpha had looked up at Avery, a seven-foot-something bear monstrosity and smelled the alpha on him.

At the time, he hadn’t known what it meant to have alpha magic. He didn’t understand why the hideously mutated fox went for his neck when he stumbled, unused to operating such weight. No one told him that a lone alpha wasn’t welcome on a were-pack’s established territory.