Page 119 of Choose the Bears

They wanted me to drop the engine, to give them yet another opportunity to put shit on me for being a weak human. I’m not sure what Roxy thought, bringing me up here, but surely this wasn’t it. I wrapped the chains tighter around my hands, a dangerous fucking move if ever there was one. The weight of the engine, when I inevitably let go, was enough to sheer my hands off at the wrists. I’d bleed out on the floor, and Andrei and Ivan would just step over me, complaining about the mess.

We should have a fucking proper engine hoist, but fox shifters didn’t need to use machinery like that. With their strength, a simple block and tackle set up worked fine for them, but I wasn’t a shifter. Every muscle quivered and shook as I tried to hold on. They kept shooting me sidelong looks, waiting for me to crack, but I forged on. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, say the words that they wanted to hear. Hurry the fuck up, was one lot. What the fuck are you doing? was another. Or worst, I can’t hold this anymore.

But I knew something that they didn’t.

I’d taken plenty of kickings in my life before I was sent to live with Bjorn’s family and that had taught me a hard lesson. That as long as you were still breathing, you could survive anything. Perhaps in a different form than before, one more battered and broken, but still. You would keep taking one step after another, always moving forward.

But that ignored a crucial law of physiology.

Muscles exhaust themselves when put under strain and then they fail, my small sound of pain making clear that. I was losing this fight, no matter what I thought or felt about it.

“Fuck’s sake, Andrei!”

The two of them stared at me, cruel smiles on their faces, and that brought too many memories back. Of men towering over me, fists raised. Of my birth mother watching everything happen with sleepy eyes and a dopey grin. I wasn’t a child anymore, and I did not have to put up with this shit. I threw my whole body into the chain, trying to use my weight as counterbalance, and that’s when something miraculous happened.

I should’ve collapsed, the chain ripping my skin as I let it go, gravity finally winning. The engine should’ve gone slamming back into the engine bay, shearing off what restraints remained and going crashing to the floor. The torrent of abuse would’ve started, telling me how fucking shit I was.

But that’s not what happened.

Bolts broke and metal groaned as I wrenched the engine up and out of the bay and then I pivoted before letting the chains go so the engine slammed into the concrete floor.

“Well fuck…” Andrei walked over and nodded at the engine. “That’s one way to get the thing out. You fucked up some of the engine bay in the process.”

“Maybe don’t play fucking games when I’m holding a damn engine!” I snapped back.

Tools clattered to the floor and I remembered then why no one fucked with foxes. It was never just one. Where there was one shifter, there were many. Green eyes bore into mine, watching my every move until I jerked myself away from Andrei.

“I’m having a smoke.”

I waited for someone to shout, to tear me a new one as I walked out the back into a cordoned off area where old car hulks rusted back into the dirt, but they didn’t. There was only quiet and stillness and this. Adrenaline, I rationalised, pumping blood frantically through my blood in response to danger, carrying oxygen around, but it felt like more than that. I was damn nearimmune to its effects. Each time I drove drunk, or did something reckless, I felt an adrenaline surge and that was nothing on this.

I reached for my cigarettes in an attempt to calm myself and instead my hand closed around the keyring. The metal felt white hot, then ice cold, forcing me to snatch my hand away in time to see a bear-shaped burn mark on my palm.

“What the?—?”

“Are you done?” Greg appeared in the doorway with a frown. “Break time is later. Work now.”

My teeth ground together, forcing me to swallow back my shitty response, but he was the boss here. I nodded and then walked back inside.

“Don’t help Andrei. He needs to fix up your fuck ups. There’s oil changes for you to do,” he told me with a dismissive nod.

Back to doing the same fucking shit I had been doing since I arrived here, learning nothing new, but I didn’t say anything in response. I just moved forward like a good little bear…

Like a good little boy, that’s what I meant to say. A good little boy.

I grabbed a wrench and a dolly and slid under the nearest car, going to work.

“Didyou piss in that bloke’s cereal or something?” the publican asked when the day ended. We’d come straight to the pub after work, not even stopping to get cleaned up. Daisy looked up when I approached, but glanced away quickly. However, she wasn’t my focus, he was. Phil was using that overly loud bullshit tone blokes do when they’re talking a steady stream of shit. I knew that because I’d done the same more than once.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Greg replied, pushing money across the bar. “Prick can’t pay his repair bill.”

“Not surprised with the way he’s drinking in here,” the other man said with a shake of his head. “Just giving you a heads up, he’s out for blood.”

“Ours?” I blinked, wondering who’d said that and surprised to realise it was me. “Or Daisy’s?”

“I told him to leave the barmaids alone.” The publican was so fucking oblivious, because it’d take a whole lot more than that to shake a prick like Phil off someone’s tail. “He’ll be kicked out if he keeps hassling them.”

He should’ve been turfed on his arse the first time, a voice growled in my head. He never should’ve been allowed to approach the girls, but that’s not how places like this worked. They had young girls working the bar, not big blokes, because it sold drinkers a fantasy. That each time a guy bought a beer from her, he was buying just a little of her time. Maybe she’d look at him, see him and her heart would flutter in her chest, like his did when he took in her shapely form. Maybe she’d reach out and touch him, choose him above all the other fuckheads clamouring around her feet and then he’d have it all. A hot, wet pussy to sink into, but also the adulation, the approval of his fellow men.

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