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A zrael hit the ground running.

He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately, but running really wasn’t a hardship.

With his small, lean frame, he flew over the ground and scaled the side of the brick wall that separated the local market from the houses.

Reaching the top of the concrete blocks, he paused, glanced back, and then disappeared over the side.

Two darkly dressed figures scaled the same wall after him and disappeared as well.

Azrael tossed the pair a glance, but didn’t linger.

He ran, challenging them to catch him.

The pair, Boston and Rebel, wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. Even as fast as Boston was, the youngest assassin was no match for Azrael.

Azrael cut through a stand of trees and thick brush that butted up against the Angeles National Forest and ran down a dirt road.

Reaching the small house that sat deep in the woods, miles from the nearest city, Azrael opened the door and stepped inside the brightly lit front room.

Beck, who stood inside, clicked the stopwatch in his hand and glanced at the time before holding it out to Azrael.

“You made record time,” Beck said just as Boston and Rebel crashed through the open door after him.

“Damn, dude,” Boston said, falling onto the dark brown couch that butted up against one wall of the living room.

Sweat dripped from the boy’s black curly hair. The strands fell into Boston’s dark chocolate-colored eyes, and restless fingers raked through it, sending wet curls into disarray. Boston was so agile and quick that he had almost caught Azrael.

Rebel stumbled over and dropped to the thick cream-colored carpet and sprawled onto his back, his arms splayed out, chest heaving. With dark curly hair and equally dark eyes, Rebel and Boston could have been mistaken for blood brothers.

Which was not the case, of course, but they were brothers by choice. In Azrael’s opinion, all of the teenagers there were his brothers. And although he craved his alone time, he also favored spending time with them.

Azrael reached around and took out the tie that held his hair back. The long strands spilled over his shoulder, and he pushed them back and rubbed at the base of his skull with relief.

He walked through the small room and into the kitchen area to snag a few water bottles from the kitchen table. Returning to the living room, he handed each boy a water.

“What did you tell Dave?” Azrael asked Boston. The boy wasn’t of legal age and he didn’t want Boston to get into trouble.

“I told him I’m staying in Nevada with Rip,” Boston said.

“Does Rip know that?” Azrael gaped for a moment.

“Nope.” Boston smiled with satisfaction, and Azrael shook his head. Lying to Dave was an explosion waiting to happen, but Azrael didn’t voice his opinion.

When Boston leaned his head back against the couch and closed his eyes, Azrael turned to look over the other two teenagers.

They currently worked as assassins for Erebus, an underground group of hitmen that had been formed years ago by Dave, the former Secretary of Defense. Boston, because of his age, was in training and couldn’t take on jobs yet.

Via the jobs he handled for Erebus, he paid the rent on this small house and considered it their base and office. The location and price had been way too fucking good to pass up and he couldn’t believe his luck when it had been brought to his attention by Dave.

After much discussion, they moved in and called themselves YA.

Most people thought the acronym YA stood for young adults…but for them it stood for young assassins.

YA had been formed by himself, Boston, and Rebel.

Azrael wasn’t cut out to rescue people.

He was more of the slice and dice the fuckers up when they did bad shit.

But he was willing to give the idea of YA a try.

What Azrael hoped for YA in the future was to be considered an extension of Erebus. To become a safe haven. But right now, Erebus leadership knew nothing about what they were up to out here in the woods.

What YA was trying to accomplish was something Erebus did not need to know about at the moment, and Azrael wasn’t ready to share about it

Not yet anyway.

This was his, Boston’s, and Rebel’s baby. They had brought Beck on because he was one of Solomon’s lost boys.

Lost boys weren’t really the right words to call them…What they had been through had been sickening. The ugly truth was that most of them had been taken by Solomon and turned into killers or sold into sexual slavery.

They were all broken or damaged. Living that life in agony had wrecked their lives.

That they had risen out of the ashes was a testament to how strong each one of them was.

“You think they got the message?” Rebel asked, bringing Azrael’s attention back to the room.

Rebel rolled to his side on the carpet and dark hair fell farther into his eyes.

“You talking about the job you just did?” Beck asked, and Rebel nodded.

Azrael was reminded that while they had timed this job, it had been a job, and warning a guy who was harassing children on their way home from school had been the mission.

“And then some,” Boston answered before he could, waving his hands around as he spoke. “I don’t think that guy will be messing with kids any time soon.”

“Just be sure to check in on him and make sure he remembers our warning,” Azrael said, taking a swallow from his water bottle.

He was positive Erebus wouldn’t think much of their threats toward a bully. Yes, the job had been small, but putting the fear into an asshole was a nice start to their business. Taking on small jobs as well as bigger hit jobs from Erebus would keep the cash flowing in for YA.

That would help with money flow while they tried to accomplish what YA had been designed to do.

What Azrael and the others planned was to find more of Solomon’s boys and bring them into the YA fold. To give them security. Here at YA was better than out there on the streets living as hired guns or worse.

At nineteen, Azrael was the oldest of the group and felt like he had to be the voice of reason. For some reason, they all looked to him for answers. Beck was also nineteen but slightly younger than him, and Boston was seventeen.

Rebel came in at eighteen. Rebel normally lived on the ranch in Nevada with Crow, but he spent a good amount of the time here during the week and traveled home on the weekends.

Sometimes, Crow came to Dave’s, and Rebel met him there.

Azrael wondered how Rebel did it. If he ever had the chance to have Real, there would be no way in hell he could go all week without him.

Azrael wasn’t sure how long it would be until they were discovered by one of Dave’s assassin groups.

There were several teams—Erebus, Genesis, Aries, and more he didn’t even know the names of.

So, he knew it was only a matter of time until they were discovered.

However, until then, he had other things to worry about, like funding.

He wasn’t sure how they were going to pay any young assassins that came to work for them. Money was a huge problem right now.

“So, what happens when we find more people like us?” Rebel asked, rolling to sit up, shaking his curly hair away from his face.

Rebel had the same tragic background as the rest of them did; he had come from the same monsters.

“We bring them into the fold. I just don’t know how we are going to pay them yet,” Azrael murmured and perched on the arm of the dark brown sofa.

“We can bring them on as Erebus and have them work here at YA,” Beck said.

“Lie to Dave and Stone?” Boston gulped. “You have a death wish.”

“Fuuuck you,” Beck said, but there wasn’t any heat behind the words.

Boston sucked in a breath and glared at Beck.

“We won’t be lying. We just won’t tell the whole truth,” Azrael cut in before Boston and Beck could start arguing. “What we need to do first is find them.”

“How are we going to do that?” Boston asked, his hands ever moving, fingers fiddling with the water bottle in his hands.

“I can get a look at the computer in Savage’s office,” Beck offered.

Azrael shook his head. “I’m better off looking into the Genesis database. They keep an extensive list of guns for hire who takes jobs via the dark net.”

“No shit?” Boston said, eyebrows raised.

“How the hell are you going to access Genesis?” Beck asked with a frown.

It wasn’t the first time Azrael had accessed a forbidden database, and it wouldn’t be the last. The only drawback was the fact that Azrael had moved out of Dave’s place.

Getting a look at the former SecDef’s systems had been easy because he had lived there and had overheard things like passwords and procedures.

Now, though, he needed to have another reason to be there.

“There’s a guy I met at Dave’s place who seems…interesting. I’ll meet him for drinks on Friday,” Azrael said, pulling his black long-sleeved t-shirt off over his head on his way to the shower.

The place wasn’t all that big, but it did have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom.

“You talking about Real?” Boston called after him.

Azrael turned into the hallway.

“No.”

The word was spoken quietly, but they all heard him.

He reached the bathroom and closed the door on any further questions.

He and Real were done.

Not that they had even started. Real was a master at dodging anything that might resemble a relationship, and right now, Azrael was glad for it, he reminded himself.

Which was saying something. At first, he had been pissed to all hell, but after realizing that Real wanted nothing to do with him in that way, Azrael had seen the light.

He needed to get his own shit together in order to figure out how to achieve the success he wanted—versus chasing after a hardened former SEAL who was too jaded to take a chance on them.

Azrael realized that his insecurities were holding him back, and after months of taking a hard look at himself, he finally understood he was his own worst enemy.

Living with a past filled with horrific acts of violence came with a heavy price. Some of those acts he had committed himself, but it was the brutality that had been done to him that he constantly warred with.

And those memories of cruelty were something nobody should have to live with.

The only thing he could think of was to let time work its magic.

He wasn’t looking for a miracle.

He was looking for redemption.

All he wanted was a chance to breathe.

Maybe, just maybe, YA could give him that.