"No, brat." I slid down to lay beside him. "I am naturally athletic because I'm a shifter and an alpha—"
"What does that mean? An alpha? What is everyone else?"
I lifted my arm, and Jazz curled into my side, snuggling beneath it. There was nothing like holding Jazz after spending any length of time with him out of my arms. "Shifters. Most shifters are just that, but, every so often, an alpha is born to help protect, to nurture. Many believe alphas are meant to be the strongest man in a fight, and we are, but violence isn't our calling. We're meant to care for people. It's a shame you couldn't have met my team before. The men they are now…" I forced the rest of that air out, it tasted tainted by the memory. "We're all different. Losing Pierce was difficult, and then we lost everything else."
Jazz sighed, rolling to his side and flinging his leg over my waist.
My cock stirred, encouraged by the wayward limb.
"How did it happen?"
I inhaled his scent; the warm vanilla clung to my skin. I wanted to roll in it, cover my body with his smell. Up until this point, I'd held back from scenting him, truly scenting him, as I would if he were a pack member. But I did then, letting his essence fill me. There wasn't anything sexual about the action, despite my existing arousal.
Scenting had been a daily occurrence in our old life, an important habit to all of us alphas, likely because our situation was so uncommon. Intimate but not arousing, on its lowest level, scenting was about recognizing responsibility. Scenting was a claim that said this is a person I protect. I'd considered Jazz mine to protect from the very beginning, but I'd done so as a man. Now, I recognized him as a wolf.
"What are you sniffing up there?" Jazz asked. "Is my hair dirty?"
"No, you smell good enough to eat."
He stirred, wiggling tighter to my side, his arm and leg draped around me. "If you don't want to tell me, that's okay. I understand if we're not at the sharing traumatic things that happened to us point in our rel—friendship."
His cheeks burned bright, and he attempted to slide away, but I held him tight. "It was a mission. Nothing different about it, nothing unusual. We were in Columbia—"
"What were you doing there?"
If there had been any danger in him knowing, I wouldn't have told him, but as it was, anyone who'd been involved that day was dead now. "We'd been hired by one of the cartels. His daughter had been kidnapped by a rival, and she didn't make it. We were hired to kill the rival's son in retaliation."
Jazz gasped, and that time, I let him slide away. He didn't move to put space between us, as I'd expected. He repositioned his body, laying mostly on top of me with his hands flat on my chest. His chin rested against his knuckles. "You killed people? For money?" Despite the nature of his question, there was no fear in his eyes.
"We were mercenaries, Jazz. We didn't get hired to put on bake sales. But there are plenty of people in this world who would only improve the state of things if they no longer existed. Killing that man's son was a kindness to the people living in the local villages. The man was a menace, taking what he wanted when he wanted. We were hired by bad people to kill bad people. But that is my point. We had no reason to suspect anything was off until Pierce went in first—like always—to clear the entrance, and the entire manor went up. There could have been no survivors. The only reason myself and the others weren't killed by the blast was because we'd been tossed into the pool.
"Clearly, the rival cartel had known to suspect something, but a blast at that magnitude couldn't have been planned. It killed everyone in the mansion, Pierce included. As near as we could tell, it had been an accident—men playing with weapons they didn't understand. When we'd returned to question the man who had hired us, we found out he'd been assassinated that same day."
"I'm sorry," Jazz whispered, his face bouncing as his jaw braced the weight of his head. "That sounds horrible. You all must have been close working together for so long."
"Like brothers." Losing Pierce had been like losing a limb. I'd never known a pain so deep, until we'd returned home and I lost my heart along with everything else. "In the shifter world, it is uncommon for multiple alphas to lead at once. One is named Alpha, with a capital A, and he holds the power. But in our pack, the six of us worked together, bringing our pack prosperity and comfort it never would've had with only one of us in charge." For as long as it lasted, our situation had been perfect.
But nothing lasts forever.
Jazz's lips were warm along my jaw as he kissed me sweetly.
"What was that for?"
"You look so sad when you talk about them. I hate it. It hurts me here…" He patted his chest with his hand. "But I still want you to talk about it because that's important."
A rumble started low in my gut, like a purr. Wolves didn't purr, unless Jazz was in the area apparently. I lifted myself into a sitting position on the weight bench behind us, pulling Jazz with me so that he sat facing me, straddling my lap.
"Which stretch is this?" he joked, his laughter cut short when he met my eyes and saw the sudden desire I knew burned in my gaze.
"I like that you're here." I murmured the words I hadn't let myself say earlier. "I want you to stay, for as long as you want to. Stay, please."
"The guys will—"
"They can deal with it how they want. Our mission is the same. Once they see that nothing has changed there, they'll relax."
"Until you run out of money."
I didn't hear any bitterness as I'd expected, but there was an edge of shame that had me leaning back to see more of his face. Could he possibly feel guilt that we wouldn't be getting the money his father had promised us? The first half was ours, and we had a chunk remaining—though it didn't sit right with me to leave a job unfinished. But, when finishing the job meant never seeing Jazz again, that mattered less.
"They worry. We aren't destitute. I'll figure something out before we are." Figuring out something for them meant figuring something out for Jazz as well now, and that planted the seed of a feeling I didn't think I'd ever experience again.
Jazz's brows dipped, forming a straight line. "I'll earn my keep. I can bring in money. I have a few ongoing cons I can—"
"No." I shook my head. "I don't want you using your power on the outside. I might not want to return you to your father, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want you. Until I know why, you need to lay low."
"We live in an abandoned hotel on the outskirts of a tiny town. How much lower can I lay?" His tone dipped, the nature of his words having the same effect on him as they did on me.
I'd been pushing down my desire, tamping it back, but when he sounded like that? Impossible. My grip tightened on his waist. "I'm going to kiss you," I warned him, knowing that once I claimed his mouth, there would be no restraint.
Thinking about him being harmed, asking him to stay, I was already on edge, wrangling my nature to something a little more manageable.
"I want you too," Jazz sighed.
My mouth covered his, my tongue surging forward to get that first taste. His moan mixed with my growl, and I cupped his head, threading my fingers through his silky strands. Kissing Jazz felt like traveling back in time to a world that could be happy and good.