Surrender Love

Prologue

A/N: Hey everyone! This is going to be a collaborative Peterick, Ryden, Frerard, and Petekey fanfiction, and I don't think this particular idea has been written about before so we really hope you guys find it interesting and enjoy reading it. If you didn't already know, this account is shared by stxmpywxntz (Paige) and colorfulwentz (Julia). We'll either collab on the chapters or switch off. The prologue was written by me, Julia. I hope you guys like it!

Blood. There was blood everywhere. It was all Pete could see for several yards in every direction, a sea of scarlet that was there because of his own doing. He fell to his knees in a thick puddle of crimson, his hands shaking as he tightly gripped his knife, his heart beating wildly against his chest. He looked at the limp, cold bodies surrounding him, tears building in his eyes. They had been bad people, sure, but they were still people. Why did Pete have to kill them? Because he was doing some sort of "good" by ridding the world of evil? Why couldn't he just do that by finding them and turning them in to the cops? He never asked for this life. He didn't want to be a murderer.

But he couldn't just get out of it. It wasn't that easy. He was tied to a gang of assassins called the "Youngbloods" by a pledge he had been forced to make as a child. They had found him abandoned and shivering on the rainy streets of Chicago when he was just six years old. He was twenty six now.

Whoever his biological family was-he could barely remember what they even looked like-they clearly hadn't loved him seeing as they left him for dead, but these assassins? Even though they raised him and took care of him for all these years, they were way worse than this biological family. Pete knew he would have rather died on those streets as a child. The Youngbloods didn't love him. They only wanted him as an extra warrior to place among their ranks. Of course, they told him that they loved him-they told him that he was family-but Pete knew the only reason he was still alive was because he was doing all their dirty work by killing the people on their hit list.

He supposed he could kill himself. That would be the easy way out of this situation. But Pete wasn't one for "easy". He was a fighter through and through, and one day he'd find a way out of this life as an assassin. He didn't know how, exactly; he just knew that somehow he would.

"Pete!" The brunette snapped back to reality at the sound of a familiar voice calling his name. His hands still shaking a bit, Pete slid the knife back onto his belt and took a deep breath before rising to his feet and putting on a good face for his leader. He turned to greet him.

"Mikey."

Mikey hurried over to him and clasped him proudly on the shoulder. "You took care of it," he observed with a grin, which Pete found absolutely disgusting. His grin was an outcome of the horrifying number of bodies surrounding them. "Well done. You always manage to get the job done, and that's why you're my favorite."

Pete wasn't phased by the compliment. In fact, he heard it so many times that it had just about gotten old at this point. It was a known fact by everyone in the gang that Mikey was head over heels in love with Pete, but for his own sake, he pretended that he didn't know.

He also pretended that he was happy to have once again killed for Mikey. He had no other choice but to pretend-survival as a Youngblood always came at so many terrible costs.

"Of course. I'll always get the job done, Mikey," Pete replied, faking a sinister smirk. Mikey's eyes glowed with approval, and this is when Pete decided he would discreetly attempt to gather the information he was actually looking for.

"What exactly did they do, by the way?" Pete inquired, gesturing towards the bodies. His eyes landed on one sprawled across the ground to his left, and a shiver ran down his spine as he remembered the way she had screamed when he plunged his knife into her chest. No matter how many times he killed, he could never seem to handle their screams.

Mikey raised an eyebrow. "Why should it matter what they did?" he asked. "I give you a list and you follow it with no further questions. Right, Pete? I mean, that's how it's been for as long as you've been picking up weapons."

"No, of course," Pete said, quickly trying to cover his slip up. "I didn't mean it like that. I was just making sure they deserved death, that's all." Because that's the whole reason we kill, right? To get rid of people that actually deserve death?

Mikey stared at Pete for an uncomfortable amount of time, carefully examining his expression. If there was anything that Pete really knew about Mikey, it was that he was unbelievably good at reading people, so the brunette tried to keep his face as emotionless as possible and evenly held his gaze in order to keep from conveying anything that would give away how he truly felt about this lifestyle.

Finally, Mikey lifted his chin and calmly said, "If they're on my list, then they always deserve death."

Pete nodded in understanding, receiving him a sweet smile from his leader, and they were back to normal just like that. Mikey broke their eye contact and turned to glance over one of the dead bodies, studying the wounds that his perfect little soldier had created.

Pete felt like he was going to be sick. He had always known Mikey wasn't a good, pure person-none of them were; they were assassins, for Heaven's sake-but something about the way he said that had sounded like a lie in every way. If the people on Mikey's kill list always deserved death, then how come Pete never knew why?