by Bethany-Kris
Still, he liked it.
Sometimes people liked to see that shit; sometimes they didn’t. He quickly learned to edit videos to make a minute or two entertaining—or rather, how to edit things out, if needed. A lot of work went into both his vlogs and photography. More than people understood, typically. He liked doing both, though. One let him focus on what he could see, and the other allowed his followers to see how he did it all.
The second his weight came down on the board as he rolled across cement, Diego let the selfie stick and camera fall to his side, so he could focus on coming to a safe stop in the semi-busy skatepark. A lot of the faces were ones he recognized.
It was only the call of his name that reminded him why he’d actually skipped school—and that exam—to come to the park today.
“Hey! Over here, Diego!”
With his camera still rolling, although it wasn’t catching anything but passing cement and audio, Diego came to a stop just two feet away from Marty Lorde. He hadn’t been sure the guy would even come seeing as how during their last meeting, Diego hadn’t exactly jumped at the opportunity the Los Angeles manager—who toted an entire list of recognizable names that he represented.
He should have jumped at it, though.
Wasn’t this the chance of a lifetime?
“No school?” Marty asked him.
Diego shrugged, and slammed the heel of his Vans sneaker into the back of the board. The front flew up from the ground, and he caught it easily. Just as fast, he shut off his camera, knowing now wasn’t the time to go back through the footage though he really wanted to see if he had caught the takeoff and landing like he hoped. “Wasn’t that important today.”
Marty chuckled; the almost thirty-year-old man was slightly out of place in the skatepark with his black, fitted suit and professional demeanor considering he was the only one around who looked like he did. “School is always important.”
“But not today.”
Even if he had missed an exam that was a large percentage of his final grade.
Oh, well. Win some, lose some.
“Did you give what I said any thought or—”
“I have some questions.”
“Shoot,” Marty replied with a wave in his direction. “I’ve got nowhere better to be, and I know something like this is … I mean, it’s a big change. A huge step. You wanna know what I can do for you, then ask away. It’s the only way you’ll learn and feel like you can make the right choice for you.”
Right.
It was the same thing he said when he first approached Diego with the offer. He could tell the guy was serious—he wanted to sign on to managing Diego’s career not just entertain him while the man was in New York on business. He saw potential and wanted to help get Diego where he needed to be to make his wildest dreams possible.
Or that was the dream Marty tried selling.
“I want to have freedom of my name and brand,” Diego said, “and not just … be a rep or whatever.”
Marty nodded, seemingly pleased with that statement. “With representation on the ground for you, it’ll be a lot easier to do that.”
“And brand deals—”
“Will secure you a decent amount of cash. Income. Influencers struggle the most to secure brand deals in the current market because it’s oversaturated, but I can make it a hell of a lot easier on you. In LA, you’re going to need the income coming in regularly and consistently. And the more present you are, with the most recognizable brands on the market at the moment, the better off you’ll be, and the nicer you’ll look to anyone else. It’s all about raising your profile, Diego. Making you … in demand.”
“Huh.”
He understood.
Mostly.
“I mean, were you planning anything else next year?” Marty asked. “College or whatever?”
Diego barely considered his reply. “Not really.”
Everyone else was.
Not him, though.
“Nothing else I really want to do,” Diego admitted after a stretch of silence.
Marty passed him a look, but said nothing. Diego didn’t offer a reply after that, either. Maybe it was something in his voice that the manager heard, but the guy smiled slightly telling him, “Listen, you still have time to think about it. I’ve got time. And it’s not like I can’t just fly you out, you know? If you wanted to come out and see what it could be like for you in LA with a decent rep watching your back—say the word, kid, I’ll make it happen. Get you set up. You’re worth it, Diego.”
Was he?
Diego didn’t really know.
“You still have my card, right?” Marty asked.
“Yeah, tucked away.”
“Then, you know how to reach me. Say the word, and your next stop is LA, kid.”
He was still considering Marty’s offer long after the man had left the skatepark. Fucking with his camera to check the footage from earlier, the idea of LA continued playing on repeat in his mind and what it could all mean. Maybe it was just too much information for his seventeen—almost eighteen—year-old brain to truly comprehend, but that didn’t make much of a difference to him.
LA seemed like the right choice.
The buzzing of his phone had him glancing to the left of his current perch on the cement steps of the park’s exit. Figuring it was just going to be Rose saying the school called again because he didn’t show up, he was surprised to find a different name lighting up the screen.
Renzo, that was.
He snatched the phone up from the ground and answered the call without thinking about it. “Hey, Ren.”
“You know Rose has called me twice today because you didn’t show up to school—”
“I had something else to do.”
“Again,” Renzo finished quietly.
He loved his brother.
He did.
Sometimes, though, Ren got that parent tone going on when he spoke, and Diego didn’t want to hear any of it. He blamed that on the fact that he never really had parents to begin with. Only his older siblings that looked out for him and did what they needed to do even though raising him wasn’t their job.
He wished they understood that didn’t make them his mother or father—so far, no such luck.
“I was looking forward to coming to Nevada to see you,” Diego said, referring to the trip he was supposed to take soon, “but less when you … do that, Ren.”
“Do what?” his brother asked.
“That. You know what.”
Renzo sighed on the other end of the call. “I know about Rose and what’s been going on. Skipping school. The restlessness. Late nights. You’re not in some shit I have to take care of again, are you?”
Diego rolled his eyes. “No.”
“Diego—”
“I said no, bro.”
And he meant it.
He wasn’t in trouble.
He was just …
“Hey,” Renzo said, his tone soft but firm at the same time on the call. “You can talk to me about anything. You know that, right?”
Maybe that’s what he’d been waiting for here—the thing that he needed to finally make a decision about what he wanted to do with his life. Or rather, whether he should take the leap and uproot his entire world just to chase what felt like a pipe dream across the country. Something like college and a traditional job were sure things. Hopes and dreams were not.
Diego felt like he was on the verge of something. Or a lot of things. Adulthood. Understanding himself. Greatness. Whatever form that took.
“You okay?” his brother asked.
He was.
Sort of.
Instead, Diego replied, “Just—hey, can we talk when I get out there with you? I need somebody to listen and let me talk through some stuff.”
Renzo didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely.”
FOUR
Renzo
“Rose, I told you. Did I not tell you?”
“I know, I know.”
His sister said she
knew—like she had told him again and again since their last conversation—but he wasn’t sure she did understand a lot of what was going on when it came to Diego. She assumed a lot he realized. Both his sister and her husband decided a lot about what was the case with their younger brother, but Renzo also learned something else the more he talked to Rose about what was happening back in New York.
She didn’t talk to Diego.
Or rather, she didn’t listen.
It was a lot of we want and we think and he should whenever Renzo got Rose down into the nitty-gritty of the problem they thought they had with Diego and his lack of … motivation. The bigger issue was that Diego’s disinterest was probably a symptom of something else, and he didn’t think Rose or her husband understood that at all.
They were too busy trying to make sure Diego could be a responsible adult because his adulthood was right around the corner. Renzo absolutely recognized the whys of it all, but that didn’t mean their seventeen-year-old brother did, could, or even cared.
But given he was in Nevada, Diego wouldn’t be on a flight to him until tomorrow, and Ren had a job to do here before he could get back home and be present in New York … well, for the moment he was stuck dealing with what he could during phone calls. He and Rose made attempt after attempt to come to some solution between the two of them that would allow them to be united in front of Diego when they presented him with some options.
Except that was hard to do when Renzo hadn’t even spoken to his little brother for long enough to get into the topic of what was going on. He respected Rose’s position on encouraging Diego to further his education—or at least, try. He also thought that maybe there was something his brother might want to do, and why couldn’t he have a conversation with Diego about it first before he decided anything else?
Seemed simple enough to him.
“I know—you’ll talk to him,” Rose said in a huff, the noise crackling the speaker of the Bluetooth in his ear. “Sometimes, I just worry about him. That’s all. It’s like he doesn’t hear anything we say most of the time, Ren.”
That had him chuckling. The sound drifted down the empty corridor of The League’s complex, reminding him that all too soon, he needed to end the conversation with Rose to handle business here. Whatever business that was, as the phone call from Cree demanding he—and apparently other team members—come into the complex last minute hadn’t given him a single hint about what was going on.
Except that it was a situation.
Perfect, huh?
“That’s probably the most normal thing about Diego. The fact you worry about him because he’s a teenage boy who doesn’t care to listen to what you have to say.” Coming up to the corner that would take him to Dare’s office, he could already hear the voices starting to filter down the hallway. Renzo decided now was the time to get off the phone. He could deal with Rose another time, and Diego would be there in Nevada with him tomorrow. “Leave him alone—don’t push him about anything. Let me have the next week with him, and I’ll see what I can do about what you want, but also what he wants after graduation, okay?”
“Skateboarding—that’s what he wants. It’s all he ever does. That and carry that damn camera around with him all the time.”
Renzo sighed and resisted the urge to scrub a hand down his face. “And?”
Because people made careers out of that all the damn time if they were ambitious enough to make it work. Why couldn’t Diego do the same, if he really wanted it?
“What if he breaks a leg, Ren? Blows out a damn knee? What will he do then if he can’t get on a skateboard anymore or—”
“What Diego does is more than just skateboarding.”
And it was.
Even Ren knew that.
Someone needed five minutes scrolling down Diego’s social feeds to know the kid was multitalented. Photography. Videography. Editing. He had an eye for art, too, and especially colorful, modern abstracts. Something Ren thanked Rose and his wife, Lucia, for because both women encouraged Diego to be artistic.
“Rose, I gotta go,” Ren said, ten steps from Dare’s office in the complex, “but you’ve got to give Diego a bit of room to breathe here. Had I told you to put your paints away, said they were stupid and wouldn’t ever make you any money … would you have done it?”
“Ren.”
“Would you have done it?”
Rose let out a hard breath. “No, but he’s got a chance to be anything. And—”
“And so we’re going to let him be what he wants to be.”
For Ren, it really was that simple. He wanted to be able to tell Diego that, too.
It was a good thing Renzo hung up with his sister before he walked into Dare’s office. Cree took the device from him and tossed it into a box under his arm without a word the second he passed the door’s threshold.
“Hey!”
From behind his massive desk, Dare peered at Renzo over the gathered team that had huddled over piles of familiar black clothing and gear to ready for departure. Already, Renzo didn’t like what he was seeing or what it probably meant.
Dare didn’t make him wait to learn.
“Sorry,” his boss told him, “but all phones are confiscated until you’re back in the country with a report. The job is moved up—we knew it was a possibility given the nature of the situation. The entire team needs to be on a plane within the hour.”
Luv, the young woman he was supposed to be mentoring, pushed away from the wall with a backpack in her outstretched hand for him to take. “Grabbed your gear bag from downstairs—Cree has your clothes.”
“Thanks,” he told her, though his attention was still on Dare. “My brother is flying in tomorrow. He was supposed to be here with me all week.”
“He’s what, seventeen?” Dare grinned, entirely unconcerned when he said, “He’ll be fine. Hell, let Luv look after him for the week. It’ll give her something to do. She’s not going on this job—not since shit changed and all.”
Cree jumped between team members, their voices and questions skipping over Ren’s head because he knew that he didn’t have a choice. Like a robot, he had already started stripping his clothes to get dressed in whatever black ensemble Cree had waiting for him. There was no point in arguing when it came to The League because that wasn’t how it worked.
You did what you were told, or you died.
Renzo signed up for this.
He did his fucking job.
“I’ll look after him,” Luv said, her smile bubbly when Cree came back their way with a pile of clothes in hand for Renzo. “I got your back, Ren.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“Not sure I have to.” The blonde shrugged, and those blue eyes of hers twinkled with mischief. “I just have to keep him out of trouble, right? Easy.”
But was it?
“I’m kinda worried about the kid,” Renzo muttered. “He’s … in a strange place.”
Yeah, that seemed like the right way to say it.
Cree’s dark eyes met Renzo’s. “Sounds like he might be searching for something—why not let him find what he needs to?”
Renzo couldn’t reply when his words were only drowned out by someone else. Dare’s voice boomed over the room with more orders. They had to be out of the building in the next four minutes.
Cree was the last thing he saw before he was shoved out of the office with the rest of the team. “Let her look after him—she’s been bored lately. It won’t hurt.”
Right.
Wouldn’t hurt a bit.
He couldn’t say he knew Luv well enough to trust what Cree said was fact. It bothered him more than he was willing to admit.
FIVE
Diego
McCarran International Airport’s arrivals was like navigating a maze. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but with the amount of people Diego had to duck and swerve on his way through to the luggage carousel, it certainly felt like a damn maze. It wasn’t his first time at the airport. Not even his tenth. Ev
er since Ren came back years ago, Diego regularly flew back and forth between New York and Las Vegas whenever his older brother worked in Nevada for a stretch of time.
Not that Ren really explained what he did here. Sort of. Diego knew, yes. He understood that Ren worked for a company that called themselves The League. His brother explained—partly—what his business for them boiled down to, and what it meant, but he didn’t go into great detail and made it clear he preferred Diego not to ask questions.
Not that he needed to ask.
Diego got the gist.
Ren worked as an assassin—yeah. A real, actual fucking assassin that was hired to do not so great things to other people or organizations depending on who had enough money to hire him through The League.
It was something Diego tried not to think about. Not because it made him think less of his brother—he understood very well how Renzo found himself in his current situation with The League; he never lied about it—but rather … he worried.
A lot.
What if Ren didn’t come back from a job?
What would Lucia do—or their son?
What would Rose do?
Diego?
It was just better he didn’t obsess over it. He barely thought about it at all now, and it was easier that way, honestly.
Shifting the backpack on his shoulder to ease a bit of the weight, Diego pulled the cell phone from his hoodie pocket. Turning on the screen and avoiding eye contact with anyone who thought to try as he navigated arrivals, he was quick to turn his phone off flight mode.
Just as fast, the device dinged.
And dinged again.
And again.
Again.
Diego sighed as the phone dinged over and over again in his hand with text after text and text. There were a couple of missed calls, too. A voice message or two, by the looks of it. Most came from his sister, some were from her husband, and there was a couple from Lucia. He didn’t have anything to say to Rose’s husband—they didn’t have the kind of relationship where Diego cared to text the man back. He would give Lucia a call later.
And probably his sister, too.
Probably.
Really, he just didn’t want to talk. Not when he felt like he had listened to Rose talk herself out for days leading up to his trip to Nevada. She had barely let him talk back at all. It had been less of a conversation and more of a lecture.