by Bethany-Kris
CUSP
A RENZO + LUCIA COMPANION
BETHANY-KRIS
For all those lovers of this series …
CONTENTS
CUSP
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
BIO
Copyright
ONE
Diego
“Are you up in there, or do I need Trevor to turn on the speakers and—”
“I’m up,” Diego threw at his closed bedroom door. Behind it, he heard his older sister, Rose, laugh under her breath. Jesus. She knew how much he hated her husband’s country music. How a big city lawyer like Trevor could stand to listen to that shit, Diego would never understand. Then again, there was a lot about his sister’s husband that he couldn’t relate to.
Nah, that wasn’t it.
More like Rose and Renzo—his siblings—raised Diego after their addict mother drugged and drank her way into a pauper’s grave somewhere. Their father … or rather, his siblings’ father? Who knew? Somethings were just better left alone.
Then, when Ren couldn’t look after Diego, Rose stepped up alone to do it. For a long time, it was just him and his sister.
Until she got married.
Trevor wasn’t a bad guy.
Mostly.
He did, however, seem to have a hard nut for the fact he thought it was also his responsibility to fill some role in Diego’s life that he believed was missing. Like a father. At first, it was little things but the closer he came to turning eighteen—not long now—the more Trevor thought he needed to be the dad Diego didn’t have.
Listen …
Diego didn’t want a dad.
He’d done fine without one for this long; he wasn’t trying to be an asshole to Rose’s husband or anything. He simply wasn’t interested in the kind of bond Trevor was trying to make. Did it cause some issues?
Sometimes.
It didn’t matter to him.
Diego wasn’t letting someone else into his life just for them to fuck off like most everybody else had already done at one point or another. Other than his siblings, that was. He loved Ren and Rose to the ends of the earth and back for it, too. Well, and Lucia, Ren’s wife. Not to mention their kid, Lorenzo. Honestly, that was enough for him. His life wasn’t open to new people he had to make time for.
What was so hard to understand about that? Diego thought it was pretty clear.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes before you miss the—”
“Got it,” Diego said over his shoulder while he shoved all the shit he needed from his desk into the black backpack on the chair. The patches he’d sewn onto the bag to make it more custom and his style had taken years to collect. After he threw in his kit—extra parts for his skateboard so long as he didn’t break the board itself—and his wallet, his phone went in last. Under his phone was a sleek, gold business card with white lettering in the middle that caught the lamplight from his desk when he picked it up.
He twisted the business card over and over in his fingers, eyeing the name on the front while his foot tapped a fast beat to the floor. Sucking air through his teeth, he read the name again just to be sure he was seeing it right.
Marty Lorde, Manager
Los Angeles, CA
The man’s cell number—Diego had a good idea how rare it was to get one of these cards, especially after he did a quick check of the guy’s socials—stared back at him, winking in the light. Taunting him almost.
Was he too chickenshit to call?
To say fuck it—be great.
Skateboarding had been Diego’s thing since he was eleven. That and photography. And one day he realized he could do both and put it on the internet for other people to see things the way he did. When he was younger, he had a hard time fitting in with other kids. Sometimes, he found trouble just to belong.
When he found skateboarding and learned to share it with the world … Diego realized he didn’t need to make friends when people would just find him. His main social where he shared the majority of his photos and videos—and where he was most active—had just crawled over two-hundred thousand followers.
His sister didn’t like it. Trevor said it was dangerous. Ren thought it was kinda cool.
And up until the moment Diego met Marty Lorde at the skatepark two blocks away from his private high school—where he should have been in class—he never realized he could make a career out of being on the fucking internet. Or doing what he did on the internet, for that matter.
Marty said shit Diego didn’t understand. And some he did.
Sponsorships. Product placement. Representation. Maybe some modeling. Definitely brand deals. Contacts are everything; you need to come out to LA.
“Are you even listening to me?” Rose called.
Her voice brought him back to the present all at once. Responsibilities. Decisions. The exam he was supposed to write during fourth period, and the graduation he probably wouldn’t attend if he decided to chase the dream that had just been placed into his hands.
Adulting was for the fucking birds.
It wasn’t even the whole turning eighteen part of the growing up business that Diego thought was stupid as fuck. It was the expectations that followed him because he was turning eighteen and what people thought he should be doing with his life because of that fact.
Like college.
Choosing a career.
Doing something … normal. Expected. And entirely fucking boring. All things Diego had no interest in whatsoever. Mostly because he never bothered to sit down and think about it at all. The things his sister wanted him to look forward to and work toward as an adult weren’t the kinds of things he’d ever considered for his own life. Not when he’d been too busy learning how far he could fly on a skateboard while filming it for others to see, too. He did the school thing. Like they told him to.
Wasn’t that enough?
“What is up with you lately?” his sister asked through the bedroom door. “It’s not like you, you know? You can’t miss the exam today, Diego. Don’t skip again, all right?”
Diego turned to head for the bedroom door and shoved the card into his bag before zipping it up and tossing it over his shoulder. He had more questions about the LA thing that wouldn’t leave the back of his mind, and since Marty was only going to be in the city today, he didn’t have a choice but to miss the exam his sister was currently bitching about.
Pulling the bedroom door open, he already had a smile waiting for Rose. She worried about him enough. Her entire life seemed to revolve around making sure he was doing what he needed to do. Diego understood why that was … but he wished she would just let him grow up the way he wanted to now.
Her eyes widened, and the hand she’d raised to knock again on the wood lowered back to her side. His grin had her softening a bit. Last year, his height shot right up and now he stood six inches taller than her at six feet. She shook her head as she looked up at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just late this morning.”
“Ace that exam. You need the grade.”
Right.
For college.
“And I got an email today,” Rose added, “about the open house at UNR. I mean, you’re going to see Ren for a week in a couple of days, why not check out the university while you’re there?”
The text he received that morning from Marty in reply to asking if the man could meet up burned a hole in the bag hanging off his shoulder. So did the exam and grade. His sister.
“I’m not sure I want to go to s
chool. I was thinking I might move out to LA and—”
“Diego,” Rose said, rolling her eyes and smiling like she thought he was being silly. “Come on, be real for a second. You gotta get serious about this stuff. You can’t play on your skateboard forever—all right?”
That was the thing.
He was serious about it.
He just needed to be taught how to do something with it.
“All right?” Rose asked again.
“I guess,” he said.
What else could he say?
He had a manager to meet.
She still wanted him to write that exam.
TWO
Renzo
“Do I have your attention now?”
Considering every stare in the room was currently locked on the projection across the room, Renzo would say his boss achieved quieting the space. An entire team of League members shoved into Dare’s office at the compound made the room seem a great deal smaller than it actually was. Ren found himself a corner for this briefing because he would really only be doing one thing if he’d been called in for the job Dare was prepping to show them. The same thing he always did when The League needed him.
Blow shit up.
It’s what he liked.
Even if it did almost kill him.
“Have you started?” asked a new, but familiar, voice.
Attention flew to the man who strolled through Dare’s open office doorway without a single concern. His gaze barely drifted over the roomful of people, and he walked straight through the projection like he didn’t distort it for everyone else at the same time. Cree, always the one to do what nobody expected him to, took his spot beside Dare who simply stared at the man as if he was considering asking, “Are you quite done?”
He might ask it.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Cree glanced sideways at his partner when Dare didn’t continue with his briefing. “Sorry, were you waiting for me?”
Dare let out a sigh, offering nothing else as he turned his shoulders to face the room once more. “Back to what I was saying—keep your attention on the images. We will not be going over this a second time in the same fashion. And since the job just came in, it’s very likely this could turn time sensitive, and then we’ll need to just move on it. Better for us all to figure out where we all stand here and now. Understood?”
Confirmative murmurs passed over the room. Including Renzo’s and the woman beside him. A good head and a half shorter than him, in a room full of assassins, Luv Moore looked like nothing more than a kid out of her element. From the second he met her, he always wondered how she found herself mixed up with The League, but he knew better than to ask.
While everyone else in the room went with black ensembles and used tactical gear as accessories, she wore skinny jeans with blown-out knees and a bomber jacket she’d zipped up to her throat. With a head full of thin, blonde hair that curled a bit at the ends and big blue eyes that seemed innocent, her small figure and dainty features only added to the whole pixie-vibe she had going on. Add in the fact the girl could bounce from one thing to the next, bubbly one second and then vicious in a breath, and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her.
Except the chick was his new … pet project.
Dare’s words, not his.
All League members took their turns mentoring someone who could match their energy and skills in one way or another. The only thing Renzo understood about his new partnership with Luv while she finished the remaining months of her training was that like him, she enjoyed blowing shit up. She was pretty quick with wires, had a taste for hacking when she was in the mood, and that was basically it.
He didn’t even know her age officially, but it wasn’t hard to tell that she was young. Really young. Barely eighteen, he assumed. If that.
Her age is not important, Dare explained when Ren arrived yesterday. All he was expected to do with Luv was engage her with training and have her accompany him on any job where she wouldn’t be considered a risk until she was cleared to go out on her own after next year’s auctions, and her contract was picked up.
He had a handful of conversations with her. Today was supposed to be training for her while he observed, but then Dare called the team in.
This job.
Whatever the fuck it was.
“A private-owned bank,” Dare said, “currently holding a quarter of a billion in gold owned by one—”
“You got a kid, right?”
Renzo’s gaze drifted down to the girl at his side. “Pardon?”
“People talk. Before you showed up, they said you live in New York with your wife and kid.”
Mostly, he didn’t mind Luv’s questioning because it was innocent enough. He cared more that people at the compound were discussing anything about another member without said member there to join. He would deal with that another time.
“I have a son, yes,” Renzo said quietly as to not gain Dare’s attention from the front of the room. After all, the man was busy explaining the takeover and robbery of a bank in a country across the world. That flight was sure to be fun. Not. “He’s three. Lorenzo. We just call him Lo or Loren.”
“Huh.”
He gave her another look. Her noise gave him the impression she didn’t understand the concept of a parent and child. It made him consider her further—if only because he was curious how she found her way to The League when she looked to be an age where she probably still needed a parent minding her. Then again, who was he to talk when he practically raised himself?
“Orphan?” he asked.
Ren didn’t need to say more for her to understand.
Luv shrugged. “Chosen.”
What did that mean?
He opted not to ask.
At the front of the room, Dare continued on. “The name we’ll be using for this job is Selective.”
The man’s stare found Renzo.
“And why is that, New York?”
Goddammit.
That nickname still stuck.
Cree always smiled when someone else used it.
The room turned on Renzo in the corner. A long time ago, the attention might have annoyed him if for no other reason than he didn’t appreciate people staring just because they felt like it. Right then, however, he didn’t have time to be bothered when Dare was waiting for an answer.
Always testing them, he knew.
It never failed.
“Selective destruction,” Renzo said, looking over the new image on the projection—the layout for the bank and the vaults.
Because apparently, there was more than one.
“Selective destruction,” Dare echoed. “Exactly. It’s how we’ll handle entering and removing what we need from the vaults. Minimal damage to lessen any blowback after the job is done, but also for the client. He would like his gold. Undamaged. You all will receive a secure text with file attachments in two minutes. You’ll find more information on this job. Preparations begin immediately. Don’t waste time.”
Luv bounced beside Renzo. “Well, this looks like fun.”
He didn’t bother to reply because a text had his phone buzzing in his pocket. Pulling the device out to check it, he hoped it would be his wife—Lucia still kept him updated on her day, but now with the addition of pictures and voice memos from his three-year-old son, too.
There, life was a dream.
Here, it was entirely different.
It wasn’t Lucia. It was from Rose. His sister’s message didn’t have him smiling, either. We need to talk about Diego, it read. What was that about?
Renzo didn’t think he’d like it. Whatever it was. For the most part, Rose handled everything about Diego because Ren couldn’t when he had to travel back and forth between New York and Nevada. He helped when he could, but she was in their teenage brother’s everyday grind. She was the one who made sure the kid got up, did what he needed to do, and everything else. If she said they needed to talk, then he’d make time.
> He typed back a quick I’ll call in a bit as Dare said from the front of the room, “Bomb specialist will have final say on all plans—he’ll be the final act in this. Make sure you know where and what he’s doing because of it. Ren?”
His head popped up from his phone.
Right.
He was the bomb specialist here.
“Sounds good,” he told Dare.
Dare clicked a button on the remote, and the projection screen disappeared from the wall. At the same time, every phone in the room that belonged to a member buzzed, dinged or rang in some fashion. Including Renzo’s.
“Your files have arrived,” their boss said, “so get to work.”
THREE
Diego
Keeping the selfie stick high and angled down to catch Diego’s lift from the ground before he landed the bottom of his board on the metal railing of the cement stairs, he caught it perfectly. And so did the camera, he bet. The skateboard protested under the weight and pressure of being stuck between him and the railing—how many had he broken doing this exact stunt over the last year alone?
Enough.
Or that’s what his sister said.
The few people who had gathered at the bottom of the stairs were quick to scatter when Diego flew off the end of the railing seemingly out of control. It kind of felt like he was, too. Those few seconds of being weightless in the air on his board, rushing too fast, changed to the ground coming at him before he even realized what happened.
Yet, it never scared him.
He liked it too much.
Diego swung the selfie stick around to catch the bright rays of the sun overhead and then a wide shot of the skatepark as his board slammed into the ground on all four wheels. Learning the skill of skateboarding was one thing, but doing it while running a camera at the same time was a whole other ball game. While he had yet to suffer a broken bone—well, nothing beyond a broken toe or sprain—he took a lot of falls. He got a lot of stitches; bruises, gashes and bloody noses or mouths was part of the territory.
