Chapter Six
M athias sat across the table from his mother in the kitchen of her apartment, tuning out the witless drone of her voice as his mind returned to the events of the previous evening. Frances Allen had been plain, barefaced, and not the slightest bit threatening. As soon as he’d laid eyes on her across the parking lot, it had occurred to him how entirely unremarkable she appeared. But she had a quick mouth, and during their conversation, he’d seen a steely glint in her eyes, giving Mathias the impression that she was a bulldog—once she got hold of something, she didn’t like to let go. Clearly, he was what she’d gotten hold of, and he needed to figure out what she knew so he could remain one step ahead.
In his efforts to source the leak, Mathias had reached out to his contacts in the city and the wider province for information. Still, he’d been unable to brush aside De Luca’s conclusion. Could Truman really have rolled over? It didn’t make any sense—the shipments implicated both of them.
“Whatever happened to that lovely young man?”
Had his mother paused her prattling to actually ask him a question?
She looked at him expectantly, turning the handle of her coffee cup. “You used to send him around every month while you were out of town. It made such a difference with the little things.”
Mathias frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“He’d shovel the walk, clear the snow from the stairs. He even unjammed the stuck window in the study. You know the one—polite, doesn’t talk much.”
That’s for fucking sure. This is the first I’ve heard of it. “He came by every month?”
She nodded. “For the life of me, I still can’t figure out where he’s from.”
Mathias fought the urge to roll his eyes. An hour north of here.
“Isn’t his French marvelous? So integrated! You know these immigrants—they can be so stubborn, refusing to adapt, chattering on in their language as if it’s our job to understand.”
How quickly his mother had forgotten that she was an immigrant herself.
“I hope you paid him well for his trouble. He never took the money I left him.”
Mathias hid a wry smile. Of course he didn’t.
“Those are nice.” She reached out to brush his right cuff link with her fingers. “Are they new?”
Mathias withdrew his hand and raised the cup of coffee to his lips. The cuff links had arrived at his apartment in an unmarked box in early November. Silver, a small opal set into each face—they were expensive and inarguably his style. Mathias had been surprised by the man’s taste. The only clue was the note inside the box: bonne fête .
The gift had come about following a conversation he’d had with Rayan while in Toronto about a year before. Rayan often did this when Mathias was still wrapped in their warmth, his mind addled with pleasure—he ambushed him with questions.
“When did you know?”
“Know what?” Mathias asked.
Rayan, pressed naked against him on the sofa, raised his head to look at him. He often struggled to follow the current of Rayan’s mind, the way it shifted, dipping below the surface into swirling depths.
“That what you liked was different.”
Mathias preferred not to dwell on the subject. It brought up other, darker feelings that seemed to have died with his father but sometimes resurfaced in quieter moments, catching him off guard. “Who knows? Things went from either-or to equally appealing. Until recently—” Mathias stopped, shocked at his own carelessness.
“Recently?” Rayan echoed.
I seem to want only you.
“Christ, always with the questions,” Mathias muttered, extracting himself and reaching down to the floor for his pants. “What’s next, my first memory? My favorite color?”
“How about your birthday?” Rayan asked, sitting up. “You know mine.”
He did—the first of March, a date his brain had oddly retained after seeing it on Rayan’s police file. “What makes you think that?” he scoffed.
“My pay was always more that week.”
Mathias set his jaw. “Misplaced optimism. Thought you’d actually spend some of it, I don’t know, on bottle service and a lap dance.”
Rayan let out a snicker.
“What did you do with all your earnings?” Mathias stood and refastened his pants. “You lived like a monk.”
“I hid the cash under the floorboards.”
Mathias blinked, incredulous. He picked up his shirt and pulled an arm through the sleeve. “And when you left Montreal? Stuffed down your shirt?”
“I gave it away.”
Mathias stilled as he registered what Rayan was saying. The man had sold his soul to work for the family, only to walk away from all that he’d gained by the sacrifice.
“The money wasn’t important.” Rayan’s face furrowed, and his eyes darted down with—was it remorse? “It’s not that I… I’m not ungrateful.”
“It was yours,” Mathias said, beginning on the buttons of his shirt. “You could have set it on fire for all I care. What about the money I left you? I suppose that’s funding some Cypriot war charity.”
“No,” Rayan said with a rueful shake of his head. “But it’s more than I’ll need in this lifetime.”
Mathias picked up his lighter and cigarettes from the coffee table. “Then I suggest you start getting creative.” He stepped across the living room and paused at the door to the balcony. He could see the outline of the man reflected in the glass—his tousled black hair, the slope of his bare shoulders. “And you?” Mathias asked stiffly.
Rayan was silent for a moment. “Since I was a kid. I don’t remember knowing exactly, more knowing I had something to hide.” He gave a soft laugh. “As if I didn’t have enough to hide from my old man.”
Mathias looked back to see Rayan staring off into the distance, lost in thought. He felt an unfamiliar pang. “November twelfth.” Mathias pulled open the balcony door, the crisp outside air brushing against his cheeks. He caught the flicker of a smile on Rayan’s face as he closed the door behind him.
When Mathias had been old enough to grasp the concept of birthdays, he’d come to the realization that he’d never had one. Initially, he’d thought, like most things, his mother had simply forgotten. But as the years wore on and the day came and went without note, he began to suspect she was actively avoiding it. So, as a point of pride, he did too.
They had enough money, but it was a while before Mathias fully understood where it came from. Part of his parents’ strange arrangement included his schooling—perhaps his mother’s only contribution when it came to raising him. She’d negotiated with his father to send him to a French private school. She would have preferred boarding school, but his father’s generosity must have stretched only so far. By the time his old man cut her off for good, Mathias was making his own money. He’d been tempted to walk away and watch the woman who’d made him fall into the depths of her own unmaking. He didn’t owe her anything, he’d spent most of his life reviling her, yet that was one final abandonment he was unable to subject her to—as much as he thought she deserved it.
His mother liked to appear regal, but she was plebeian at best. She’d been a headstrong girl who had left school at sixteen and absconded to Canada to shed the shackles of her parents’ influence. From there, her life had followed the trajectory of many young women who found themselves alone in an unforgiving city. She’d always bemoaned the loss of her education, which Mathias found laughable, as if that was the reason she’d ended up where she was. He’d gone to university to show her how easily he could throw it away. Mathias knew she was secretly disappointed in his decision to join the family. He imagined she, like his father, had envisioned a different life for him.
He looked at his mother across the table. Marguerite had already launched into another topic, Mathias and the cuff links forgotten. She appeared to him like a crudely drawn sketch, a hollow pretense for a person. As a child, subjected to her coldness and her volatility, he’d been frightened by that emptiness. Now he no longer cared. He’d given up trying to understand his mother a long time ago.
“Jesus, can you keep this stuff away from the kids?” Diana slapped a pile of papers down on the kitchen table, where Frances was sitting, watching her niece, Brie, shape a heart out of purple Play-Doh.
“Where did you get this?” Frances cried as she realized it was the contents of a confidential file from her backpack.
“Timmy was pulling it to pieces in the hallway,” her sister sniffed. “Must have found it in your bag.”
Frances stood and attempted to shuffle the mess into an orderly stack, searching for the missing folder. Brie leaned over to look, and Frances placed a hand on top to shield her view.
She was back in Ottawa for a few days, putting the screws to her old contact Dave Villanova, who supposedly had an in with the Red Reapers and was attempting to get a message to the group’s head, William Truman. The Quebec office had looked into who was facilitating the Ontario end of the mob’s shipments and had narrowed it down to the Hamilton-based Reapers. While it was unusual for the family to be associated with the outlaw motorcycle clubs that dominated the Canadian criminal landscape, there had been rumors of an alliance with the Reapers following Giorgio Russo’s death. She knew pulling off a meeting with Truman was a long shot, but she had a nice bit of leverage, and if anyone had dirt on Mathias they might be persuaded to divulge, it would be the head of the notorious Ontario biker gang.
“Oh my God, who is that?” her sister murmured, glancing over Frances’s shoulder.
“No one.” Frances briskly shoved the photo and the rest of the papers into the folder she’d found at the bottom of the pile. Timmy chose that moment to toddle up to the table with her car keys in his mouth. “There’s my crime-solving nephew,” she cooed, gently tugging the keys from his reluctant jaws. “Want to be like Aunty Frances one day?”
“Is he one of the guys you’re after in Montreal?”
“Diana,” she said pointedly, noticing Brie observing their interaction with wide-eyed curiosity. “You know I can’t talk about it.”
Her sister shrugged, a suggestive smile on her lips. “I wouldn’t mind getting him alone in an interrogation room.”
Frances recalled the quiet warning in Mathias’s words. He’d looked at her with a kind of amused contempt, like she was out of her depth—a child playing dress-up. She scowled, and Diana raised her eyebrows in mock surprise.
“Why, Mommy?” Brie piped up as her sister breezed into the kitchen to finish chopping the salad for dinner. “He must be a bad guy if Aunty Frances is chasing him.”
“You’re right,” Diana said. “If Aunty Frances is after him, then he must be bad.”
Frances pocketed her keys and stepped into the hall to pick up her manhandled bag. She slipped the folder back inside and hung it on one of the coat hooks by the door, out of reach from prying fingers. She wondered how much Brie knew about what she did for a living. As her niece got older, Frances found herself entertaining thoughts of taking her into headquarters and showing her around. Maybe she’d even get some of the grunts to dress up in uniform. But aside from the odd question, Brie had never really shown an interest. She was like her mother in that way—she would much rather go shopping than tour the inside of a federal police station.
Frances returned to the kitchen as Diana pulled a casserole from the oven and placed it down on the island. She gave a disappointed frown. “It doesn’t look anything like the recipe,” Diana said, poking at the crusted cheese with a fork.
“It looks fine.” Frances reached behind her sister for plates. In fact, it looked better than anything she’d eaten in the past week. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been relying on packets of vending-machine chips for her weekday meals.
After dinner, having wrangled the kids into their pajamas and to bed, she and Diana sat in the lingering chaos of the kitchen. Pans and dirty plates were scattered across the counter. Diana poured them each a glass of wine then slid back in her chair with a sigh.
“Let Jeff clean it up when he gets home. I’m done.” She took a gulp and set her glass down on the table. “So, you up for this one day? Or have I scared you off?”
Frances laughed. “What, kids?”
Diana nodded. “I mean, is it part of the plan, or do you see yourself doing this for the rest of your life?”
This? She could count on one hand the number of women under forty who were heading an entire federal investigation. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, Frances. Work can’t be everything, right?” Diana asked, raising her hand in exasperation. “I thought you had something there with Ethan. Are you meeting people? Going on dates?”
Frances bristled at her sister’s appraisal of her personal life. Does she think I’m lonely and pining, sitting around waiting for a man? When she wanted one, she sure as hell didn’t have to wait. That was the beauty of living in an era when men seemed to prefer the least amount of commitment.
“You don’t need to go on dates to get laid.”
“Please, you’re thirty-eight,” Diana said dismissively. “At a certain point, casual sex starts to look sad.”
Sad, is it? Her sister’s opinion of her prom dress had followed a similar vein. As had her opinion of Frances’s first boyfriend and most of them since—Ethan being the notable exception.
“Honestly, I don’t care what it looks like,” Frances said, raising her glass and taking a pointed sip.
That was her sister’s MO—husband, house, kids. Diana liked to make sure everything she did fit into a tidy little checkbox.
“Okay. Well, hear me out,” her sister said, placing her hands flat on the table like she was about to launch into a sermon. “I have a friend of a friend, recently single.”
Frances gave a snort. It’s not a sermon—it’s a fucking pitch.
“He’s looking to meet someone, and we all offered to see who we could set him up with. I think you’d like him.”
“Really?” she said mockingly. “And why’s that?”
“He’s got a great job, super-stable, and is into cycling, travel. Plus, he’s easy on the eyes.”
Frances wasn’t sure what among those stellar qualities was supposed to appeal to her—and this from her own flesh and blood. She hadn’t ridden a bike since she ripped her chin open falling off the Schwinn she’d gotten for her twelfth birthday. She still had the scar.
“It would just be casual—you know, coffee or a drink somewhere. You’re in town for the next week, right? Can’t hurt.”
Frances gripped the stem of her wineglass. She’d always resented her sister’s meddling. It made her feel like she needed to be fixed.
“I read this thing online about how, as we get older, our circle of acquaintances shrinks.” Diana was incapable of taking a hint. “So I figured, why not share some of mine?” She talked about it like they were sharing appetizers off a menu. “Please, just do it for me,” she whined. “I worry about you. This is what big sisters do.”
Frances let out a defeated groan and did what little sisters did—she agreed.
After leaving Diana’s, she drove through the darkened streets to her house across town. Even though she’d bought it a few months before meeting Ethan, he’d moved in shortly after they started dating, so it still felt like theirs . As she pulled her car into the garage, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the place was eerie without his stuff. Ethan had constructed an elaborate hanging display for his landscaping equipment across one of the garage walls. He was the type to wake early on a Sunday morning to mow the lawn, which had both amused and annoyed her. Now the wall was empty, a white expanse in the dim light, punctuated by ominous metal hooks.
She got out of the car and headed inside. It wasn’t just the garage that had been stripped after Ethan left. He’d owned most of the furniture in the house, and she hadn’t got around to replacing it, mostly because it was too much of a hassle to pick something out and haul it home. It didn’t help that she was barely home to begin with.
Frances dropped her keys on the counter and surveyed the state of the place. It was strange to be back among her things and stranger still to realize that she didn’t miss any of them. She opened the fridge for a beer and popped off the lid. Taking a long pull from the bottle, she felt a buzz in her pocket as her phone began to ring. It was Dave.
“Please tell me you have good news,” she said. She was desperate for some. Her usual tactics were proving laughably ineffective.
“It’s good. I’ve got you a meeting.”
“No shit!”
“You’ll have to go alone, though. He only agreed to see you. And he insisted on picking the place. He’ll get word to my man, and I’ll get word to you.”
“Awful lot of conditions,” Frances grumbled, resting her elbow against the kitchen counter.
“It’s William Truman, Frances,” Dave said with a snort. “If he’s seen meeting with you, the hit to his reputation will be the least of his worries.”
“And I’m supposed to just go along with his demands? I’m the one with the dirt here. With what Border Services has on him, he should be bending over backward for a chance to meet with me.”
“Truman has managed to avoid the cops for years. He’s not afraid of you.”
Frances smirked and took another swig of beer. “He will be.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dave cautioned her.
“All right—thanks for coordinating. Keep me posted about the particulars.” Frances hung up and gave a short laugh when she realized that, in the space of one evening, she’d managed to be set up twice.