A Life Betrayed (Montreal #2)

Chapter Nine

M athias sat at the bar and watched the line of people queuing for drinks. For a crumbling joint, it was surprisingly busy at two thirty in the afternoon. Does anyone have a job in this fucking town?

Gurin had called the previous evening and asked to meet with him to discuss what he’d uncovered about Inspector Allen. Mathias had made the trip out to Hamilton that morning, knowing he couldn’t stay long as there were pressing things to be dealt with back in Montreal. He glanced down at his watch. Granted, he was early, but Gurin would have to haul ass if he expected to make it on time. They’d agreed to meet at the same piece-of-shit bar in North Glanford where they used to trade intel when Mathias was stationed in the city.

During his brief stint in Hamilton, he’d grown to appreciate Gurin’s practical efficiency, along with his capacity for discretion. Even back then, he’d trusted the Russians more than he had the bumbling head of the Reapers. The Bratva had been in the game longer and knew the value of caution—keeping your mouth shut and your friends close. He would soon find out whether Truman had forsaken both of those tenets.

“I’m not late,” Gurin announced as he sidled up and took a seat beside Mathias at the bar.

“Cutting it close.”

Gurin grinned and signaled the bartender with his hand. “Still a stickler for the time.”

“Time is money,” Mathias said.

“That it is,” Gurin agreed. The bartender took his order, and Mathias tapped the edge of his empty glass for a top-up. “Rare to see you in town. Not exactly going out of your way to visit these days.”

“You could say that.” And when he was here, it wasn’t Gurin he came to see.

Gurin waited until the drinks were poured and the barman had stepped away before continuing. “So, your girl’s been rather busy as of late,” he said, reaching into his jacket and handing Mathias an envelope of photos. “Spent some time in the capital with her sister’s kids and had herself a romantic evening out.”

Mathias flicked through the collection of shots—Allen leaving the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, at the park with two young children, seated across from a well-dressed man at a restaurant. Then the last set of images made his hand still.

“She even managed a trip out here to catch a hockey game.”

There she was, high in the stands of the Copps Coliseum, two seats down from the easily recognizable bulk of the Red Reapers’ head, William Truman. Mathias slipped the photos back into the envelope and tossed it onto the bar. The anger rose, a pressure against his chest.

“So now we know,” Gurin said. “Truman’s been getting cozy with the Horsemen.”

“Or maybe they’re both Bulldogs fans,” Mathias muttered sarcastically. He took a swig from his drink.

Gurin snickered. “Are you really that surprised, Mathias? He’s always been a shifty bastard.”

“I figured he had too much to lose to squeal. She must have something on him.”

“My money’s on that as well,” Gurin agreed. “If he’s willing to go against you and the family, she has him by the fucking balls.”

“Any ideas?”

The Russian shrugged. “With Truman, it could be anything. He likes to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.”

“Yeah, we knew that going in.”

So why did I let this happen? There had been plenty of opportunities to sever ties with the man and wash his hands of their whole joint venture. Mathias didn’t want to dwell on the reason he hadn’t—which had nothing to do with Truman.

“It seems he’s outlived his usefulness. Now might be a good time to cut him loose.” Gurin raised his drink to his lips and swallowed, then he placed the half-empty glass back on the bar between them. “Want me to see what I can find out?”

Mathias nodded. “Any trouble he’s in, anything the cops have on him, I want to know about it.”

“I can do that,” Gurin said, absently twirling his glass on its coaster. “I hear you’re due a favor.”

“You have a better memory than your boss.”

Gurin chuckled. “His is selective. Belkov doesn’t like owing people.”

“Then he should stop asking for help. But quiet, yes? The last thing I need is for Truman to get wind of the fact that I’m looking into him.”

“Please,” Gurin said with a smirk. “He’s so far up his own ass I’d be surprised if I registered.” He downed the rest of his drink. “How’s business in Montreal? Margins as crippled as ours with the increased border scrutiny?”

Fortunately, the family had always made efforts to diversify its income streams. When Narcotics took a hit, one of the other divisions picked up the slack. The Bratva’s Hamilton activities were almost exclusively tied to their cross-border drug trade, which made them particularly susceptible to recent government crackdowns.

“Piper has a lot to answer for,” Mathias said. “You have my sympathy.”

“I’ll need more than that if things don’t pick up soon,” Gurin grumbled and signaled the barman for a refill.

After Gurin had left, Mathias dropped a couple of notes down on the bar and slipped the envelope of photos into his jacket. He stood and looked again at his watch, his resolve buckling. The pull was frightening, calling to him with a power that made Mathias want to neglect his duties and throw caution to the wind. He was so close it seemed almost cruel not to.

It would be tight, but there was time.

When Rayan opened the door to his apartment, he found Mathias sitting on the sofa in the living room. His jacket was draped over the back cushions, and he had Rayan’s thesis proposal in his hand. The folder lay open on the coffee table, where Rayan had left it that morning.

“Where have you been?” Mathias asked, his voice betraying a hint of agitation.

“The library.” Rayan hung up his coat and dropped his bag to the floor. “Not so fun, is it?” he teased, moving to the sofa. “Waiting around for someone to show.”

Mathias arched an eyebrow, and Rayan plopped down beside him with a grin. “When did you get in?”

“I’m not staying,” Mathias said. “I had something to discuss with Gurin.”

“About what?”

“This is what you’re working on?” Mathias asked, ignoring his question and flipping through the pages in his hand.

“It’s a study of moral luck. Nagel’s a big proponent.”

Mathias gave a snort of laughter. “Moral luck?”

“The idea that we’re morally assessable only to the extent that we’re assessed for factors under our control.”

“Open to interpretation,” Mathias said with a shrug.

Rayan hid a smile. Naturally, that was how he viewed things. “Somewhat. It’s more an argument that we can be judged for our intentions, just not the results of our intentions.”

Mathias tossed the proposal down on the coffee table and turned to him with a cynical look. “You realize who you’re talking to.”

Rayan’s eyes dropped to the signet ring on Mathias’s right hand. “I’m sitting in lectures with kids whose biggest moral dilemma is whether to buy free-trade coffee beans.”

“And you think you’re more qualified to weigh in on the subject?”

“I wonder,” Rayan shot back.

“No one will take you seriously in that fucking thing. You look like a frat boy at football practice.”

Rayan laughed, glancing down at the oversized sweater he’d thrown on before leaving the apartment. He’d picked it up at the bookstore one rainy day after getting soaked on his way to class. It bore the school’s name and a white coat of arms—tasteless but surprisingly warm. Perhaps on some level, it had been an attempt to blend in with the hordes of carefree students who roamed the campus, pretending that he was one of them and not an entirely different beast.

“I’m sure there’s one in your color.” He pulled himself onto Mathias’s lap, his legs astride the man’s muscular thighs. The feel of Mathias beneath him sent a spike of heat through his insides. Rayan reached for the hem of the sweater and yanked it over his head to reveal his bare chest. “Better?”

“Getting there,” Mathias murmured, running his hands down Rayan’s back to grip his ass.

Rayan lowered his head and kissed him hard. Mathias parted his lips, heady and soft, and the rest faded into nothing, time slowing to a crawl.

“Miss me?” Mathias snickered when Rayan emerged, his breathing shallow.

“Maybe.” Rayan ground against him, rocking his hips as the blood surged between his legs.

Mathias wasted no time removing Rayan’s cock from his jeans, and it sprang, insistent, into his hand. Suddenly impatient, Rayan tugged at the front of Mathias’s slacks, unbuckled him, and pulled his hardening cock from his fly. Mathias spat into his palm and gripped their shafts together, easing his wrist up and down in long, deliberate strokes.

“How about now?” Mathias ran his mouth along the underside of Rayan’s jaw and nipped the flesh of his earlobe.

This time, Rayan didn’t answer, managing only a low moan. He wrapped his arms around Mathias’s neck and bunched his fingers in the back of his shirt. He always felt overwhelmed when they once again found themselves together. Rayan’s arousal lurched forward, untamable, threatening his ability to hold back.

Mathias rubbed the pad of his thumb along the slit of Rayan’s cock, already leaking, and Rayan groaned. Mathias began to quicken his movements, squeezing and releasing in a way that made Rayan’s head spin. He tried to fight it, but the entire world had been reduced to the sensation of them pressed against each other, the warmth of Mathias’s hand as he drew it along the length of him. Rayan wanted to make it last—prolong this coveted closeness—yet at the same time, he did not want the man to stop.

When Rayan finished far too quickly, Mathias gave a soft chuckle, tracing a finger through the streaks of white across his stomach. “The stamina of a frat boy as well.”

“Fuck off,” Rayan muttered, burying his face in Mathias’s neck as he caught his breath. “It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you.”

“There’s three million people in this city. I’m sure someone can help with that.”

While Mathias’s tone was flippant, his gaze was watchful, like he’d laid down a trap and was waiting to see how Rayan would maneuver. Rayan remembered the way Noah had jumped him in the bathroom and how much he’d hated the feel of the cocky kid’s mouth.

“I don’t want anyone else,” Rayan said, trying to keep his voice light despite the depth of feeling that fact evoked. “What about you—full dance card?” He spoke casually, as if he hadn’t mulled the possibility over a hundred times, turning his jealousy over like a stone.

Mathias studied him. “You’re enough trouble as it is.”

A warmth flooded Rayan’s chest. He ducked his head, not wanting the satisfaction to show on his face. Shifting his weight, he pushed Mathias’s hand away so his alone was wrapped around the man’s cock and began to move—quick, tight jerks, fingers slick with his own come. He yanked open the buttons of Mathias’s shirt with the other hand and lowered his mouth to his nipples, feeling Mathias swell in his grip. Rayan curled his wrist and ran his palm across the head of Mathias’s cock in slow, circular strokes. Mathias’s fingers dug into Rayan’s waist, and his chest rose rapidly as he closed in on his release. He came with a short growl, his forehead furrowing before a wave of pleasure washed over his face, momentarily smoothing the hard lines. It was Mathias at his most defenseless, and the sight always made Rayan’s throat constrict.

After releasing Mathias’s spent cock, Rayan reached for the discarded sweater and used it to swipe away the remnants of their encounter. “It’s good for something.”

Mathias smirked and pulled Rayan to him. The kiss moved from Rayan’s mouth to his jaw then the hollow of his neck and down to his shoulder blades. Rayan stroked the man’s hair, savoring the ease of Mathias’s hands on him, not wanting to break the spell.

“A woman was caught trying to scatter her husband’s ashes from the top of the CN Tower,” Rayan murmured as Mathias slid a hand along his chest.

“They found a man in Boucherville housing fifty raccoons in his basement,” Mathias returned, tracing Rayan’s ribs with his fingers.

Rayan laughed. “You win.”

“We seem to be giving the Anglos a run for their money.” Mathias brushed his nipple with a thumb, and Rayan—still on his lap—arched against him.

“How was the wedding?” Rayan asked in an attempt to keep him there if only for the moment.

Mathias grimaced. “Which one? They all bleed together.” It was no secret that Mathias despised the more socially taxing aspects of his new role. He’d never been one for appearances.

“What else is happening in the city?” Rayan missed the place, the language, and the culture, which felt so distant from his life in Toronto. He could almost picture what the mountain looked like this time of year.

But mention of Montreal made Mathias’s face harden, and he dropped his hands. “I have to get back.”

“Don’t.” The word came out before Rayan had the sense to swallow it.

Mathias gave him a stern look. “Don’t ask for things I can’t give you.”

Rayan sighed, defeated, and eased himself off Mathias’s lap.

“So, you and my mother…” Mathias stood and began buckling his pants. “You really are a sucker for punishment. She said you came by every month while I was in Hamilton.”

“Right.” Rayan gave a quiet laugh, refastening the front of his jeans. After meeting her that first time, he’d been compelled by a strange sense of pity. “She seemed lonely.”

“She is lonely,” Mathias said with a frown. “Always has been. It’s her defining characteristic.”

Rayan recalled the way the woman’s face would startle when their conversation reached a natural lull, as though dreading the space that rose in between. “That must have been hard.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“Then I shouldn’t have gone?” Rayan pivoted.

“You need a hobby,” Mathias said, reaching for the top button on his shirt. “You obviously have no idea what to do with your time.”

“I can think of a couple things.” Rayan looked up, catching the man’s eye.

Mathias’s fingers stilled. “You’re pathetic, you know that?” But his mouth tweaked, and he lowered his hands, letting his shirt fall back open.

Rayan tried to keep the stupid smile from his face. “You have no idea.”

With how hard it was proving to get dirt on Mathias, Frances had reached out to Transport Canada and added his plates to their automated recognition watch list. This way, if he crossed provincial lines, she’d know about it. Truman was still playing hard to get, so she figured she’d try to gather her own evidence of the two of them working together.

The opportunity presented itself sooner than expected. Earlier that week, she’d received an alert that Mathias’s car had left Quebec and later been clocked through the toll on Highway 407, heading into Hamilton. She’d called in a favor with Stan Redford, a former colleague who had started his own PI firm after leaving the RCMP and was only too happy to take a stab at tailing Mathias. Granted, it was a little unorthodox, but Ontario was her old stomping ground. Out there, she had a greater selection of resources at her disposal, while in Montreal, she had a sneaking suspicion that she was being deliberately left in the dark.

Stan managed to locate Mathias’s car parked outside a dump of a dive bar on the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t a location Frances recognized from the list of known Reapers establishments. Before Stan had a chance to get out of his car, Mathias emerged from the bar, so there was no way of knowing who he’d met with. Stan followed Mathias as he drove out of the parking lot and onto the highway. But instead of heading back in the direction of Montreal, he’d crossed Burlington Bay and continued north to Toronto. Not one to back down from a challenge, Stan tailed him to a sleepy neighborhood downtown, where Mathias had pulled his car into an underground lot beneath a block of apartments. From there, Stan lost track of him.

When Stan had relayed all of this to her over the phone, she’d been certain they’d stumbled onto something. Perhaps Mathias kept a woman in the city. It was common among the mafia elite and had proven many a man’s downfall. In her experience, these women were the ones the men confided in—certainly not their wives or, as Mathias had made painfully clear, the interchangeable girls who worked at the clubs. Mathias had built his life carefully, leaving very little in the way of open doors, but this had the potential to be that opening. If they could find the woman, Frances could start putting pressure on her. She’d instructed Stan to return the following morning and spend three days photographing everyone who entered and exited the apartment building.

Frances sat at her computer—the Montreal office was deserted on a Friday evening, since everyone had gone home to dinner with their families or out with friends—and scrolled through the file of images Stan had sent her. She was looking for a younger woman, polished and beautiful with expensive taste. She’d narrowed it down to a few candidates when she clicked through to the next photo and paused.

The shot was of a man of ambiguous ethnicity, in his early-to-mid-twenties, with tousled black hair. He looked Hispanic, or possibly Middle Eastern, and was athletic in build but dressed casually. She flicked through a few more photos and found him again, this time arriving back at the building in the evening, the collar of his winter coat pulled up against the cold.

Why does he seem so familiar? He wasn’t on her map and hadn’t been plotted out among the ranks of family soldiers. But she had an eye for faces and couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before. She flipped through the folder on her desk, not finding him among the stack of printed bios. Then she strode down to the filing room and pulled out a box of images from Giorgio Russo’s funeral. HQ had sent over a photographer to capture everyone in attendance so as to assemble an updated record of the group. Much had been speculated about the men at that funeral and what had happened afterward.

She scoured each photo. There were over a hundred of them, with names and known ranks recorded on the backs of the images. When she came to Antonio Giraldi, she stopped, her eye catching on the blurry profile of a man standing behind him. She held it up to her face. He was out of focus, the target of the image being the old man in front, yet the resemblance was unmistakable. She trawled through the remaining archive of figures, from lowly drivers all the way up to Giovanni Bianchi himself, but the dark-haired man hadn’t been categorized—he’d been omitted from the record. Or he’d been removed entirely. Purposely erased.

Frances reached for another box, which was dated several years prior to the funeral, when Mathias Beauvais was only just beginning to come up on the RCMP’s radar. She scanned the index and then thumbed through it, finding images, documents, and whole sections missing.

“The fuck…?” she muttered.

Someone had done a number on this—a full-scale clean-up job. She picked up the box and hauled it back upstairs to her desk, where she took everything out and went through each piece of paper with a fine-tooth comb. People were fallible. If the mob had someone on the inside, they were bound to have removed the evidence in a hurry to avoid getting caught. And when someone was in a hurry, mistakes were made. Her hand fell on a photo of Mathias in discussion with a large, gruff-looking man, and there, almost cropped out of the frame, was the young man from outside the building. Gone were the tousled hair and the casual clothes. Here was a slicked-back soldier in black, his face a blank mask.

That’s right. Before Jacques Laberge, there was someone else… After she’d accepted the transfer to Quebec, Frances had dived deep into the records of the family’s purported activities in Montreal and remembered coming across a mention of another subordinate who had worked with Mathias. What was his name? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember. And it seemed someone else wanted to ensure he was forgotten.

But why? Frances took the photo and held it up beside the image on her computer screen. Then she picked up the phone and called Stan. She hadn’t found the woman Mathias was seeing, but this coincidence was too jarring to ignore. She would have Stan follow the man in the photo and find out who he was.