A Life Betrayed (Montreal #2)

Chapter Eleven

W hile having Mathias followed in Hamilton had yielded an unexpected win, when he was back in Montreal, he’d proven difficult to track. On her recent visit to Ottawa, Frances had twisted the arm of a connection at HQ to secure warrantless approval for the installation of cameras across the street from several known family locations, and this had allowed her to piece together an idea of Mathias’s movements. She learned that he didn’t frequent the same places at the same times and was often absent from conventional family establishments. He was also extremely skilled at moving through the city unnoticed, which meant surveillance had lost him more times than Frances cared to admit.

However, as luck would have it, late that morning, Frances had received word from intel that one of the cameras had picked up Mathias and Jacques Laberge entering Gino’s—a deli in Petite Italia often frequented by members of the family. She’d driven straight over and caught a glimpse of him through the window, seated at a table with his subordinate.

She pulled open the door to the deli and stepped inside, watching as Mathias caught her eye. His face darkened, and he said something quietly to Laberge, who turned in her direction and got to his feet. As she walked to where Mathias sat, a cup of coffee steaming in his hand, she and Laberge passed each other, and the man gave her a dirty look before moving outside and stationing himself by the door.

“Friendly,” she remarked, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from Mathias.

“You again.”

“I thought I’d stop by and introduce myself properly. I think we got off on the wrong foot.” Frances slid her contact card across the table toward him.

“Is that what you’d call it?” Mathias said, picking up the card and flipping it between his fingers.

Frances recalled the quiet unease she’d felt after their brief interaction in the parking lot. On the drive back to her apartment, she’d found herself checking over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling. She cast the thought aside. If anything, Mathias was the one who should be on edge.

“If there’s something you’d like to discuss, I’m all ears. You wouldn’t want someone else to beat you to it. Cooperation can make all the difference in cases like these.” She leaned forward and placed her elbows down on the table. “Funny, I was just saying the same thing to an old friend of yours…” Pausing for effect, she felt a shot of exhilaration. “Rayan Nadeau. Mind telling me what he’s doing in Toronto?”

Frances could have been mistaken, but she thought she saw Mathias’s mouth twitch. So he wasn’t entirely impenetrable. She smirked.

“Now that you’ve infiltrated Hamilton, figured it was time to break into the Toronto market? And what—he’s some sort of scout, sent ahead to lay down the groundwork? What have you got him doing out there?”

Rayan hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about his involvement during their brief conversation. She’d wanted to spook him into submission and had assumed that, given enough of a push, he would prove cooperative. What she hadn’t anticipated was his complete and immediate disappearance. They’d managed to locate CCTV footage of Rayan returning to his apartment and leaving again shortly afterward, but from there, he’d seemingly ceased to exist. There was no record of his attendance at the university the following day or the day after that, and Frances could only assume he’d gone underground. While that was inconvenient, it was only a matter of time before he resurfaced. Meanwhile, she’d gone ahead and lodged alerts with the TPD and all the major airports so she would know if he attempted to leave the country.

“What are you on about, Allen?” Mathias said, the indifference of his tone not reflected in his eyes.

“I think you know.”

Mathias leaned back in his chair. He pulled a silver lighter from his jacket and flipped open the lid. “How was your date?”

Frances felt her blood run cold. “What?”

“Last week,” Mathias said, flicking his thumb against the striker and letting the flame spark. “Just your type, too—a cuck who likes talking about himself.”

She stared at him, unable to mask her terror. “You’ve been watching me?”

He brought the lighter to the edge of her business card and waited for it to catch. “I thought I’d return the favor, seeing how interested in me you’ve been lately.”

She stood, her chair scraping loudly against the floor. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she fought the instinct to run. “You think you can intimidate me?”

Mathias held the burning card until the flames reached his fingertips then dropped the charred remnants into his untouched coffee cup. He reached into his pocket, and she recoiled—but he produced only a handful of bills, which he dropped onto the table.

“I also have informants, Inspector. Eyes across the country.” Getting to his feet, Mathias towered over her. His eyes glittered like those of a snake closing in on its prey. “And I’m willing to bet mine are a lot more motivated than yours.”

Frances stepped backward, losing her footing as she stumbled over her chair. She felt the man’s hand on her arm, steadying her. His grip was strong, as though capable of crushing bone or tossing her to the floor like she was nothing. She remembered the photos from the files—body bags and dismembered corpses, men shot through the temple, as clean as an execution.

“Careful, Frances,” Mathias said as she righted herself. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

He released his grip and strode past her to the door. Frances stood perfectly still, the chair on the floor behind her. She was aware only of the lingering feel of his hand on her arm and the sinister sound of her name on his lips.

Mathias paced the living room of his apartment as he turned the burner phone over in his hand. His jaw was stiff, clenched to offset a growing panic. Early on, they’d established a way for Rayan to reach him without the man’s number finding its way into the web of complicity that was Mathias’s world. Mathias had an unregistered phone that he never let leave the apartment. He would check it once a day, usually in the evening, and respond then. The system had worked well thus far, and Rayan was never more than a day away from contact—until now. Mathias couldn’t get hold of him.

Mathias recalled the inspector’s smirk as she’d thrown down Rayan’s name like a prize. It had pierced him, a cold needle slid just beneath the skin. He’d thought they’d been careful and assumed that even if someone came for him, Rayan would be safe. Mathias gritted his teeth at his own hubris. He’d been the one to suggest Rayan return to Canada, and now the Feds had found him.

In his hand, the phone gave a short buzz, and he yanked it up to look at the screen. The flood of relief was palpable. En vacances , the message read, followed by a truncated address. Mathias plugged it into his phone, and a boarding house in Montreal’s industrial district came up.

He’s here? That could only mean something had gone very wrong.

The entrance to the concrete residential building was swathed in graffiti, and the glass door panel was badly cracked, a series of jagged lines creeping across its surface. Mathias entered the shabby lobby to find a young security guard seated behind the front desk, watching an unintelligible show on a tiny television. The residence looked like a halfway house, the kind of place that took cash but no names.

“We’re full,” the security guard muttered, not looking up from his show.

Mathias slipped a fifty across the counter. “I don’t need a room.”

The man glanced at him then reached over to take the money and returned his attention to the television screen. Mathias moved to the stairwell and made his way up to the fourth floor. The door’s number was marked crudely with black spray paint. Mathis knocked once. He heard the click of a deadbolt unlocking, and then Rayan opened the door and ushered him into a tiny bedsit. The air was as cold inside as it was outside. Rayan stood dressed in several layers, his gloves still on and a hat pulled down over his ears.

“It’s fucking freezing in here,” Mathias admonished him.

“Heat’s broken.”

He raised a hand to Rayan’s cheek. It was like ice. “Why didn’t you go somewhere else—a hotel, for Christ’s sake?”

Rayan said nothing. They both knew how easy that would be to track.

Mathias saw the skittish glint in his eyes and the way he hunched forward, hands tucked under his arms. This was the version of the man who’d spent nights sleeping on the street, the rest of him retreating within—a well-worn survival mechanism. Mathias had seen snatches of this person before, when Rayan shuddered awake in the middle of the night, his hands clawing at the sheets.

On the wall, the thermostat had been smashed in and hung by a loose wire. Mathias bent to run a hand along the radiator and found it cold to the touch. “Wonderful. Where’d you find this place?”

“Stayed here sometimes when we had the cash.”

Mathias stepped into the tiny kitchenette and turned on the hot tap. He waited, but the water didn’t warm.

Rayan sat down at the counter opposite, watching him. “It’s changed.”

“The city or this hole?” Mathias asked, shutting off the tap.

“The city. I got off the bus and couldn’t remember where I was.”

Mathias fixed him with a careful stare. “What happened, Rayan?”

“They’re watching me, the apartment. One of them ambushed me on the way home.”

Mathias swallowed the bitter rush of fury.

“The woman knew who I was, knew everything about me, my—” He stopped abruptly and looked away.

“Frances Allen. She’s RCMP.”

“You knew about this?” Rayan asked, his eyes snapping back, incredulous.

“I didn’t know they’d followed me to you,” Mathias said tightly. How did she figure it out? He’d made efforts to ensure that all trace of Rayan’s involvement in the family had been erased.

“I don’t think she knew about…” They exchanged a look. “Only that I worked for you.”

That had been Mathias’s impression as well. The woman seemed to think he’d sent Rayan as some envoy to spearhead a new family operation in Toronto. It was ridiculous but far preferable to her knowing the truth.

“If they think they can use me to get to you, they can get fucked.” Rayan’s voice was hard, and his eyes shone with anger. “I’m not afraid of prison.”

Mathias knew what Rayan was trying to do. Before him, he saw a kid who’d finally been given the chance to figure out what he wanted and deserved the years that stretched ahead to make up for the shitty ones he’d left behind. He wouldn’t let Rayan throw that away—least of all on his account.

“You should be,” Mathias warned in a low voice. “But that’s not going to happen, understand?”

While Rayan didn’t look entirely convinced, he gave a short nod. “Were you careful?” he asked with a pensive frown. “Did you drive here?”

“I’m not an amateur. I took the metro.”

Rayan raised his eyebrows. “Things really must be bad.”

Mathias snorted, secretly pleased at the smile that flickered across Rayan’s face. “Speaking of bad, you’re not staying here,” he said, glancing at the stained yellow curtains hanging limply from the rod above the window. He reached into his pocket, pulled one of the keys from his keychain, and handed it to Rayan across the counter. “I keep a small apartment off Beaubien.”

“This is new.”

“This is careful,” he said pointedly. “After Piero, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Make your own way there. Use the entrance around back. Once you’re in, don’t go anywhere. I’ll stop by later tonight to drop off food.”

Before she kissed them goodnight as children, Rayan’s mother would say, “I hope you wake up to all the good.”

That was her wish for him and his brother—a good life, different from the one of pain and loss that she’d left behind. Rayan wondered if her dogged pursuit of this for them had been at the cost of her own happiness. He couldn’t remember much good befalling her in the short time they’d known each other. Maybe he and Tahir had been her good, although even they hadn’t been enough in the end.

In the bedroom of the safe house, Rayan lay under a thick pile of blankets. The small, minimally furnished apartment on the ground level of a brick triplex five minutes from Beaubien station was fully stocked with the requisite necessities one might need to remain temporarily hidden. He found the place comforting. Clean, austere, and functional, it had Mathias written all over it.

Rayan had left the boarding house shortly after Mathias came by. He hadn’t told Mathias, but the man’s offer had been the first decent thing to have happened in the past two days, the key pushed across the counter like a rope tossed into the dark well that Rayan had found himself in after the inspector had flagged him down on the street. Once inside the apartment, he’d gone straight to the thermostat and cranked it up as high as it could go. Still, Rayan hadn’t been able to shake the chill, so he’d gathered all the blankets he could find, headed to bed, and heaped them over himself as he lay beneath the covers, fully dressed. The ache in his stomach served as a reminder that he hadn’t eaten since the previous day, but getting warm was the only thing that mattered, a singular focus that took him back to those long nights lying on concrete floors and grassy verges, staring at Tahir’s eyes in the dark and seeing the same hardened resignation staring back. They’d been awake and exhausted but too cold to sleep.

One winter, not long after they’d abandoned their last group home, when he was maybe sixteen and the drugs hadn’t yet found his brother, Rayan had fallen ill. The two of them had taken shelter in the interior corridors of the Guy-Concordia Metro station and curled up together on a flattened cardboard box. Rayan had a raging fever and was trembling with chills, and he found himself falling in and out of dreams that were so real he was sure he was awake. He must have been calling out in his sleep, because Tahir kept jostling him awake and telling him to keep it down. The other people holed up in the corridor had started to grumble, and some were becoming increasingly agitated as his delirious pronouncements kept them awake.

The last train on the Green Line stopped running just after midnight and didn’t start back up again until five thirty the following morning. It was the part of the night that Rayan dreaded most—when the stream of people dressed in their winter coats and scarves, chattering to friends as they walked, began to dry up and only the rest of them were left—the ones with nowhere to go.

“Shut him up!” someone shouted.

“Fuck you too!” Tahir hollered back, but he moved to Rayan’s side, wrapped the blankets around him, and helped him to his feet. “Come on—we gotta go.”

They left the Metro station and trudged aimlessly through the snowy streets. By this point, most of the good spots would already be taken. Tahir had once joked about robbing a nearby dépanneur so the police would take them in and they’d have somewhere warm to spend the night.

“I hate her.” Rayan swallowed back tears. He regretted his words immediately and was filled with a fathomless guilt. “Sorry, Mama,” he whispered.

“She can’t hear you, you know,” Tahir said viciously and turned to glare at him, his eyes black in the darkness. “Because she’s in hell. That’s where you go when you do what she did.”

Rayan drew back in horror.

“And even if she could, she doesn’t care. If she did, she’d have hung around to take care of us,” Tahir snarled. “So I wouldn’t get stuck having to drag a crybaby like you through the fucking snow.”

Rayan didn’t have the energy to protest. He could only focus on putting one foot in front of the other as he attempted to keep up with his brother. He must have fallen or simply lost the ability to stand, because the next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, his burning cheek cooling against the sidewalk sludge.

Up ahead, he saw Tahir stop. His brother swore, kicking at the drifts of snow piled by the side of the road. He picked up a nearby trash bin and sent it skidding across the sidewalk, litter spilling everywhere. Clenching his hands at his sides, he gave an almighty howl that echoed through the empty streets. Then Tahir made his way back to him, and Rayan felt his brother’s hands under his armpits, pulling him up.

“Come on, akhi ,” Tahir said quietly as he hoisted Rayan onto his back. “I won’t leave you, no matter how bad it gets.”

And Rayan, dizzy with fever, had known in his bones that it was the truth.

Rayan heard a click from down the hall as the front door to the apartment opened, and he stiffened in learned fear. Then came the purposeful sound of shoes on the parquet, and he knew it was Mathias. His shoulders slackened in relief. It was strange to recognize someone from the tread of their feet alone. He knew a lot about the man now—the way he inhaled sharply just before waking, the soft grunt of approval he made when Rayan took him into his mouth.

A paper bag rustled, the fridge opened and closed, and then footsteps came down the hallway toward him. Mathias paused at the entrance to the bedroom, a silhouette in the darkness. Rayan lay facing the door, the blankets gripped in fists by his chin, his jaw clenched to fight the unceasing shiver.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” Mathias said. “I’ll be back in a day or two. Don’t go anywhere.”

Rayan remained unmoving. If he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth would chatter and give him away.

Mathias gave a sigh. “Still cold?”

The floorboards creaked as he moved into the room. Then came the dull thump as Mathias kicked off his shoes and the swish of fabric as he shrugged out of his jacket. The bed gave a squeak, and he climbed in beside Rayan, still in his clothes. Rayan felt the man’s solidness against his back as Mathias’s arms wrapped around him and pulled him to his chest. Rayan let out a shuddering breath, and finally, the chill began to recede.

“Go to sleep, Rayan,” Mathias murmured into his hair. “Tomorrow it starts again.”

Unlike his mother’s sendoff, this one made no promise of the good.