Chapter Ten
R ayan recalled nothing from the short drive back to the house.
It was as though he’d blinked and found himself standing at his front door.
He felt like an empty husk, his body a collection of dead limbs.
Once inside, Mathias kicked off his wet shoes in the entranceway while Rayan stood, making a puddle by the door.
As Mathias removed his watch, the hands frozen in place beneath the glass face, Rayan was devoured by a searing black fury.
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
“You’re welcome,” Mathias shot back. His drenched hair was plastered against his forehead, and his face was an angry mask. “Someone had to stop you from getting yourself killed.”
“If it meant I could’ve saved their mother—”
“It would’ve been worth it?” Mathias hissed. “To whom?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly,” Mathias snarled. “You think I don’t know what this is about—the center, working at the camp? This is all some fucked-up moral tally. You figure if you help enough people, you’ll break even. Tell me, Rayan, how many more lives do you have to save to live with yourself?”
Rayan blinked, floored by his own transparency. “Fuck you,” he spat. “This isn’t about me.”
His whole body hurt, and his mind swirled as if it, too, had been tossed about in the surf like a rag doll. He couldn’t get the little girl’s cries out of his head.
“I saw the look on your face,” Mathias said, an edge to his voice.
Rayan had felt it—the familiar helplessness.
Forced once again to stand back and watch someone slip away.
It seemed Mathias was about to say more, but he pressed his lips together.
Then he shook his head and began walking down the hall.
Rayan was about to lose it. The anguish clawed out from inside him, refusing to be ignored.
“Didn’t you ever wonder”—he hurled the words at Mathias’s back, a shameful admission he’d kept buried all these years—“what I would’ve done if you hadn’t picked me up that day?”
Mathias stopped. He turned to look at Rayan, his expression wary.
“I’d have thrown myself in after him,” Rayan said.
Mathias strode forward and grabbed Rayan by the front of his shirt.
He shoved him against the door. “Don’t you ever do that to me.
” His voice was hard as steel, piercing through Rayan’s fuddled brain with a violent clarity.
“Do you hear me, Rayan?” A wave of conflicting emotions flickered across the man’s face.
“Don’t you ever fucking leave me like that. Are we clear?”
Rayan nodded woodenly.
Mathias released him, his eyes shuttering. “I’m going to take a shower.”
He disappeared into the house without another word, and Rayan stood dripping in the entranceway, his heart pounding in his chest. Then he wrenched open the front door and strode out onto the street.
He didn’t know where he was going, only that he needed to escape the thoughts.
He could feel them circling, coming for him.
It wasn’t just his brother. He remembered the closed bathroom door, locked and silent. Always too late.
He made it to the end of the street and crossed over the road to the deserted promenade that followed the curve of the coast. Far off in the distance, he could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles that had gathered along the beach.
Out at sea, the circle of light from the coast guard’s boat lurched side to side as the cutter was jostled by the swells.
Rayan knew it was hopeless. She was gone. He sank down onto a nearby bench, and the memories found him, no longer able to be held at bay.
The past opened, swallowing him whole. He pressed his fists into his eyes, but the sobs rose, sharp and broken, squeezing through his clenched teeth.
It was impossible to see where the pain began and where it ended, the tears coming for it all—two little girls who had lost their mother and the little boy who’d never gotten over losing his.
Mathias paced the floor of the study, his mind elsewhere.
The sting, as his cigarette burned down to singe his fingers, snapped him out of his thoughts.
He crushed the butt in the ashtray on his desk and ran a hand through his hair, which was still damp from the shower.
In an attempt to distract himself, he’d come in here looking for the company’s import-license paperwork, which was clearly in the filing cabinet at the warehouse.
After he’d left Rayan and climbed the stairs to the bedroom, Mathias had watched from the upstairs window as the man stalked from the house and down the darkened street.
What had happened at the beach was a knife to a partially closed wound, and he’d thought it best to give Rayan a chance to regather.
But standing in the silent, empty house, Mathias felt a twinge of unease. He’d still expected Rayan to come home.
The unease turned to dread lodged cold and hard in his chest. There was a part of Rayan so fragile it scared him. Mathias didn’t trust himself to know what to do if it broke.
He strode down the hallway and threw on his coat then crouched to pull on his shoes. Not the ones from earlier—those he’d have to throw out. Italian leather didn’t lend itself well to saltwater.
Mathias pulled open the front door and saw a dark shape on the steps outside. He reached behind him to flick on the porch light. It was Rayan, sitting hunched over on the top step. Rayan squinted as the light hit his face, and Mathias could see he was still in the same clothes, his eyes red rimmed.
“Must have locked it when I left,” Rayan mumbled.
“Where are your keys?”
Rayan turned over his palm as if to show he was empty-handed. “In the water, I guess. Along with my phone.”
How long has he been sitting here?
“Come inside.”
Rayan looked away, staring out into the blackness. After a long time, he spoke. “I could have saved her.”
The woman or your mother? Mathias stepped forward and held out his hand. “Get up.”
Rayan took it, and Mathias pulled him to his feet. He led Rayan into the house and closed the door behind them.
“I don’t want to think anymore,” Rayan said hoarsely, digging his nails into the underside of Mathias’s wrist. Sometimes he liked a roughness that bordered on pain, which Mathias was more than happy to administer. But the man was already hurting.
Mathias peeled Rayan’s fingers from his wrist and linked them with his own. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Rayan yanked his hand away, his eyes darkening. “Don’t coddle me.”
Mathias had become better at it—knowing Rayan.
He was less a puzzle than he’d once been.
Mathias wrapped his arms around Rayan and pressed him tightly to his chest. Rayan wrenched against him, but Mathias held firm.
Then Rayan’s body began to sag as though he could no longer hold himself upright.
He buried his face into the fabric of Mathias’s shirt and went still, his arms hanging limply at his sides.
“I won’t let go,” Mathias said quietly as Rayan’s breath hitched.
Later, Mathias ran a bath and helped Rayan wash the salt from his skin and rinse the sand from his hair.
“You think I’m pathetic,” Rayan said, his eyes closed.
“I thought that already.”
Mathias was granted the whisper of a smile. Then he’d toweled Rayan off and walked him to bed. They lay there, neither of them sleeping, waiting for the night to be over.
The office was empty when Mathias arrived at the warehouse early the following morning. After the night he’d had, it was a relief not to have to dodge any of Elise’s small talk.
In truth, he’d been reluctant to venture from the house.
He would have preferred not to leave Rayan, who’d eventually fallen into a fitful sleep, but he had this business with the import license to straighten out.
The sooner he got his case in front of the stiffs at the trade office, the sooner he could get things resolved.
Mathias was flipping through the filing cabinet at the back of the room and had just located the folder with their current license certificate when the phone on his desk began to ring.
He stared at it, wrestling with an unmistakable sense of foreboding.
Then he tossed the folder onto the desk and lifted the receiver to his ear.
“Oui?”
“Evening, Beauvais. Or is it morning over there? I forget.”
Mathias ground his teeth together. The gall of the man. “Think you can woo me like one of your side pieces? First love notes. What’s next—flowers?”
De Luca chuckled. “When I heard your name come up, I couldn’t help but be curious. You did just up and leave, after all.”
“Why don’t you ask Bianchi about that,” Mathias said savagely. “See what he has to say.”
De Luca’s tone shifted. “The boss is proving less than accommodating these days,” he said cryptically.
Has something happened? Perhaps life wasn’t looking so rosy for the king in his kingdom. Then Mathias recalled the hot sting of betrayal that had accompanied his exit from the country and reminded himself that he didn’t give a shit.
“Heard through the grapevine that you’re working with the Albanians,” De Luca said.
Mathias thought of Marsela sitting across from him with that self-assured smile, her tinkling laugh more ominous than amused. It was no coincidence that merely a week later, he’d found himself on the Ministère de l’économie’s blacklist. “Then you heard wrong.”
“Careful with them. They’re a shifty lot.”
“What makes you think I have any interest in what you have to say?”
This seemed to dampen the man’s peppiness. “Mathias, there’s something we’d like to discuss—”
“Back off, De Luca,” he warned in a low voice. “I’m done with the family.” He dropped the phone back in its cradle and exhaled through his nose.
It wasn’t as though Mathias was in hiding. He’d heeded Giovanni’s warning and cut his ties. He didn’t owe the family anything. But now—thanks to Charles’s loose lips—they knew exactly where to find him.
De Luca’s call hadn’t been about retribution. In fact, he’d sounded almost deferential. They wanted something from him. And as far as Mathias was concerned, there was nothing the family wanted that he was willing to give.
He straightened, and his aching limbs grumbled in protest. It felt like he’d been flung through a spin cycle. He closed his eyes, and it took more effort than he expected to open them again. In addition to the restless night, he’d left the house without his morning shot of caffeine.
Mathias threw on his coat and headed to the café across the street. He ordered and stood to one side as he waited for his coffee. The smooth swell of jazz coming from the radio behind the counter faded abruptly and was replaced by the clanging intro music of the local hourly news bulletin.
“Last night, in yet another instance of its kind, a boat filled with illegal migrants setting out for Dover capsized not far from Calais beach. One woman is confirmed dead and another missing. Five people were transported to hospital with minor injuries, including three children…”
Around him, several people began to murmur.
“Another one?”
“What were they thinking, attempting a crossing like that with children?”
“They should just send them all back where they came from.”
The woman behind the counter handed Mathias his coffee, and he stepped out onto the street.
Instead of returning to the warehouse, he made his way to the promenade and took a seat on one of the benches facing the beach.
Before him, the ocean stretched blue and tranquil along the coast. Gone were the giant swells they’d battled through the previous evening.
Mathias raised the cup of coffee to his lips. There had been a broken edge to the girl’s voice as she’d screamed for her mother, a universal fear encapsulated in the sound. He wondered what the people in the café would have said if they’d heard it.