Page 22 of A Life Chosen

Mikey nodded.

“Go home, Rayan,” Mathias called down the hallway.

Rayan wiped a sleeve across his forehead, stopping the slow drip of blood, then turned and walked out the door into the parking lot.

Mathias picked him up from the office the following morning. “What is it with you and trouble?” he muttered. “You can’t be so stupid not to realize you have a target on your back.”

Rayan had woken up to a few bruises he hadn’t anticipated. He wasn’t sure if he should defend himself, knowing his capo did not take kindly to excuses. But if he’d let Mikey and his buddy smash his face in, what kind of soldier would he be? “Should I have let them rough me up?”

Mathias raised an eyebrow. “No. Idiot.”

As they drove, Mathias’s lips curved into a smirk. “You broke the fucker’s nose.”

Rayan frowned, failing to mirror his boss’s amusement. “They won’t accept someone like me.”

The smirk had disappeared, Mathias’s mouth forming a hard line. “Then you make them respect you. You make them fear you. Acceptance? Overrated.”

“Hey,estraneo.”

Rayan jolted back to the present. Silvano Junior stood before him, holding out a take-out coffee cup, which Rayan took silently, the heat warming his palm. The man’s other hand gripped a second coffee, tiny curls of steam snaking out from the hole in the lid. It was early, and they were at the office, waiting for Mathias to finish up with the Collections boss before starting on the day’s jobs. Rayan glanced down the hallway at Tony’s door, still closed.

“So, what are you?”

Rayan stared straight ahead. Junior, as he preferred to be called, was young. Younger than him, if he had to hazard a guess. He gathered from Mathias’s brief explanation that the kid’s father was high up and was pulling a favor, so Rayan was to mind his tone. After a week working with the man, it was already proving challenging.

“Saudi, then?” Junior asked smugly. “Or just another mixed-up Quebec hick?”

“All Quebecois are hicks.”

Junior chuckled. “How’d you get to work with him?”

The family employed a great deal of people from all over Montreal—the Algerians, the Haitians, the Chinese—but rarely did it let any of these outsiders into the fold. Rayan had been made painfully aware of this fact as Mathias moved up the ranks. Silvano wasn’t the first full-blooded Italian to take issue with that.

Rayan shrugged. “Lucky break.”

Junior watched him, sizing him up. Rayan could tell he was growing tired of evasive answers. He had a feeling the kid was used to getting what he wanted. If Junior thought he could mine him for information by ingratiating himself with a cup of coffee, he could get fucked.

The door opened, and Mathias came down the hall toward them. Rayan tempered the immediate quickening of his pulse. As the days wore on, he was finding it difficult to maintain their continued pretense, considering that when he closed his eyes, he could conjure every inch of his capo’s naked body.

It hadn’t been nothing—he’d felt too much for it to be nothing. The man’s mouth had captured his with a force that left him breathless, his hand seeking and claiming Rayan’s release. Yet as his capo’s frostiness refused to thaw, Rayan was beginning to doubt himself, becoming more and more convinced that Mathias regarded that fateful afternoon as a grievous mistake.

Silvano’s presence had only widened the gap that had formed between them. And Rayan had done nothing. He simply carried on, propelled by sheer habit. But there was the twinge he felt when Mathias addressed Junior or requested his assistance while Rayan shadowed. The slow break was harder simply for the space it left for him to wonder about what had once been and what exactly they’d become.

“Here, boss.” Silvano handed Mathias the remaining cup as he walked past him toward the door.

Mathias took it wordlessly, the kid trailing behind him like a dog waiting to be praised. Rayan scowled at Silvano’s back, tossing his untouched coffee into the trash and following them to the parking lot. As they walked to the car, Mathias absently took a sip, grimacing. He spat out the mouthful at his feet, snapped off the lid, and hurled the liquid into the curbside drain. Then he turned and pushed the empty cup into Junior’s hand.

“You put milk in my coffee?”

Silvano looked back at him, wide-eyed and momentarily speechless. Rayan hid a grin. Not that he hadn’t also learned this lesson the hard way, but he took a secret pleasure in someone else drawing Mathias’s ire. Compared to Silvano, Rayan was in another league altogether.

“The fuck you waiting for?” Mathias snapped. As Junior hurried back into the office, the man leaned against the car, patting down his pockets for a cigarette. “Useless.”

For a moment, it was like before, Junior’s incompetence uniting them in shared enmity. Rayan smiled ruefully. He’d missed this.

“Something funny?” Mathias asked.

Rayan glanced up to see his capo watching him. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, but something lingered on his tongue, threatening to betray him. “No,” he murmured as Silvano returned with a fresh coffee in hand like he was the Savior himself.

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