Page 13 of A Life Betrayed

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 hercar 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?”

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