Page 33 of A Life Betrayed

“No, no!” Tahir called out, winding down the window. “Fuck off!”

Out of habit, Rayan scanned the man’s features, shadowed beneath the lowered brim of a baseball cap. As he scuttled away, Rayan’s eyes followed his retreat, trying to assemble a face in his mind that he could barely remember.

“Green, it’s green!” Tahir snapped, and Rayan flew back to the present, gunning the car and speeding through the intersection. “It wasn’t him, you know.”

Rayan started and glanced over at his brother, who was staring at him with a guarded expression. “Yeah, I know,” he said, covering his momentary lapse with a short laugh.

They continued through the city, killing time to delay the inevitable, the night stretching out before them.

“You knew when he put on his boots it was trouble,” Tahir muttered into the darkness of the cab. Every Sunday, their father cleaned and polished a pair of black army-issue boots. He kept them on the top shelf in the hallway closet. “When he was done with us, he used to go after her.”

Too many nights to count, they’d lain on their sides in the dark, whipped and shamed after a beating, eyes meeting across the yawning divide between their two twin beds as they listened to the steady thump of his boots down the hall.

“If that had been him,” Rayan said, gripping the steering wheel, “I’d have run him the fuck over.”

Tahir laughed, turning and socking him hard on the shoulder. “Like hell you would. You’re all talk, Rayan. You don’t have the stomach for it.”

Rayan glared at the city as it sped past through the windscreen. For his father, he would make an exception.

“Head to the overpass—I have to meet someone,” Tahir instructed.

Rayan changed lanes and turned onto Saint-Laurent Boulevard. He knew who his brother was meeting.

They were several meters from the turnoff when Tahir leaned forward in his seat. “Here, pull over.”

Rayan brought the car to a stop, and his brother jumped out, his head swiveling anxiously before he started to cross the road. Rayan watched as Tahir waited, noting the nervous jerk of his brother’s foot and the way he kept crossing and uncrossing his arms. Evan appeared from the shadows, removed a brown paper bag from his jacket, and held the bag out to Tahir.

Rayan looked away. He hated seeing his brother like that—the gleeful shine in his eyes, his hands trembling with anticipation. Or withdrawal. It was hard to tell at this point. Rayan kept his gaze fixed on the shuttered hardware store up ahead, whose sign above the entrance was so faded it was barely legible.

The passenger door opened, and Tahir slipped into the seat beside him.

“Akhi…” Rayan began quietly.

“Don’t call me that,” his brother said, the words curling viciously. “You’re just like her—too fucking soft. Now, drive. I want to see how much Lenny’ll give us for this ride.”

Mathias sat in his car in the parking garage beneath his building, phone pressed to his ear. Through the windscreen, he could see a couple arguing by the elevator. She was young, a redhead, with a designer purse clutched to her ample chest. The man stabbing a finger in her face was much older and should have known better.

Mathias had returned to his apartment the previous evening after mustering enough sense to leave the safe house before hereally lost his temper. He’d stood fuming on the other side of the bedroom door, fighting a deep-rooted urge to show Rayan exactly who he was dealing with. But something had stopped him. There had been a rawness to Rayan’s pain that he hadn’t seen before, and Mathias wasn’t sure how to approach it.

“She hasn’t got approval from the Crown to tap phones, but you’re under intermittent monitoring,” Gagnon said on the other end of the line. “There are cameras.”

Mathias had been on his way out when the cop had called. He’d known Alexandre Gagnon for years, first as a corruptible rookie with the metropolitan police and now as a sergeant at the RCMP’s Quebec divisional office. He’d proven an invaluable resource when it came to intel on the Feds’ activity in the province and beyond. Gagnon’s biggest flaw had always been easy for Mathias to exploit: the man could not keep his dick in his pants.

“Where?” Mathias asked as the woman by the elevator reached into her purse and pulled out a tissue to stem the blackened streams pouring from her eyes.

Gagnon cleared his throat nervously. “Several of your offices have been targeted. The club. Some of the regular meeting spots. She’s trying to put together a schedule of your activities.”

That explained how Allen had managed to ambush him at Gino’s. “Good luck with that,” Mathias said scornfully, irked by the woman’s nerve. “And Nadeau?”

“They’ve lost eyes on him. Either he’s holed up somewhere in Toronto, or he’s left the city. But he’s still in Canada. Allen has alerts set up. She’ll know if he tries to leave the country.”

Mathias rapped his knuckles against the steering wheel in agitation. “She’s building a case against him?”

“It’s likely—she’s looking into everything. Went to talk to his father yesterday, to find out what he knew. Came back with a pretty damning character reference.”

Mathias snorted, incredulous. “His old man? What would he know?”

“Seems he had a lot to say, actually. I’ll send you a copy of the write-up. It’s a common tactic. She puts a case together against Nadeau, scares him enough to get him to roll over, and then she uses his testimony against you.”

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