Page 60 of A Life Betrayed

“End it,” Mathias instructed his second from the corner of the room. But Rayan stood, the same conflicted look on his face, the same hesitation.

Mathias felt a twinge of foreboding as he remembered the fear in the kid’s eyes when they’d first met.Too soft.He’d thought itthen, and he thought it now. Death was a fact of life in the family. To falter here would cost Rayan more than he knew.

Mathias sucked his teeth, no longer patient. He’d given Rayan a second chance, and he wasn’t in the habit of giving anyone the opportunity to disappoint him twice. There was no way around it—the kid wasn’t cut out for this. Mathias reached beneath his jacket and unclipped his holster, forced once again to take matters into his own hands.

His second seemed to interpret this as a sign. Before Mathias could step forward, Rayan’s face hardened, and he plugged Olman with two perfectly aimed shots, one to the heart and one to the head. The man crumpled to the floor at his feet.

A silence fell over the room. It was so quiet that Mathias could hear Rayan’s ragged breathing. He stood deadly still, his arm remaining outstretched, gun aimed at the space Olman had occupied just moments before.

“We’re done here,” Mathias said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Rayan started as if coming out of a trance. He dropped his arm and holstered his gun with a series of jerky movements. As Mathias watched his second put himself back together, he felt an unfamiliar sense of responsibility, as though by crossing paths with Rayan that fateful day by the river, he’d unwittingly cursed him. But Mathias hadn’t seen the conflicted look again. From then on, there was no hesitation.

Back in the car, Mathias stared at the gun on the dashboard, the black barrel illuminated by the soft glow of a nearby streetlamp. Then he reached out and tossed the pistol into the glove compartment. He snapped it shut with a click. As he sat back in his seat, his body flooded with a wave of relief.

Mathias had thought he’d taken something from Rayan—torn it from him—when he’d forced his hand all those years ago. But it had never really gone. Whatever Rayan had done to functionas he had during his time working for the family had faded, and Mathias was glad for it. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled the car out onto the street, his mind clearing. There was one more person he needed to see.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

Frances sat on the sofa in her living room and looked down at the coffee table, where she’d assembled the contents of the envelope Rayan had given her. Across a series of twelve photos was a damning account of evidence against not just Hamilton Police Chief Roger Wainwright but the entire Hamilton Police Department. There was an image of Truman handing money to Wainwright in a swanky restaurant and another of the cop smoking a cigarette while his subordinate slipped a suspicious-looking envelope to the Reapers’ head outside one of his strip clubs. Even more perplexing was the photo of Truman holding open a car door for the HPD chief, who was leaving the vehicle with his arms around two scantily clad women. Knowing what she knew about the women in Truman’s employ, the legality of both their profession and their presence in the country—not to mention their age—was very much in question.

She sighed and picked up the bottle of beer sweating on the coaster by her elbow. She took a long swig and set it back on the table. She had a professional obligation to raise those allegations of corruption against Wainwright with the deputy commissioner. And the second she did, the full force of the RCMP would descend on the case. As Gill had said, it came down to optics, and a right-leaning government hard on crime would jump at the chance to throw the entire weight of its resourcesat the first sniff of police corruption. What she had on the table before her was more than a sniff.

But by handing in this evidence, she was bound to her deal with Rayan. That meant putting the Montreal investigation, already mired, on ice. The tip-off had centered on Mathias and his involvement in the Reapers-assisted shipments. With him off-limits, there was nothing left to keep it going.

It was the perfect tactic—to turn the eye of the law back on itself. Meanwhile, Mathias Beauvais and the host of other family players assembled in Montreal would return to being inconsequential, flying under the radar and escaping capture once again. Her hand had been forced. If it was ever discovered that she’d withheld these photos, she would be implicated in the fallout—sixteen years of clawing her way up the chain of command would be down the fucking drain.

Frances reached over to pick up a close-up image of Truman and Wainwright sharing a drink, the Reaper’s mouth turned up in a grin. This evening, cornered in the back room of that dingy warehouse, she’d realized there was nothing Truman wouldn’t do to protect himself, be it bribing the chief of a municipal police department or quietly dispatching a federal inspector who’d asked one too many questions. Why had Mathias, then—cut from the same cloth—come to bail her out?

And then there was Rayan. Frances pulled her laptop from the bag by her feet, placed it on the table beside the mosaic of photos, and logged into the agency database. She typed in the young man’s name and pulled up the case file she’d created then scrolled through her notes—the attempts she’d made to connect him to the Montreal crime family and his father’s disjointed testimony, which the old man had recanted several days later over the phone, flustered and speaking in a panicked mumble.

It was an empty case full of dead ends and question marks. She still hadn’t been able to determine the true nature of hisactivities in Toronto or the reason for his sudden reappearance in Montreal. And then, after interfering with Truman’s plans, he’d handed her the envelope of photos.

What do I do to make sure it’s not him?

It didn’t make his or Mathias’s actions any clearer. But what did that matter now?

Frances moved the cursor over to the file settings and selected a tag from the drop-down menu. The case updated, a red label appearing over Rayan’s photo: Suspended.

On the sofa beside her, Frances’s phone rang. It was her sister.

“Brie’s final recital was today. You said you would come,” Diana said when she picked up, her tone accusatory.

Frances rolled her eyes. As if she’d spent the night lounging around watching television. She could still conjure the smell of the gangster’s breath as he’d leaned in, his fingers digging into the flesh of her wrist.

“I’m sorry. Tell her I was sad to miss it.”

“Were you, though? I thought you said after Ethan that you wanted to start putting family first. Prioritizing the relationships in your life.”

“That’s unfair, Diana,” Frances said, the heat rising to her cheeks. Her sister was clueless, completely off base. “Of course that’s what I want. But I’ve got things on my plate—people relying on me. I can’t just drop everything for a dance recital.”

She felt a coldness descend on the other end of the line. “I saw him, by the way,” Diana said. “Ethan, at the supermarket the other day. With someone else.”

Frances wondered if her sister had been saving up that particular piece of information, waiting for a time to invoke maximum effect. Well, now was as good a time as any. It seemed she was getting the stuffing kicked out of her tonight.

“Oh?” she replied breezily. “And…?”

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