A Life Chosen (Montreal #1)

Chapter Five

D espite the establishment’s relative safety compared to the constant danger that marked their line of work, they were jumped while walking from Le Rouge to the car. Mathias, drunker than usual after his meeting with Giovanni, had passed Rayan the keys on their way out the door. They were steps away from the Mercedes when the man appeared, stooped and hooded, the glint of a hunting knife in his hand. He moved erratically, bouncing from foot to foot. His words slurred when he told them to hand over their wallets, shuffling awfully close to where Mathias stood with hands in his pockets.

Rayan’s capo looked amused. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

Mathias, in part due to the liquor, did not see this tweaked-out man as a threat. But Rayan had encountered many of his kind on the streets of Montreal—unpredictable, willing to put a knife in your back for the food in your hand. He gripped the keys, the metal digging into his palm.

Mathias’s unruffled demeanor made the man even more jumpy. Rayan slipped the car keys into his pocket, mentally noting the gun against his chest, how quickly he could get to it, and how much damage the man could do before then. In the dark, it was hard to see exactly who they were dealing with under the hood, but Rayan could hear the man grinding his teeth.

“The fuck you talking about? Wallet now!”

Mathias reached into his jacket and pulled out a roll of bills. He began to peel them off, one by one. The man froze. This was not what he’d expected.

Rayan tried to catch Mathias’s eye. What was he doing? Fucking with him? His boss had been especially hard to read the past few days. Preoccupied, prone to lashing out. And now this. He was being unusually reckless .

“How much does a bump cost these days?” Mathias asked. The junkie hissed and snatched at the money, but Mathias stepped back, holding it out of reach. “Not so fast.”

Then the man lunged. Mathias moved to avoid the knife, but the edge of the blade grazed his forearm as it passed. In the end, Rayan didn’t reach for his gun. Even before he saw the blood, he’d tackled the dopehead to the ground, the knife clattering out of reach, and pummeled the man with his fists until he stopped moving.

“Fuck,” Rayan whispered.

The hood slipped back to reveal a kid of nineteen or twenty, his cheeks mottled with acne scars—not much older than Rayan had been when he first met Mathias. But it was another face he saw, flickering like an apparition in the dim light. He put the back of his hand by the kid’s mouth. Still breathing.

“Leave him,” Mathias said. Rayan stood to see that he’d removed his jacket and was inspecting the blood blooming on the sleeve of his white shirt. “Scum.”

“I’ll call the doc.”

Dr. Olivier Martin, who operated a private clinic in the South Shore, had a long-standing—and highly lucrative—arrangement with his capo, which included his personal number on speed dial.

Mathias shook his head. “Let’s go.”

Rayan reached into his pocket for the keys, and his fingers brushed his phone. He glanced back at the kid lying in the parking lot. He could just give them the address and hang up without leaving a name.

“Don’t even think about it,” Mathias said coldly, seeing straight through him. “Better for everyone if he drowns in his own blood.”

“One less strung out piece of shit to deal with?” It came out harsher than Rayan had intended. He realized his nails were biting into the flesh of his palms.

Mathias gave him a hard look. “You don’t live in that world anymore, Rayan.”

They got in the car and drove the rest of the way to Mathias’s apartment in silence, the blood drying on Rayan’s knuckles as he clenched the steering wheel.

While they were waiting for the elevator in the garage beneath the building, Mathias turned to him. “If you feel sorry for everyone that tries to fuck you over, you will not last long in this business.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d imparted this lesson. Years before, shortly after Rayan had graduated from driver to second, Mathias relieved him of his weapon as it shook in his hand. He still remembered watching with a churn of shame as Mathias completed the task he’d found himself unable to do. Much had changed since then. Rayan had mastered this particular principle, save for the odd reminder.

The elevator doors opened with a ding. They stepped inside, and Mathias punched in the floor access code, grimacing. Rayan’s gaze fell to the stain on the man’s shirtsleeve. He felt his anger dissipate. His capo’s blood was proof of his failure. Once in the apartment, Rayan stepped into the kitchen and washed his hands long and hard in the searing-hot water, exorcising the junkie’s muck from his fingers.

“There’s a bottle of Macallan in the cabinet. Bring it here,” Mathias called from the living room.

Rayan opened one of the cupboards, half expecting it to be empty. Instead, he found shelves of neatly stacked packets, jars, and cans. It didn’t take him long to find the scotch, displayed in a glass cabinet with a wide selection of liquor bottles in varying shapes and sizes. He took down the bottle and fished a small tumbler from the adjacent drawer.

In the living room, Mathias sat on the sofa, his shirt left on the floor. Rayan placed the scotch and the tumbler down on the coffee table. Then he threw off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and went to raid the hallway bathroom cabinet. When he returned with supplies, he found the glass abandoned, his boss opting to drink straight from the bottle.

Rayan sat next to him and started to clean his arm, gently exposing the cut beneath the blood. He felt a wave of relief. It wasn’t as bad as he’d initially thought. “Make sure Martin has a look at this,” he cautioned as he finished sterilizing the wound and began on the bandage.

“Count yourself lucky it’s not worse,” Mathias admonished him.

“Don’t fuck with an armed junkie,” Rayan retorted, pulling tight on the fabric. “Makes my job harder.”

His capo snickered, raising the bottle to his lips.

Busying himself with taping the end of the bandage in place, Rayan spoke to his hands. “Something on your mind?”

Mathias swallowed, pausing. “Do you know your father?”

Rayan glanced up, not sure what had brought this on. They’d left one night when he was a child, and Rayan hadn’t seen his father since. The man hadn’t even shown up in court after his mother died. He remembered the social worker using the term child abandonment as he and his brother sat on a hard wooden bench in front of the judge, the starch on his borrowed button-down shirt making his neck itch. All these years, he’d never felt the urge to find him. No doubt, he was still living in the old weather-beaten house where Rayan had grown up.

“I don’t have a father,” he said after a moment.

“Easier that way.”

Rayan saw a sliver of the man slip past the impenetrable exterior. So they were alike in that way. It made sense. One didn’t get into this business on the merits of a happy childhood. He became aware of the warmth of Mathias’s skin beneath his fingers and the quickening of his own pulse. But his capo was looking past him, thoughts elsewhere.

When Rayan came back from putting everything away, Mathias was stretched out on the couch, eyes closed, his bandaged arm resting on his bare chest. He paused, startled to find himself with an uninterrupted view of the man. He was usually careful, snatching glimpses here and there. He’d always found Mathias painfully beautiful. Even more so when he was like this—unguarded, sedate.

Rayan walked down the hall in search of a blanket. He’d been inside Mathias’s penthouse a few times but only in passing. It resembled a showroom, as though no one really lived there. No photos, no papers strewn about, no unopened mail. Rayan stopped in front of the open bedroom door. The bed was made, nightstands clear of clutter. He stepped into the room and opened the wardrobe. Lines of perfectly pressed clothes hung from floor-to-ceiling racks. A stand displayed a small collection of Rolex watches. It smelled of Mathias. Of his cologne, his scent. Rayan closed the wardrobe and grabbed the throw blanket from the end of the bed. He made his way back to the living room.

Careful not to wake him, Rayan draped the blanket over his sleeping form. In the dim light of the room, Mathias’s face tilted toward him. The hard lines had softened. Those disapproving lips were parted, his hair mussed and tumbling across his forehead. Before he could stop himself, Rayan reached out and brushed the pad of his thumb against Mathias’s temple. His fingers itched to run through the man’s thick dark hair. Rayan pulled his hand back as though stung, his heart pounding with a paralyzing fear. Careless. He could not afford to be this careless.

After picking up his jacket from the back of the sofa, Rayan let himself out, locking the door behind him.

Like a curse, Mathias’s question conjured unwelcome thoughts of the past. They surfaced—snatches of memory Rayan had worked hard to bury. Back at his apartment he found himself unable to sleep. He lay in bed, fighting the pull of the clock on his nightstand. Recognizing the futility of willing himself to sleep, he sat up, flicking on the light. He opened the battered copy of Terre des hommes he kept by his bedside but found himself reading the same sentence over again. It was too late to be this distracted. The book, usually enough to coax his mind to consider the possibility of sleep, was closed to him. Since he’d first begun to decipher words on a page, books had been his comfort, his Ambien. He couldn’t recall who’d taught him to read—school had been an extravagance, a joy denied at every opportunity. He figured, like most things, he’d simply taught himself.

Rayan remembered little from his childhood—he hesitated to even call it a childhood. His mother, a Lebanese refugee, and his father, an older Quebecois army veteran, were mismatched from the start. To this day, he could not understand why they’d married and why they’d had him and his older brother, Tahir. It must have stemmed from a shared decision to cling to the other as protection from life’s uncertainty. They were both cut off from their families, she by circumstance, he by choice.

Rayan learned quickly that he had no love for his father. If André Nadeau had taught him one thing, it was how to hide. Whether to escape a fierce beating or conceal the parts of himself he knew were different.

As soon as he was able, he began to shape the person he was based on everything his father wasn’t. He clung to his mother and would have done anything to see her happy. His brother, on the other hand, took on their father’s life lessons as his own. Rayan’s last memory of the man was the night they’d left, his mother glancing over her shoulder as they walked quickly from the house, a boy in each hand. Their father looked on from the doorway, illuminated in the dark. A silent, fearsome figure.

She didn’t know how to drive, so they walked the two and a half miles to the bus stop. Several years later, living in a small apartment they couldn’t afford, she locked herself in the bathroom and never came out. His brother went in when the custodian arrived to force the door. Fortunately, he’d spared Rayan the details.

Rayan flipped to the front of the book and traced the inscription with his fingers. Made by his mother’s hesitant hand, it was all that was left of her. She’d struggled with her adopted language but had written it carefully regardless, the French words stilted, sentimental, except for the final line, her profession of love, which she inscribed boldly in al-abjadiyah , the Arabic script. His mother, who had given all her love but received so little in return, could only express it in her native tongue.

After her death, he and Tahir had spent a couple of years bouncing around in state care—group homes, the odd foster family. They never stayed long. In the popularity contest that was child placement, two teenage boys weren’t exactly in high demand. It was his brother who convinced him they were better off on their own. That was when home became the streets of Montreal. For a while, they got by on the kindness of strangers, the unhoused community rallying around them, showing them the ropes and where to make a couple of bucks panhandling. But it soon became clear they would need more to survive. They started stealing cars, roaming through the city, careful not to hit the same neighborhoods too often. Rayan learned to drive in a stolen car, a shiny white SUV with black leather seats. They would drive around like they were other people, better people, and leave the cars with a man in Brossard who paid them a small fee for their trouble. Sometimes they stole other things as well.

It didn’t take long for Tahir to get into the hard stuff. It was surprising how easily it flowed through the streets. Guys who couldn’t afford a sandwich somehow had enough for a hit. The carjacking didn’t cut it anymore, and Tahir began running for his dealer, a man named Jean Bastien. Rayan managed to avoid getting formally involved yet was often pulled in by association. Trailing his brother as he ping-ponged around town, going from soaring highs to crushing lows. By this time, Rayan had perfected his camouflage, hiding behind a mask that changed shape depending on who was peering in. He benefitted from his brother’s affiliation, but it pained him to admit how much like his father Tahir had become. Rayan knew it was only a matter of time before something happened. There’d been the occasional run-in with police, but the wrath of street politics licked at their heels, especially when Tahir, flush with growing authority, began stealing from Bastien. Loyalty, which had tied the brothers together, started to fray. Tahir grew erratic, paranoid, no longer recognizable.

Rayan closed the book and turned off the light. He lay in the dark, flexing his fists. They were already starting to stiffen. There would be bruises in the morning. He closed his eyes and realized his heart was racing. It wasn’t mention of his father that had brought the past back in high definition. It was the junkie he’d beaten into the pavement.

On a day when his brother had been tasked with delivering a cut to Bastien’s mob associate, Tahir had taken off with the money. It didn’t take long for the dealer to find him. Tahir had made it as far as the port’s southernmost container terminal. Bastien took Rayan along as collateral. Deserted on a Sunday, the terminal was a wide expanse of concrete that ran along the Saint Lawrence River, dotted with shipping containers in stacks of twos. Parked at the end of a dirt track off the main road, Rayan could see the swell of the river through the maze of freight, swollen with spring snowmelt. While Bastien’s lackeys dragged Tahir to where he and the dealer stood waiting, a black car pulled up, and two men in suits stepped out. Rayan hadn’t seen many mafiosi in his time, but there was no mistaking that these men were with the family.

“It’s a bad week when I have to see your face twice,” the taller of the two said to Bastien. He was young and well-built with hardened features set in a scowl.

Bastien reached to pick up the scuffed sports bag one of his men had dropped at his feet. Rayan recognized the bag—it was Tahir’s. He looked over at his brother, whose arms were pinned behind his back. His face was bloody. If he’d seen Rayan, he didn’t show it.

“Apologies. We ran into a minor problem. You’ll find something extra in there for your trouble.” Bastien handed the bag over to the man’s partner, who set it down on the hood of the car and began counting. There was a blur of movement as Tahir broke free and began to sprint. Without hesitation, Bastien pulled his piece from the waistband of his jeans.

Akhi… Was it thought or said? Rayan only recalled the taste of the word in his mouth, never to be spoken again. There were two shots. The second tore through his brother’s chest, and he fell to the ground, unmoving.

“Problem solved,” Bastien said, stowing his weapon.

Rayan stared, the only sound his heart thundering in his ears. Forced to bear witness, he could not tear his eyes away. One final familial duty.

“Get rid of it,” Bastien instructed his men tersely. They picked up Tahir, his shirt already darkening, eyes open yet unseeing, and carried him to where the crane dock dropped into the river.

We belong to Allah, and to Him do we return.

The words came to his mind unbidden, like a lyric from a children’s song. It had been a lifetime since he’d last believed his mother’s stories of faith and repentance, read from the special book she’d carried with her from a mystical homeland. His hands began to shake, a tremor that rose from inside his body, pushing through to his fingertips. He saw his mother kneeling on the living room carpet, Tahir’s arms looped around her neck as she kissed him.

“It’s all here,” the man who’d counted the money announced, popping the trunk and moving to stash the bag.

“Who’s the kid?” The tall mafioso was looking at him, and their eyes met for an instant before Rayan dropped his gaze .

“Junkie’s brother,” Bastien said. “Want me to take care of him too?”

The man was quiet. Rayan felt his slate-gray eyes on him, the thread of his life casually placed in this stranger’s hand.

“One dead kid, cops look the other way,” he said finally. “Two’s bad for business.”

Bastien shrugged. “Your call, Mathias.”

“If you’re late again next month, a little extra won’t cut it.”

Bastian shrank, giving him a curt nod. Without another word, the dealer and his men got into their car and pulled out, Rayan already forgotten, left to his fate.

“Who’re you with?” the man called Mathias asked, addressing him in English.

Rayan searched for words but found his mind blank. Seeing Tahir dead on the ground had rendered him mute. He stared back, saying nothing.

“Don’t make me ask again.” Mathias reached into his jacket, and Rayan wondered how it would feel when the bullet pierced his skin, tearing through him, shredding his insides. But instead of a gun, he pulled out his cigarettes.

The fear parted for an instant, allowing Rayan to think. “No one.”

“Smart kid.” Mathias lit up and took a drag. “Smarter than your brother, at least. It’s not a good idea to steal from the family.”

Rayan remained silent, still convinced he would kill him.

“What did you see here today?” Mathias asked, giving him a pointed stare. This time, Rayan did not look away.

“Nothing,” he whispered. The thought of denying his brother’s existence while his body sank to the bottom of the Saint Lawrence was too much to bear. He felt a swell of tears and swallowed hard, refusing to let them come.

“Good.” Mathias exhaled a plume of smoke. He appeared to be considering something. Rayan did not know much about the family, only that if you traced any street activity far enough, it led to them.

“Roll up your sleeves.”

Rayan obliged, pulling his sweater up to his elbows to expose the unmarked insides of his arms. Users were unreliable. They had nothing to lose.

“Come with me.”

Rayan’s feet moved on their own. There was little choice in the matter—he couldn’t risk refusing a member of the family, someone with the power to make Jean Bastien flinch. He could take his chances and run, like his brother. But to where? He had nothing—and no one—to go back to.

“You Quebecois?” Mathias asked as they walked around the black Mercedes to where his partner waited, a frown on his face.

“ Oui .”

“I’m tired of speaking English,” Mathias said in French. He gestured toward the car. “Get in.” Then he turned to his subordinate. “Drop him off at Guillet’s.”

“Boss?” the shorter man asked, eyeing Rayan suspiciously.

Mathias took another drag on his cigarette before flicking it to the ground. “He’s short on runners. Might as well get some use out of the kid.”

In bed, Rayan felt sleep encroaching, covering him like a heavy blanket. For most of his life, he’d been treated like he had no future, the long line of social workers, court registrars, and police officers always with that same look of pity, like he was the sad result of an unfortunate past, broken and unsalvageable. But Mathias had looked at him, standing before the river that had swallowed his brother, and seen a flicker of possibility. Alone in an unforgiving city, it was more affirming than anything anyone had given him since his mother’s death. He could be useful, worth something at least. He was not nothing.

So Rayan had taken that possibility and held it tightly. That was the beginning, he knew now, when he had seen something in Mathias that others did not see, a kernel of feeling Rayan had buried deep, its tendrils growing despite his futile attempts to cut them back—gratitude manifesting loyalty and admiration breeding devotion. Because he knew on that day, had he not been seen, he would have disappeared entirely.

Rayan had ended up running for Guillet for almost a year, his only skill not getting hooked on what he was selling. It was enough to propel him up the ranks until he was sent, as a favor, to drive for the family. When he’d arrived at the Collections office and seen Mathias, he’d been transported back to the day of Tahir’s death. He remembered in the car, as they sped through the city, how he’d been too afraid to look at the man beside him in the backseat. He’d felt a tug as though he were being torn in two, half of him left at the port with his brother, the other half a stranger headed into the unknown to start a new life chosen for him.

It was less strange now. In fact, it was the most constant Rayan’s life had been since he’d left his childhood home. Yet here he was, still hiding.