Page 17 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Maren waits beside her workbench with her arms crossed.

“This is absolutely not happening,” she says before the gate finishes coming down.

“Maren—”

“There’s a plumbing van at the end of my block that has never once been on my block, Piper, and the two men inside it have not gotten out to plumb anything.” She points past me toward the street. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that men who sit in parked vehicles are never good news, and I’ve now had two sets of them in one day.”

“Those are ours,” Platon says.

“That’s what I said. Two sets.” Maren gives him the same quick, unflattering assessment she gives a credenza. “You’re the one who texted me a secure number yesterday with no explanation.”

“I am.”

Maren folds her arms and looks him over one more time, unimpressed on principle. “Your text had no greeting, no signature, and no punctuation at the end.”

“The number was the message.”

“The number was alarming.” She turns from Platon to me, because I’m the safer person to blame and we both know it. “You disappeared into a dead bratva boss’s mansion for two days. You called me once, from your own phone, with somebody listening. You asked me to pull buyer records and then you hung up. Now you show up with a security detail and a man in a costume.”

“He’s not in a costume,” I say. “He’s in a coat.”

“Piper, I’m serious.”

“I know you are.” I set my bag on her workbench. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I’m going to explain what I can.”

“You’re going to explain all of it.”

The workspace smells like lemon oil and old wood and the burnt coffee she’s been reheating since roughly 2019. Rolling racks of tagged clothing line the back wall. A walnut credenza sits under a tarp with an inventory number safety-pinned to the corner, and beside it, three mid-century chairs wait in a row with their price tags facing outward. Her laptop lives on a workstation shelf under a layer of resale-site stickers so thick I haven’t seen the actual casing since 2021.

The blue binder sits open beside the laptop.

“I pulled everything after you called,” Maren says. She drags the binder toward her. “Payment records, message threads, broker contacts, the whole resale chain for the last four months. I’ve been sitting here since seven trying to figure out what I was looking at.”

Nikita moves toward the workstation, and Maren puts her hand on the binder without looking up.

“I don’t know you,” she says to him. “Piper reads it first.”

Nikita stops. He doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t glance at me for backup. He steps back and puts his hands in his coat pockets, and he does it so easily that I have to look away.

Platon watches the whole exchange with an expression I can’t read.

I open the binder.

Maren logs every sale by buyer and date, with a printed message thread stapled behind each entry. I find the sale of the watches, icon, and cigarette case on page eleven. The buyer used the name Peter Halloran, which is almost certainly not his name, and the appointment thread runs eight messages long.

I read it twice.

“Maren, you need to read the third message.” My voice comes out wrong on her name.

She leans over my shoulder.

Before we schedule, I need to confirm the seller’s provenance history. Is she connected to the Voss name?

The message is dated four days before the appointment. Four days before he ever set foot in that dining room. Four days before he opened the case and found the crest and started photographing it like he’d discovered something.

He came to confirm what he already suspected.

“I answered that,” Maren says. She speaks more quietly now, and the anger is gone. “I told him yes. I told him the seller had estate-liquidation experience through her father’s business. I thought he was checking credentials, Piper. Buyers ask about provenance experience constantly, and Voss is a name in this industry, and I thought I was helping you close.”