Page 53 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

“You think we’re different?” He tilts his head. “I gave the Rusakov family twenty years. I made the numbers work when Arkadi burned money on vendettas. I kept the estate breathing through four years when the man who owned it was rotting in an unmarked hole, or so the whole world believed. I filed the papers, paid the taxes, and held a dead empire together with my own two hands. Not one Rusakov ever looked at me as anything but the help. I took what I was already managing. I told myself I’d earned it, because I had.” He leans in again. “You’ve said those exact words to yourself. I earned this. They owed me. It was mine before I took it.”

I don’t answer, because the words are sitting in my own head, worn smooth from a lifetime of use. I earned this. They owed me. I said them through every smaller estate job and every piece of questionable paperwork Dorian’s curriculum ever made possible. I said a version of them five months ago, when I first stood in a dead man’s hall, deciding his estate owed me a way out because no one else ever had. I hear my own excuses in his, and I can’t reject his logic without rejecting mine.

“You see it now,” he says softly. “That’s the thing about our particular talent. We’re never stealing. We’re always collecting a debt.”

I make myself breathe. He’s doing to me what I’ve done to a hundred marks, holding up the version of me that agrees with him and waiting for me to nod. The difference is the part I can finally admit. I used to tell myself I only ever hurt people in the ledger, that a stolen cigarette case was a number and nothing more. Nikita’s face the night he saw his mother’s things scattered across the world proved that was a lie. My thefts were never clean. They cost real people, and I spent years refusing to look at who paid. I can see the harm now, and I can stop calling it something else. Adrian sees the harm just as clearly, and he calls it payment. He’s going to spend a man’s life and three heartbeats he doesn’t know about to collect it.

“You fed Shilov the codes,” I say, to move him off me, to get the whole of it while he’s talking. “You controlled the storage access. You set up the public events to flush Nikita out.”

“I confirmed he was alive for Rahil. That’s all the events were.” He says it like it costs him nothing, which it doesn’t. “A dead man doesn’t buy a necklace to keep his forger safe. A dead man doesn’t dissolve his own shells the week his wife gets nervous. Every room I put you in, I was reading him through you. By the second gala, I was certain you were his weak point.” He shrugs. “Shilov wants him. I want what I built. You were the clearest way to give us both what we’re owed, because you’re the one thing on this earth Nikita Rusakov will risk anything to get back.”

There it is. Adrian hands me the whole plan in a reasonable voice, because he believes he’s the wronged party. I’m not leverage because they hate me. I’m leverage because Nikita loves me. Adrian has watched that love grow for two months and priced it to the dollar.

“He won’t come how you expect,” I say.

“He’ll come exactly how I expect. I’ve known him for twenty years—far longer than you have.” Adrian stands, smooths the front of his gray suit, and retrieves the reading glasses from his pocket as if there’s paperwork somewhere that needs him. “You should rest, and eat what they left. Whatever you’re planning, and I know you’re planning something, factor in the water. There’s a great deal of it.” He pauses at the door. “For what it’s worth, I’d have preferred a world where none of this touched you. You’re the only person I’ve met in a long time who might have understood me.”

“I do understand you,” I say. “That’s how I know you’ll lose.”

Adrian presses his lips together for one beat before he looks calm again, and I mark it, because his need to be understood has just shown me the one soft place on him. Then he’s out the door, Lazar follows, and the lock clicks shut behind them. I sit in the quiet he leaves behind and understand that Adrian made exactly one mistake tonight. He needed me to see him. Everything else he did was clean, but that one thing was human.

I check both windows because I have to know, not because I hope he lied.

One faces a stone terrace and a dock with a single covered boat. The other shows open water past a strip of scrub grass, gray to an unbroken horizon. I test both latches, and neither gives, and the glass sits inside reinforced frames with no gap to force a tool into. I can’t see a bridge, a road, or a neighboring shoreline from either side. I count four men from the two windows and assume twice that many I can’t see.

Adrian already told me it took a boat to reach this place, and the water past the glass tells me he wasn’t exaggerating the distance. Somewhere past it is a coast, and somewhere on that coast is a house with a portrait over the staircase and a man tearing his own empire apart to find me, and between us is more open water than I could swim at my strongest, which I’m not right now.

My mouth is dry in a way the single bottle of water they left won’t fix. I ration it anyway, because dehydration is a real risk and I have three passengers who can’t afford it. A wave of lightheadedness comes when I move too fast from the window. I brace on the sill and wait it out, one hand splayed under my ribs.

The fear I can manage. The fear I can’t is quieter and lives lower down, the animal certainty that whatever happens to me happens to them. I’m the only shelter three people have and the shelter is trapped on a rock in the middle of the Sound. I make myself drink one more careful mouthful and sit before my body decides the matter for me.

I don’t know where I am. That’s the design. Adrian didn’t pick an island because it’s beautiful. He picked it because a place you can only reach by boat is a place no one stumbles onto, and a captive who can’t name her own coordinates can’t whisper them to anyone even if she found a phone.

I sit back down on the edge of the bed, and I press both hands low over my stomach.

The nausea returns in the late afternoon, as it has every day for weeks, except here there’s no ginger tea and no excuse to leave a room. I ride it out with my gaze on the horizon and my hand pressed to the underside of my ribs. I make myself eat half the bread they left even though my body wants none of it, because the three of them need it despite my queasiness. That steadies me. I’ve already learned to keep going for people too small to know they exist. I won’t be the reason we don’t walk off this rock.

Then I turn back to the room to search more thoroughly. The chair is too heavy to swing, but one of its legs ends in a steel foot the size of my palm, loose in its socket, worked halfway free by years of someone dragging the chair across stone. I don’t pull it the rest of the way yet. I seat it back into the wood so it looks untouched, and fix the location of it in my mind beside the four moves Platon taught me, and I let myself have the small mean pleasure of a hidden thing Adrian doesn’t know I have.

For a second, I let myself picture three children with Nikita’s gray eyes and my inability to sit still, learning to read and learning which of their parents to go to for which kind of trouble. I let myself want it so hard it doubles me over on the edge of the bed with my forehead nearly to my knees. That yearning is the thing that almost finishes me, not the vastness of water, Lazar, or even Adrian and his reasonable voice. What almost finishes me is the thought that I might have watched three heartbeats flicker on a screen and never hold three hands in mine.

Then I make myself stop, because Platon taught me the rest of that lesson standing in a soundproofed range before dawn. You can panic later. Panic now gets you killed, and it gets the people depending on you killed, and there are three people depending on me who don’t have names yet. I can grieve after I get out. Right now I need to think.

I take stock instead. I have a locked door and two sealed windows over water I can’t cross. I have a captor who keeps talking when he believes someone finally understands him, which means he’ll keep talking. He’ll keep handing me things. I have Lazar, who was told not to break me yet, and yet is a word with an expiration date. My husband will be looking for me. I used to think his control was absolute, but I watched it crack at the gala when a man put a hand near my throat, and part of me is afraid that the thing that will find me fastest is also the thing most likely to get one of us killed when it does. Last of all, I remember the sequence Platon drilled into me at the range until I could run it without hesitation, the four moves in order, the instep, the elbow, the twist, and the distance, that turn a grabbed woman into a problem for the man holding her.

I straighten and lift my head, counting the men again. The one at the dock turns his back on the house every time he checks the boat. I count the seconds he gives me, and I start building the route out from there.

24

NIKITA

Platon says my name once, low and hard, and I’m on my feet before my eyes are fully open, because in six days that tone has come to mean one thing.

It’s two-thirty in the morning. I don’t remember lying down against the wall, which means my body finally overruled me somewhere in the last stack of Adrian’s phone records. The long table is still buried under six days of his life, printed and cross-referenced, shipping manifests beside estate filings beside pages Platon pulled through channels I don’t ask about. Somewhere in that paper is the room where a man is holding my wife, and I read in the set of Platon’s shoulders that he has finally found the thread that leads to it.

Six days. I’ve counted every hour of them against the ones Piper has spent somewhere beyond my reach, hungry, or hurt, or worse, and I haven’t let myself finish that sentence once. We chased two wrong leads and paid in time I couldn’t spare, a clean warehouse in Red Hook on the second night and a chartered medevac in Teterboro that cost most of a day, both of them Adrian’s misdirection or a broker’s lie.

In between, the people who love me kept me upright when I’d have run myself into the ground. Mila stood over me on the fourth night with a prescribed sedative and told me I would sleep four hours or she’d stop treating me. Platon took my car keys on the third day so I couldn’t chase a lead alone at four in the morning. Angelina came the second day, saw how wrecked I was, stopped telling me to rest, and stayed anyway. None of it mattered as much as the laptop Platon is turning toward me now.