Page 63 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

She breathes through something and then makes herself smile at whoever she’s talking to, and I set my glass down and start moving before I’ve decided to.

“It’s nothing,” she says when I reach her, which is what she says about everything. “They’re Braxton Hicks. Mila said—” Piper tightens her grip, pales, and stops talking.

I crouch in front of her chair. “Count it for me. Start now.”

She does. At forty seconds, she catches her breath. When it passes, she looks at me, and under the calm she’s performing for the room I can see that she knows this is a week earlier than Mila planned.

Mila is already there. She places one hand on Piper’s stomach and checks her watch. Mila doesn’t need to reassure the room. Her calm is enough.

“That lasted forty seconds,” Mila says. “How long ago did the first one start?”

“The first was ten minutes ago, maybe less,” Piper says.

“With triplets this far along, we don’t wait for another.” Mila straightens. “The hospital is twenty minutes if the drive is clear. Nikita drives, I ride with you and keep her monitored, and I’ll call ahead so the delivery team is scrubbed and ready before we’re through the doors.”

The room hushes around us, both families turning, the party congregates around her chair. I feel the old thing rise in me, the pressure to control the space, account for every exit, move everyone according to a plan, and for once, it has somewhere useful to go.

I don’t panic. I execute, because that’s how I’ve always loved her, with action, a plan, and the route to the hospital already mapped in my head.

“Vera, her bag is on the second shelf in the blue room.” I’m already lifting Piper’s coat. “Callum, your mother rides with Angelina. Platon, you clear the drive and take the lead car.” I put an arm around Piper and she gets to her feet. She locks one hand around mine, the other low on the stomach where our children have just announced they’re finished waiting. “Everyone follows. Nobody speeds. Mila’s in the car with us.”

Vera has the bag before I finish the sentence. Callum carries his mother’s coat to Angelina’s car, and Celine follows him without argument. Platon is at the front door with a phone against his ear, clearing the drive, and the machine I spent a decade building for war turns out to work just as well for this, for getting one frightened woman safely from a chair to a car while people who love her move in formation around her.

Angelina lowers her camera when she looks at me, and I nod. She brings it up again, and no one questions photographs after that. Five years ago, I would have checked where the camera was aimed before I moved. Today, I don’t think about my face appearing in a photograph until we’re already through the door.

Piper looks up at me as I walk her toward the door, past the silver-wrapped gifts for babies who’ve decided not to wait for them to be opened. She looks frightened, but she keeps moving toward the door.

“Are you ready?” I ask her.

“I’m not ready.” She crushes my hand as another contraction begins. “You’re driving because it’s happening anyway.”

29

PIPER

The contraction crests. I crush Nikita’s hand and swear at him with everything I’ve got. He holds on without flinching, steady and unbothered by the swearing.

“You need to breathe through the top of it,” he says, close to my ear. I want to tell him where he can put his breathing. I don’t, because the breathing helps, and because his voice is the only thing in this bright loud room that isn’t a machine. There was never a version of this where I push three of them out; Mila scheduled a cesarean for the end of the week months ago. Labor started a handful of days early, so the contractions are only what we’re outrunning to the operating room. I focus on getting through each one until I get a spinal block.

“I need you to talk to me,” I say between waves. “Anything. I don’t care.”

He starts with the nursery. He tells me about the three cribs he assembled himself last week and then had Platon check because he didn’t trust his own work with something this important. Apparently, he read the instructions twice and still put one rail on backward. Platon found it in four seconds, said nothing, and handed him the screwdriver.

I laugh in the middle of a contraction, and it turns into a sound that isn’t a laugh. He talks about nothing important while the nurses finish my blood work, the anesthesiologist reviews the plan, and three neonatal teams assemble outside the operating room. I ride out each contraction until Mila says they’re ready, which means the operating room now.

The operating room is colder and brighter than I expect, and it fills with more people than I can count. The anesthesiologist slides something cool into the line already running into my arm, then works at the small of my back. The spinal removes every sensation below my ribs until the lower half of me seems absent. They raise a blue drape across my chest so I can’t see past my own ribs, and Nikita appears at my head in a gown and a paper cap, close, his mouth at my ear, the only warm thing in a room built out of steel.

“I can see,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything. You won’t miss a second of it.”

That’s the deal we make without saying it. I can’t see past the drape and I can’t feel what they’re doing. I feel only pressure, a deeply insistent pulling that isn’t pain but knows where pain lives. I read the room the only way left to me, through him, through the face I’ve spent almost a year learning to translate.

He tightens his grip on mine. “They’ve got the first one. Piper, they’ve got him⁠—”

The sound arrives before he finishes. A doctor lifts my first son above the drape for one second before the team takes him to be checked. He’s tiny, red, and furious, and his cry brings tears to my eyes. I’m crying and I didn’t decide to.

“That’s one,” Nikita says, and his voice isn’t steady. I’ve heard this man stay level through a gun against my head. His voice breaks on a single number.

The second comes a minute behind his brother, faster than I’m ready for, another boy, and quieter this time. They lift him over the drape too, and then he’s gone to the warm lights, where a nurse rubs him down and murmurs at him until he complains about it. That makes two.