Page 13 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

The orgasm tears through me. My inner walls clench around his cock in waves as I cry out against his neck, and the pulse of it drags him over with me. He buries his cock deeper and comes with a low groan he’s clearly been holding back for as long as he could, and the heat of it sends one last aftershock through my wrecked nerves.

We lie still afterward, breathing hard. The room smells like sweat, sex, and the cedar from the open closet, and neither of us speaks.

I keep my hands at my sides. If I touch him now, I’ll want him to touch me back. Then I’ll want it again tomorrow, and I’ve seen what happens to women who start needing things from men like him.

Dad told me once the worst marks are the ones who swear they’re in control right up until the second they aren’t. I always assumed he meant the people he conned. Lying in Nikita Rusakov’s bed, I’m starting to think he meant me.

He pulls out and rolls onto his back beside me. I stare at the ceiling and think about what I should have twenty minutes ago. Neither of us said a word about protection. He finished inside me and I let him, and I didn’t think about it once until now, which is sloppy. I add it to the list of tonight’s bad decisions but don’t say it out loud, because that means deciding what to do about it, and I’ve decided enough for one night.

Nikita gets up, and I brace for the part where a man like him leaves the room and lets me find my own way back to being an asset. Instead, he crosses to the bathroom. I hear water run before he returns with a glass and sets it on the nightstand on my side without comment. He doesn’t ask if I’m all right. He just sees to my needs.

“This doesn’t change the arrangement,” I say.

“I know.”

Neither of us argues. The silence leaves the lie intact.

He watches me without reaching for his clothes, and for once, he doesn’t seem to have decided what happens next.

I sit up first, drink half the water, and retrieve my underwear and jeans from the floor. Nikita dresses without looking at the bed, and we return to the closet and the files as though clothing can restore the boundary we crossed.

We spend the next forty minutes rebuilding the order of the safe, identifying two missing insurance statements, and matching storage-unit numbers to the leases Platon compiled this morning. Nikita works beside me in silence, and neither of us mentions what happened in the bedroom.

By the time I place the last folder on the shelf, his phone buzzes. He angles the screen so I can read Platon’s text:

“Callum is secure. I moved him to the cottage, and Vera is handling intake. I found another route through the Gideon broker. We need to review it at first light.”

I nod, so Nikita sets down the phone.

“Platon doesn’t ask for a first-light meeting unless the trace got worse,” he says.

Maren’s name is at the end of that trace. She pulled the buyer records for me this morning without asking what she was walking into, the same as she has for every job I’ve ever run. I let her do it because I needed the information more than I needed her safe. That makes me feel like a shit even though Nikita would have ended the call if I said too much. “How much worse can it get before it reaches Maren?”

Nikita doesn’t answer right away, and the pause tells me more than a firm answer would have.

6

NIKITA

Piper is still asleep when I leave the bedroom at five-forty. She’s turned onto her side with one arm folded under the pillow and the other stretched into the space I vacated. I stand in the doorway for several seconds longer than I have any operational reason to. Four years of discipline, and the thief who made eleven sales from Mama’s collection has me counting seconds in my own hallway.

I pull the door closed and go downstairs.

The lower security room sits behind the wine cellar, past a false wall my father installed decades ago that I upgraded twice before I died. Platon has been here since three. Six monitors run along the far wall, and he’s covered the table with printouts organized in a system only he understands.

“You slept,” he says without turning around.

“I slept some.”

“That’s good. One of us should.” He drags a chair out with his foot and gestures at it. “You should sit down. This is going to take a while, and I’d rather you were comfortable when you get angry.”

I sit. Platon pulls up a diagram on the center monitor that makes yesterday’s Gideon chart look like a child’s drawing.

“Gideon Arts Consulting doesn’t buy anything,” he says. “It launders provenance and routes acquisitions to private clients. Your cigarette case cleared through Gideon in under six hours and went to a private auction broker named Emil Vogt, who operates out of Geneva and services roughly nine clients. Shilov is one of them.”

“How certain are you?”

“Certain enough that I’ve stopped calling it a theory.” Platon taps the screen. “Vogt scheduled a black-tie gala with a private viewing, and the invitation routes through an account Shilov controls. The lot list includes the six-piece silver set and the oil icon, all Rusakov-linked. Piper sold the case and the icon. The other five pieces of the set disappeared before she ever entered the house.”