Page 16 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Piper considers that for longer than most people would.

“I’ll do all of it,” she says. “I have three conditions.”

Platon makes a sound that might be a laugh.

“You’re negotiating,” I say.

“I’m agreeing. The conditions are the price.” She counts them without dropping my stare. “One, nobody moves Maren without telling her the truth first. You moved Callum before anyone gave him the whole truth. Maren gets the truth first. Two, I sit in the room for the decisions that involve my family, including this one. Three, if I tell you something is wrong and you disagree, you say so out loud instead of routing around me.”

“Those aren’t conditions,” Platon says. “Those are standards.”

“Then they should be easy.”

I’ve spent twenty years watching people negotiate from weakness. They flatter, or they threaten, or they ask for more than they want so they can concede gracefully. Piper Voss does none of it. She names three things and waits, and every one of them costs me control I’d rather keep.

The third condition is the one that stops me. Nobody has told me to disagree out loud since I took control. Platon argues, but Platon has earned it through a decade of surviving the same crises. Vera criticizes and calls it household management. Everyone else brings me options and lets me choose, which is a form of obedience dressed as service, and I’ve let it happen because it saved money.

This woman has been in my custody for thirty-six hours and she’s asking me to say when I think she’s wrong.

If she’d simply agreed, I could’ve treated her as an asset and moved on. I could’ve kept her in the category where she belongs, useful and contained and separate from anything personal enough to compromise my judgment.

“I accept all three,” I say.

She holds my stare for half a second, and then she nods once and turns back to the monitor.

Platon’s phone buzzes against the table. He reads it, and he sits up straighter than he has all morning. I’ve watched him do that exactly four times in ten years, and every one of them ended with somebody in the ground.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Maren Valentine texted the secure number I sent her after Piper’s monitored call yesterday.” He sets the phone down. “Two men came to her studio at six this morning asking about estate provenance work. She told them she doesn’t take walk-ins and locked the door. They’re still parked outside.”

7

PIPER

Mila took my blood pressure at eight this morning, asked me nine questions about sleep and appetite and stress, and wrote everything down without telling me what any of it meant. When I asked whether I passed, she said health isn’t a test and I should stop treating my own body like a hostile witness.

I’ve been thinking about that for three hours, which is two hours and fifty minutes longer than I meant to.

The car turns off the Long Island Expressway a little after eleven. Platon drives. Nikita sits beside me in the back with a wool coat and a driving cap he put on somewhere around Douglaston, which does almost nothing to disguise a man his size.

“You look like a spy in a community theater production,” I tell him.

“I look like a man in a coat.”

“You look like a man in a coat who’s six foot four and hasn’t been photographed in four years, which is a problem, because Queens has cameras.” I turn in the seat. “Why are you here? Platon could’ve done this. I could’ve done this with Platon.”

Nikita watches the storefronts slide past the window. “Two men sat outside your friend’s studio for nearly four hours this morning.”

“They left at nine forty,” Platon says from the front. “My detail confirmed it twenty minutes after we pulled out of the estate.”

“They left,” Nikita agrees. “They know the address. They know she’s connected to the sale. If they come back while you’re inside, I’d rather be in the building than back at Water Mill, nearly two hours away.”

He says it like a logistics decision. I let him have that, because arguing would require me to name what it actually is, and I’m not ready to do that in a moving vehicle.

Maren’s workspace occupies the ground floor of a converted garage off Thirty-Seventh Avenue, behind a roll-down gate she painted teal four years ago and has never once repainted. One of Platon’s people raises the gate as we turn onto the block. Platon drives straight in, and the gate comes down behind us before Nikita opens his door.

As far as anyone watching the street is concerned, two women are pulling estate records for a scheduled verification. Nikita never appears on the sidewalk at all.