Page 27 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

I work her until she grabs my wrist and gasps that if I don’t get inside her now she’ll finish without me. With a breathless laugh, I free my cock and push into her in one stroke.

She cries out and I swallow it with my mouth. She’s hot and tight around my cock as she takes all of me at once while dragging her nails down my back through my shirt. She locks her heels against my ass so I can’t pull back even if I wanted to.

I don’t want to. I set a hard rhythm on the edge of that desk, one hand fisted in her hair and the other gripping her hip to hold her where I need her. She meets every thrust, rolling her hips up to take me deeper while swearing at me, telling me harder in a voice stripped of every performance she’s given all night.

“This is what you couldn’t watch,” she says, ragged, her forehead against mine. “Someone else getting to have this.”

“No one else gets this.” I drive into her and feel her clench. “Say you understand that.”

“Make me believe it.”

I do. I get my thumb back on her clit without breaking rhythm and work her in fast circles while I fuck her, and she comes apart around my cock with my name more a gasp than a word. Her pussy spasms hard enough to drag me to the edge with her. She looks at me through it, and I bury myself deeper and come inside her with a groan I couldn’t stop if the door opened right now, while she keeps me locked against her with her heels and the wrecked look on her face.

Neither of us moves for a moment. Her forehead stays against mine, both of us breathing hard, the case and Vogt’s card sitting forgotten on the corner of the desk where the whole reason we came here waits for us to focus on it again.

The same thought comes back—the one that hit me the first night she was in my bed and that I haven’t let myself consider again. I came inside her again and neither of us stopped to think about it. I turn it over as I would any risk I’ve accepted with my eyes open. I built four years of survival on never taking a risk I couldn’t undo. This is the second one I’ve taken with this woman that I have no wish to undo at all, and that unsettles me more than the recklessness.

“We’re not calling this a mistake,” she says finally. Not a question.

“No.” I brush a strand of hair off her damp cheek, and she lets me. The plain domestic ease of the gesture frightens me more than the jealousy did, because I have no strategy for wanting this. “We’re not.”

Then my phone buzzes against my hip, once, cut short, pause, and once more, longer this time. It’s the pattern Platon only uses when he needs my attention, and I pull back enough to read the screen over her shoulder.

Vogt made a call the second he cleared the floor. Not to a buyer. He reported the case and the “associate” who stepped between him and Mrs. Rusakov, straight up the chain to Lazar Malenkov. Shilov doesn’t know you’re alive. He knows someone dangerous is guarding her, though, which is almost as bad.

11

PIPER

Two weeks after Vogt called Lazar from the club, Platon puts an unloaded pistol in my hands and tells me I’m not leaving until I know how to keep someone from taking it away from me.

Lazar made no direct move in all that time, and the waiting wore on everyone. Two weeks of tracing accounts, recovering pieces, and waiting for a hit that didn’t come. Nikita took the silence as a warning, doubled the estate detail, rotated Callum’s guards twice, and finally decided that if the wait was going to stretch, I wasn’t going to spend it unable to defend myself. He scheduled this before sunrise.

“Fix your grip,” Platon says for the fourth time. “Your grip is a handshake, not a fist. You hold it firmly, as if you’re shaking hands with someone you don’t trust but won’t insult.”

The private range sits two floors underground beneath a building Nikita owns through three shells, soundproofed and empty except for the four of us. Nikita runs his own drills at the far lane while Platon starts me on the pistol. Maren watches from behind the glass at the observation window, arms crossed, a coffee going cold beside her, and every time I glance over, she’s wearing an expression that’s going to become a sentence the second we’re alone.

“Nobody’s grabbing me,” I say. “I’m holding a gun.”

“The gun is the least likely thing to save your life.” He holsters the training pistol and walks me to the padded section behind the lanes. “Most bad days happen inside arm’s reach, and there, the gun just gives one of you something to fight over. We start with what you do when someone already has hold of you.”

He steps into my space without warning, one hand closing around my forearm, the other pinning my upper arm. I freeze for a second before I make myself listen. Across the range, Nikita stops running his own drills.

“You can panic later,” Platon says. “Right now, you learn the sequence. Somebody grabs you from the front, you have four moves in order, and you run them the same every time. You stomp his instep with your full weight, you drive your elbow into him below the ribs, you twist free against the thumb because the thumb is the weak point of any grip, and you create distance. Instep, elbow, twist, and distance.”

I run it slowly then faster. The first time I try it at speed, I catch him uselessly in the sternum.

“You wound up like you’re chopping wood,” Platon says. “The power comes from your hips, not your arm. Again.”

We drill it until my forearm goes purple where his grip keeps bruising it and the four moves stop needing me to think before using them. It reminds me of learning to carve a notary stamp, where the hand takes over once the brain stops arguing, except a botched stamp never left a bruise.

Nikita hasn’t gone back to his own lane. He’s watching Platon’s hand on my arm, and he’s holding still with obvious effort, and I notice it before I decide to.

“You could try blinking,” Platon says without turning around. “It doesn’t help her grip, you standing there like that.”

“I’m supervising.”

“You’re hovering. She had it two reps ago.” Platon resets my stance with two fingers. “He knows I’m the better teacher for this. It bothers him to watch anyway, which is the only reason I let him think he’s supervising.”