Page 32 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

13

PIPER

The next night, the Gulfstream carries the four of us—Nikita and me, Platon and Maren—toward Palm Beach, with two of Platon’s people in the rear cabin. It isn’t registered to a dead man, obviously. It belongs to the leasing company that fronts Nikolai Volkov, the clean corporate identity Nikita wears in public. The old estate photographs I found were private; Volkov has no public image attached to him. On paper, the jet is chartered to Volkov in his role as a consultant to the Rusakov estate, and nothing in the records points to Nikita. I know exactly what a jet like this costs because I had a request for forged maintenance records two years ago and never delivered it.

The airframe runs eight figures, and keeping it in the sky costs seven figures a year. My client wanted me to fake the maintenance log, because that’s the one document a careful buyer actually reads. When I realized he was trying to sell an unsafe aircraft, I canceled the transaction. It crossed a firm line for me.

I sink into a seat wrapped in leather that was dyed, not painted, and run my thumb along the stitching out of habit, checking for the machine regularity that gives a fake away. It’s hand-done. Of course, it’s hand-done. The whole cabin is an inventory of things that can’t be counterfeited, and I’m the only person aboard who can’t stop translating every detail into a resale number.

“Stop appraising the upholstery,” Maren says. She drops into the seat across from me, kicks off the heels she’s been complaining about since Water Mill, and tucks her feet under her. “You’ve got your resale face on. It’s unsettling at forty thousand feet.”

“I’m not appraising.” I totally am.

“You mouthed a number when you sat down. I watched you do it.” She accepts a sparkling water from a steward who appears and vanishes before either of us thanks him, which is its own trick I’d like to learn. “This is the life, then. How’s it fitting?”

“It’s a work trip.”

“It’s a work trip on a jet worth tens of millions, and you’re wearing the diamonds he chose to tell an entire room not to touch you, and the man who chose them is up front pretending to read a security brief he’s already memorized.” Maren sips her water. “I’ve watched you talk your way into rooms like this. I’ve never watched you sit down in one and get comfortable.”

I snort. “I’m not comfortable.”

“You crossed your ankles.”

I uncross my ankles. She grins, and it’s the old grin, the one she uses to check that I’m still in here, and I hate how well it works.

Up front, Nikita has the brief open on the table in front of him with Platon beside him, and the two of them are doing the thing where they talk in half sentences because the other one already knows the rest. Every few minutes, Nikita checks on me quickly, then returns to the brief. He’s been doing it since the car. I’ve decided not to name my feelings about it.

“Can I ask you something and get Piper instead of the answer you’d give a mark?” Maren asks, and the grin disappears.

“You’re going to ask either way.”

“What happens when it stops being pretend?”

The water in my glass catches the cabin light. I keep my gaze on it. “It’s a cover,” I say. “It’s the widow. It’s a job with a costume.”

“That’s the answer you’d give a mark.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and she drops her voice under the engine noise so it’s just the two of us hearing it. “You keep putting real things into the widow story. Your brother is safe because of him. You let him see what Celine does to you. You chose those earrings because you needed one thing tonight that belonged to you.” She lets me absorb that. “What happens when you stop taking the role off? You’ve always had a plan, but I don’t think you do this time, and that’s new.”

I don’t answer, because I’ve been avoiding writing it down like a number I don’t want to total, and Maren knows what that avoidance looks like on me because she’s the one who named it years ago. She doesn’t push. She holds my gaze for one more second, holding a door instead of slamming it, then leans back and puts her heels back on because we’re beginning our descent, and the moment closes without either of us having to survive saying more.

I consider myself lucky. I was expecting her to ask about that other thing I’m deliberately ignoring. She still hasn’t, but she will soon.

My stomach churns with nausea. It’s purely from the angle of descent. I try really hard to believe that.

We come up the drive into a private estate on the water, a house with a name instead of an address, where the auction is the excuse the room has agreed to use for gathering. Platon’s two men separate from us at the entrance, one taking the service corridor and the other drifting toward the auction floor. Waiters carry champagne no one finishes. Guards stand at the walls dressed as guests, and I clock nine of them in the first ninety seconds, because counting the men who could stop me leaving is a reflex I’ve never turned off and never plan to.

Nikita places his hand at the small of my back as we come in, light, guiding, gone the second we clear the entrance. He introduces me as Mrs. Rusakov twice and lets the name do its own work. As Nikolai Volkov, he is only the estate’s security adviser, close enough to protect the widow and too professionally distant to explain the diamonds at her throat, and I understand the choreography now in a way I didn’t at the club. He doesn’t hover. He gives me the room and stands at the edge of it, close enough to reach me but far enough that no one reads him as the reason I’m untouchable. The necklace does that. Every person who prices what’s on my throat arrives at the same figure and adjusts their manners accordingly.

I move through it and I’m good at it. That’s the part I don’t want to look at directly. These are my father’s people, one remove and a great deal of money up the ladder from the buyers I’ve sold to, and they talk about provenance the way other families talk about weather. A woman in a column of gray silk tells me about a Fabergé frame she “rescued” from an estate in Geneva. We both know rescued means the family didn’t consent, but neither of us says so. I trade a story about a private ceremony in Bridgehampton for her opinion on a Dutch still life across the room.

Every exchange is a negotiation. Every smile is a line item. I belong here in a way that would frighten me if I had the time, and I make a note to be frightened later, on the plane, where it’s cheaper.

Then I see the broker.

Emil Vogt stands near the bar with a flute from which he isn’t drinking. His clothes are more formal than they were at the club, but he holds himself with the same watchful stillness I recognize because I evaluate a room exactly as he does.

Duvall stands beside him, recognizable from Platon’s file by the red pocket square, his bids financed by the same lender that holds Callum’s debt. I mark where he’s standing and drift the other way, toward the display cases along the east wall. The lots sit under angled light with their numbers and their little printed histories. Those histories are the only thing in this building I trust myself to read better than anyone in it.

I read them the way Dorian taught me, which is to say I read them like receipts, looking for the tells. Most of them are clean, or clean enough, the ordinary laundered provenance of a room like this. Then I reach lot forty-one, and I stop in front of it before I finish reading the card, because I know the object on sight.