Page 5 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

A text from Maren asks Piper to confirm that she left the mansion. A voicemail notification from Celine appears beneath it. Once the phone unlocks, the open thread with Callum still shows his most recent apology.

“Who is Maren?” I ask.

“My partner for tonight’s sale. She left before you arrived.”

“Who is Celine?” I ask.

“Celine is my mother.”

“Who is Callum?”

She loses the anger for one unguarded second, and fear shows before she can hide it. “Callum is my brother. He’s the reason I needed the money.”

I scroll through the thread. Callum’s messages are polite, grateful, and increasingly desperate. He mentions a lender, a deadline that keeps moving, and every other text contains an apology. He knows his sister is trying to cover his debt, and if I’m reading the apologies right, he hates needing her help.

Piper Voss forged a marriage certificate to an officially dead bratva boss, infiltrated a secured estate, and sold pieces from my family’s private collection in eleven separate sales to keep her younger brother out from under a predatory lender.

Her scam has compromised every safeguard I built to keep my family hidden. Good recordkeeping and a forged notary stamp have undone my cover, Platon’s operation, Vera’s position, and Angelina’s safety in less than three months.

Downstairs, Platon’s voice is low and controlled on the phone, briefing Vera on a situation he doesn’t fully understand yet because I haven’t decided what to do with the woman still sitting on my floor.

She watches the pocket where I put her phone instead of checking the door. When I shift my coat, she leans forward before stopping herself. Her brother is the real pressure point, and knowing that changes the entire situation in ways I haven’t worked through yet.

I lock the phone and put it in my coat pocket. “You’re not leaving this house tonight.”

Piper starts to argue, and I hold up one hand.

“You filed a document that connects your name to mine. A buyer connected to Rahil Shilov photographed the Rusakov crest on a piece you sold from this estate. In approximately twelve hours, Shilov’s people will begin tracing that sale back to the estate-access records, and when they find your marriage certificate, they will come looking for you. The theft is secondary to them. Your certificate suggests I might still be alive, which makes you useful to Shilov.”

She glances toward the bedroom door, then faces me again. “I’m a hostage, then,” she says, her voice wobbling only a little.

“You’re a liability.” I pick up the inventory binder from the floor and close it. “Whether you’re a hostage depends entirely on what you do next.”

Platon’s footsteps return on the staircase and stop on the landing.

“Nikita, the broker trace just updated.” Platon gives my name without inflection, which means the news worsened while he was downstairs. “Tonight’s buyer uploaded the crest photographs to a private server that Shilov’s people use.”

The timeline just collapsed from twelve hours to now.

3

PIPER

Nikita’s study smells like leather and the same stale air that fills every room in this mausoleum. I sit in a wingback chair across from his desk with my hands folded carefully in my lap and my bag on the floor beside me, projecting calm cooperation while every turn of the page makes me reconsider how much evidence he has.

Platon stands between my chair and the door with his arms crossed and his phone in one hand. He hasn’t spoken to me since he escorted me downstairs an hour ago, but the positioning isn’t subtle. He’s good at making custody feel like company though. I’ll give him that.

I slept in the guest room last night, which is a generous description of lying in the dark with my shoes on while two men I’ve never met guarded a hallway I wasn’t allowed to walk through alone. The sheets smelled like fabric softener, but dust lined every surface in the guest room.

I stared at the ceiling and ran through every possible version of the next twelve hours, discarding each one as it failed. By three in the morning, I’d narrowed my options to cooperate or jump from a second-story window onto flagstone. I discarded the window after imagining what the landing would do to my ankle.

Nikita sits behind his desk with my forged marriage record, the buyer receipt from Maren’s last transaction, and the message screenshots I used to arrange the estate sales. He’s been reading for twenty minutes without asking a question, which means he’s either building a case or deciding how much trouble I’m worth.

Every few minutes, he makes a notation on a legal pad beside the documents, and the sound of pen on paper is the only thing keeping the silence from becoming unbearable. His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, and a cup of black coffee sits beside the documents. The morning light through the window catches the edge of his jaw, and I make myself read the bookshelf spines instead because I don’t need to know what this man’s face does in daylight. I especially don’t need to know while he’s holding evidence that could put me in prison.

“You bypassed a timer-lock system with a copied service key,” he says without looking up from the forged marriage certificate. “How did you get the key code?”

“I visited the service company’s office twice under a maintenance inquiry.” I keep my voice level because I’ve been on the wrong side of enough questions to know when someone is building a file on me. “The receptionist left an intake binder on the front counter while she handled a complaint call. I photographed the service-key code and had a blank cut through one of my father’s old contacts.”