Page 55 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

I look at the gun and remain still. Piper keeps looking at me, calm in a way that frightens me more than panic would. Her stillness is a warning. I watch her closely and prepare to move the instant she gives me an opening.

25

PIPER

Nikita stands twenty feet away while Adrian holds a gun against my side, and I watch him choose control over the instinct to cross the room, which is the hardest thing I have ever asked him to do without saying a word. His own pistol stays lowered at his side because he knows what I know. Any sudden movement in this room could cost us our lives.

I know that face. I’ve spent two months learning it. It’s the expression he wears when every option is bad and he’s making himself pick the least worst one. His pointed gaze at my abdomen and the way he pales tell me Mila reached him.

He knows. Six days ago, I was rehearsing how I’d tell him myself, choosing the room and the words, and instead he learned it from a doctor. It should hurt more than it does. That he knows matters more than how he found out.

Nikita would hold still for me either way. Knowing about the babies only gives him three more lives to protect and makes an impossible calculation even worse. Adrian put us in this room by corrupting every safeguard I followed six days ago, and knowing that doesn’t move the gun an inch.

What I can do is give Nikita an opening, and to do that, I need Adrian to stop paying attention to him or me for a second.

“You found me sooner than you should have,” Adrian says from behind me, and his voice isn’t the voice from the meetings anymore. Six days have sanded the polish off him. He hasn’t shaved. He breathes quickly against my ear and can’t keep his forearm steady across my body, a weakness his polished manner used to conceal. He bet everything on one clean plan, and now he can feel it coming apart in his hands. “It doesn’t matter. You still can’t cross this room before I finish it.”

“You shoot her, and you destroy the only leverage keeping you alive,” Nikita says coldly. “Shilov will cut you loose the second you stop being useful to him.”

Adrian laughs, and it’s an ugly, exhausted sound, nothing like the cold control he used across a conference table. I’ve spent two months in rooms with this man, watching him move furniture four inches to control who sat where, and the person breathing against my ear now couldn’t square a picture frame.

Six days waiting for a plan to work has hollowed him out from the inside. “You still think this was about Shilov.” He says the name like it tastes bad. “You think I did this for him. You think I spent twenty years running the machine that kept your family rich so I could hand it to that animal?” Adrian tightens his hold, and the trembling grows worse. “I went to Shilov because your return threatened everything I built, and he was the only man powerful enough to keep you from taking it back. I did the rest because I earned it. I kept the estate alive for four years while you played dead. Then you walked back in and dismantled everything I preserved without once asking what it cost me.” His voice cracks on the last word, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “You never once saw me. I kept the lights on, and to you, I was the furniture.”

Adrian is no longer watching the room. He’s watching Nikita, his attention narrowed to one man while the rest of us blur at the edges. I notice this with the part of my brain Dorian trained and Platon sharpened, the part that runs cold while the rest of me screams.

He no longer notices what Lazar or I am doing.

I scan the room without turning my head, running the same survey I’ve used every time they brought me through here. Lazar stands near the tall windows, where he’s been since Nikita came through the doors. Platon’s people are visible on the terrace outside, moving to cut the paths Adrian built, and Lazar turns to watch them instead of me.

I’ve stood still and compliant long enough to become cargo again.

Lazar drifts two steps toward the glass to track the men outside, and the space between Adrian and any help he might expect opens into a gap.

This is the gap I’ve rehearsed for six days. Adrian’s weight is wrong now, tipped forward toward Nikita, with his attention nailed to the man he’s still arguing with. His grip is a habit instead of a decision. Lazar is looking at the water.

The room will never be this open again.

I don’t give myself time to hesitate. Hesitation would close the gap before I use it. Platon drilled the sequence into me in an underground soundproofed room, and I have rehearsed it in my head for six days. I run it now.

I stomp down on Adrian’s instep with my full weight. He grunts, surprised, and his forearm loosens across my upper body, and that loosening is all I’m going to get.

I drive my elbow back into him below the ribs, hard, exactly where Platon trained me to put it, and Adrian exhales hard against my neck. When his arm gives, I twist free toward the opening between his forearm and my body. Then I create distance. I drop sideways away from the pistol, land on my hip and shoulder, and get one arm across my abdomen as I go down.

I complete the sequence before Adrian can recover. The whole escape takes less than two seconds.

Nikita is already moving. He crosses the twenty feet before Adrian recovers the space I put between us, faster than I’ve ever seen him move. He grabs the back of my jacket to drag me up and behind him in one motion, putting his whole body between me and the room. I go where he pulls me. Six days of planning my own escape, and when the moment finally arrives, the last three feet of it are his, because that’s the plan we never spoke aloud during our shared look moments ago. I get us to the gap, and he gets us through it. The world gets loud. Platon’s men come through the terrace doors and the hall at once, and the syndicate men who’ve been holding the house break for the exits Adrian prepared.

Platon’s team fires at the men running for the doors. The syndicate men fire back, and rounds strike the walls as Nikita drags me toward the stone hearth.

He keeps his grip on my jacket and holds me directly behind him in short controlled steps, never once turning his back on the room, until we reach cover. I keep one hand low over my stomach and let him steer. I have never once let a man put himself between me and an exit, but I let Nikita do it now without hesitation.

Three of the four men who came in through the hallway fan into the room to engage the syndicate guards, and Platon reaches the hearth with the fourth. He takes position beside me.

“I have her,” Platon says.

Adrian doesn’t surrender. Surrender would mean admitting that none of this was ever his and facing consequences.

He gets his feet under him, and instead of using the gun, he bolts through the double doors and into the hallway, heading for the service exit that opens onto the path to the dock, the escape he built for this. Nikita shoves his pistol into its holster and goes after him, trusting Platon to keep me behind cover.