Page 56 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Nikita catches him halfway down the hall, beside the propped service door. Adrian is desperate, and Nikita is six days past the edge of anything reasonable. They collide against the doorframe together hard enough to crack it. Adrian twists the pistol toward Nikita. Nikita traps his wrist with both hands and forces the muzzle toward Adrian’s own torso as Adrian pulls the trigger, unable to stop in time.

Their bodies muffle the shot, but the sound still cuts through the hallway. The round strikes Adrian below the ribs. Nikita takes the pistol from his hand and steps back, but he doesn’t fire again. He doesn’t need to.

Adrian looks down at the blood spreading across his shirt with open surprise, as though a plan this carefully built shouldn’t have been allowed to end with him on the floor. He slides against the doorframe and presses one hand to the wound. Nikita stands several feet away with the pistol lowered, not aiming it.

“You didn’t have to…” Adrian says.

“You pulled the trigger.” Nikita stares down at him. “You held a gun against my wife. I stopped you.”

Platon sends a medic into the hallway. The medic works over Adrian briefly, then looks up at Platon and shakes his head.

Adrian’s eyes stay open but never see anything again.

Lazar surrenders when the last door closes. He studies the sealed exits, Adrian bleeding in the hallway, and Platon’s men aiming their weapons at him from three directions. Dying for Adrian accomplishes nothing for Shilov, and Lazar has probably never done a single thing that accomplished nothing. He lowers his gun and sets it on the floor, unhurried, almost bored, and laces his hands behind his head. There’s nothing cowardly in it, and nothing brave.

The remaining men follow his lead. The gunfire stops, and Platon’s people begin securing the prisoners.

Then Nikita is across the floor and on his knees in front of me, and everything else stops mattering to either of us.

He checks me quickly, examining my face, my arms, and the yellow bruises around my wrists. It’s the frantic inventory of a person he’s spent six days imagining broken, and only after he has checked every visible injury does he place one hand low over my stomach and leave it there.

Everything in him quiets around that one point of contact. I’ve never seen him hold this still, not once in two months. He’s known about the babies for six days and carried that knowledge under the terror while he tore his empire apart to find me.

How he found out—secondhand and terrified—is the one thing I can still put right.

I put my hand over his, holding it against me, and give him the news as it was always supposed to reach him, from the person carrying it.

“I’m pregnant. There are three of them.”

Nikita exhales sharply. Hearing it from me makes it ours. Nikita closes his eyes and presses his forehead to mine, and his control finally slips. He trembles once beneath my hand before he steadies himself.

“Three,” he says, and his voice cracks.

“Three.” I keep my hand over his, because I was supposed to give him this news myself, in a room I chose, and holding his hand here is the closest I can come to reclaiming that. “All five of us are getting off this rock.”

One of Platon’s men kneels beside us with a medical kit before anyone talks about moving me. He checks my blood pressure, my pulse, and my abdomen, and asks in a low, steady voice whether I’ve bled or cramped in six days, and I shake my head. He asks what they fed me, and I tell him they brought water and enough plain food to keep me upright and nothing more, and that I made myself eat all of it because starving three passengers wasn’t a form of protest I could afford. He notes it and moves on.

Nikita puts Mila on speaker before the medic finishes the first reading, and she questions the medic about every number before she gives him a single instruction. She wants my blood pressure logged every thirty minutes in the air, wants me on fluids the moment we reach the mainland, and wants to know if I feel any cramping, pressure, bleeding, or pain low in my abdomen.

The medic clears me for the flight only after she’s said all of it, and even then, Nikita makes him repeat the numbers twice.

Then he takes me off the island himself, in the helicopter, while Platon stays behind with the prisoners, the evidence, and the arriving authorities. Platon’s men cover Adrian’s body before we lift off. I watch them carry him across the same cleared ground Nikita’s men landed on an hour ago, and I wait to feel something about it, triumph or the cold satisfaction I’ve watched other people take in a settled score. I feel tired, protective of the lives inside me, and finished with Adrian. I’m glad he’s dead but would be just as apathetic if he’d been handcuffed instead.

The medic starts an IV the moment we set down on the mainland and rides with us to the safe house, taking my blood pressure every thirty minutes exactly as Mila ordered.

Nikita doesn’t let go of me through the flight or the drive. He keeps a hand on me when the island shrinks to a green dot behind us, when the mainland rises gray, ordinary, and safe ahead of us. When we transfer to a car with blacked-out windows for the long drive inland, he rests his palm on my knee, as though six days of searching still hasn’t convinced him that I’m beside him.

I let him keep one hand on me because it steadies him, and it steadies me too.

The safe house is quiet when we reach it. Nikita walks me through the door with his hand at my back. The locks engage behind us, and he checks them twice before he turns to me without taking his hand from my shoulder.

“Mila will be here later this morning,” he says. “Until then, you stay where I can see you.”

For once, I don’t argue.

26

NIKITA