Page 64 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Nikita presses his mouth to my damp hair and says something in Russian I don’t catch and don’t need translated.

Then the third, and the room’s easy rhythm changes.

She comes out silently. The first two cried immediately, so I know something is wrong before anyone speaks. Two doctors move at once. Someone says a word I don’t know, clipped, and the warmer across the room fills with people whose backs are to me.

I can’t sit up, feel my own legs, or do anything but lie pinned and open on a table while they work on my daughter six feet away.

Nikita closes one hand hard around mine and brings the other to the side of my face, turning me toward him instead of toward the backs I can’t read.

“Mila,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Mila, I need to know where she is.”

A neonatologist leans over Sofia while another doctor calls out her heart rate and oxygen level. Mila stays close to me, listening to them, and Mila’s control keeps me from panicking. She watches for three seconds that take a year, then she turns and looks straight at me, because she knows I need her eyes more than I need her words.

“Her heart rate is strong,” Mila says, clear and even, pitched to carry over the noise. “She needs help opening her lungs, and she’s responding. They’re starting CPAP and taking her to the NICU. Her oxygen is rising, and she’s responding exactly as they want. You need to watch the monitor with me instead of their backs.”

I look at the monitor but don’t understand the monitor, so I keep my gaze on Mila instead. She keeps her attention on the neonatal team until one doctor calls out that Sofia’s oxygen is climbing. Nikita squeezes my hand and exhales against my temple. Then the sound comes, thin, outraged, and late, the best sound in the entire world, and my daughter starts to scream.

“There she is,” Mila says, and only now, with the crying started, does she let herself smile. “Three. All three, and all of them loud. That last one’s going to be the one who gives you trouble.”

“She’s already trouble.” I’m sobbing and laughing at once. “She waited on purpose.”

They bring the boys to me one at a time while the surgical team finishes closing the incision. A nurse supports each baby against my cheek because I can’t hold him safely yet. I press my face to each of them and memorize the smell before he’s lifted away. Sofia I only get to see, not hold, because she already has the smallest mask over the smallest face, helping her breathe. She scowls at me around it. I fall completely in love with her scowl.

“They’re all right,” Nikita says, not quite a question, watching the team wheel the incubators toward the doors.

“They’re where they need to be,” Mila says. “All three are stable. The boys are breathing on their own, the girl has a little help, and none of that is a surprise at almost thirty-five weeks. They’ll spend some time in the NICU, and then they’ll come home.” She strips off her gloves. “Nikita, you should go with them. Piper is in good hands here, and someone should be at the glass when they get settled. You should go be their father.”

He looks at me, torn clean in half.

“You should go,” I say. “I’ll still be here. I want you at the glass when they get settled.”

He goes and stays with them for two hours. He returns just after they start moving me to a recovery room.

He looks besotted. “They’re perfect, Piper.”

I nod, blinking back tears, with my throat too clogged to speak.

Platon and Maren come first, once I’m out of surgery and into a recovery room with a door that closes, the feeling crawling back into my legs one cold inch at a time.

Platon stops inside the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed, which is new, because he’s walked into every other room in my life like he owned the floor. He’s already been to the NICU glass. I can see it in his smile. Maren is beaming too.

“Three,” he says. He looks at me, then at Nikita, then back. “You do nothing by halves.”

“Did you see them?”

“I saw them.” Platon looks overwhelmed for one unguarded second. “The one with the mask has your expression exactly. She looked at me like my existence displeased her.”

“Sofia,” says Nikita with a proud-papa smile.

Maren squeezes my hand and tells me I look terrible and she’s proud of me. They don’t stay long. Platon puts one hand on Nikita’s shoulder before he leaves. Neither of them speaks. They don’t need to.

By evening, they let me be wheeled in to sit beside the incubators, and Vera arrives while I’m there. A nurse settles the stronger of the boys against my chest, skin to skin, wires and all.

When my arms tire, Vera comes as close to asking permission as she ever does. “May I hold him?” The nurse nods, and Vera takes him with hands that have clearly done this before, decades before, for babies in this same family who grew into hard men. She holds him against her shoulder, careful of every lead.

Vera loses control of her expression for one second, then recovers. When she looks up, her eyes are wet, and she looks furious about it.

“He has the Rusakov chin,” she says, like an accusation and a gift. “God help him.”