Page 11 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

My phone rings. Callum’s name fills the screen.

Nikita watches me but doesn’t reach for the phone, and he waits while it rings a second time. Every man I’ve ever known who held power over me used it the first chance he got. Nikita keeps giving me the choice instead, and I hate how much that matters.

I answer. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Piper, some guys came by the shop again today.” Callum’s voice carries the forced casual tone he uses to hide panic. “They knew my shift schedule. They knew my manager’s name. One of them asked whether I’d talked to my sister recently, and when I said no, he smiled like he already knew the answer and wanted to see if I’d lie.”

I grip the phone harder. “Did you tell them anything?”

“I told them I don’t keep track of my sister’s address. They didn’t believe me, but they left.” The shop compressor runs in the background. “Pipes, these aren’t collection guys. Collection guys threaten to break your legs and smack you around. These guys knew things they shouldn’t, and they didn’t touch me, but they will next time.”

Nikita holds out his hand but doesn’t reach for the phone. “Do you want me to move him?”

I pass him the phone.

His voice drops into the controlled pitch I’m starting to recognize as his operational mode. “Callum, this is Nikita, a…friend of your sister’s. You need to stay inside the shop and lock the front door right now. I’m sending someone named Platon to pick you up. He’ll come through the service road behind the building in a black sedan, and he’ll tell you Piper still owes Maren coffee. You don’t open the door unless they say those exact words.”

“I can’t just abandon the shop in the middle of my shift,” Callum says, loud enough for me to hear.

“It’s not safe to finish your shift. You’re staying behind the locked door until Platon arrives. He’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

Callum argues for another few seconds, then stops and agrees. Nikita hangs up and texts the code phrase and pickup details to Platon before handing my phone back.

I stand in the middle of Nikita’s office holding a phone that just proved his entire threat assessment correct. I aim the anger at myself. I thought I understood how far the danger reached. I was wrong. Nikita leads me across the hall into his bedroom and through to the closet. It smells like cedar and stale air. He moves the coats aside, unlocks the safe, and swings the door open. Platon transferred the documents into a locked file box this morning, and Nikita sets it beside the safe and removes the folders one at a time.

“There should be a separate set of storage contracts for the Manhattan units,” he says, checking the bottom shelf. “Three facilities, all leased under the trust.”

I kneel beside the safe to check the lower compartment. The third storage contract is wedged behind a metal divider in the back, and when I reach past Nikita to pull it free, I brush his arm with my shoulder. He holds completely still instead of moving away.

The folder comes free, and I sit back on my heels. His refusal to move makes the accidental contact harder to ignore. “You can move.”

“I know I can.”

“Then you should move.”

He turns his head, and his face is close enough that I can count the darker flecks in his gray eyes. He smells like coffee and clean wool with something warm underneath both that I can’t name.

“You should tell me to walk out of here,” he says.

“You haven’t done anything yet.”

His voice drops. “I’m about to.”

“Then you should mean it.” My own voice comes out steadier than I expected, because Dorian taught me to sound confident even when I’m shaking, and right now, I’m definitely shaking. “I’m not interested in being a distraction you regret in the morning.”

“You’re the worst complication I’ve had in four years, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since I found you sitting on this floor.”

One clear second passes where the distance between us is still a choice. I could stand up, walk to the guest room, and close the door. I could preserve the arrangement, keep the boundaries intact, and spend the night reminding myself that sleeping with a bratva boss I met yesterday is the single most reckless decision available to me.

I don’t leave.

He kisses me, and everything I’ve been thinking about since he walked into this bedroom last night empties out. His mouth is warm and firm, and he tastes like the coffee he never finished.

He cradles the back of my head and pulls me closer while I grab the front of his shirt and pull him toward me. The safe door scrapes against the closet wall when I slump backward into it.

I kiss him harder because stopping would mean admitting I’ve wanted this since the phone handoff in the study made me wonder what his mouth would feel like. He makes a low sound against my mouth when I bite his lower lip, and the ache in my pussy sharpens into something insistent. He kisses deliberately, unhurried, giving nothing away, and I want to be the thing that finally makes him lose control.

We don’t make it to the bed gracefully. He lifts me, I wrap my legs around his waist, and the storage contracts scatter under his feet as he carries me out of the closet and across the bedroom.