Page 20 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

We work through it for another hour. He gives me the name of the restaurant where we supposedly ate on Sundays and the reason we sat at the back table, the model of the car he supposedly picked me up in, the exact wording he’d have used to introduce me to people who didn’t matter. He builds the marriage in load-bearing pieces, the same as he builds everything else. By the end of the hour, it feels detailed enough to survive questions and personal enough to make me uncomfortable.

Around six, Platon comes into the kitchen with a laptop.

“I pulled the footage off Maren’s old door camera before my technician replaced it,” he says. “The two men from this morning came to photograph something in particular.”

Nikita sets down his cup. “What were they photographing?”

Platon turns the screen toward us and freezes the footage. The image is grainy and shot from above the doorframe, but the man standing at the front window is holding a camera with a telephoto lens, and he has it aimed past the glass at Maren’s workstation.

The binder lies open on the shelf in front of him.

Maren left it open to page eleven: the Peter Halloran sale, with my buyer thread stapled behind the entry.

8

NIKITA

Piper is asleep in the guest room, so I don’t have to worry about not waking her. I take the back stairs down to the lower security room before the house wakes. She slept in my bed two nights ago, after the first time. Last night, once we finished with the files and the widow rehearsal, she gathered the last folder, said she needed sleep before the verification, and walked back to the guest room with her decision already made.

I let her go because the alternative was asking her to stay, and I’m not ready to expose myself like that for sex. Amazing sex, but still just sex.

Sex that could become something more if I don’t maintain control. The timing is all wrong even if I wanted that kind of relationship, which I don’t.

I told myself the distance was correct. I lay awake most of last night telling myself that, and past three, I gave up and read verification statutes instead, because statutes are easier than the thing I keep refusing to name.

Platon is already at the monitors when I come in. He has coffee, and he’s wearing yesterday’s shirt, which means he slept here or didn’t sleep.

“You could go home for four hours. Get some sleep.”

“You could too, and you built a bedroom two floors up.” He doesn’t look away from the screen. “The verification firm confirmed nine o’clock,” he says. “Two examiners. I ran both names, and they’re legitimate estate forensics with no connection to Shilov that I can find. They do this for banks and probate courts. They’re good at it.”

“Are they good enough to catch her?”

“They’re good enough that she can’t improvise anything they can verify. She can color in feelings all she wants, but every checkable fact has to hold if they pull the file and audit it again six weeks from now.” He turns his chair to face me, which he does maybe four times a year and never about scheduling. “Before we get into their questions, I want two minutes on ours.”

I know what’s coming. I pull out a chair and sit, because refusing to sit would concede the point before he’s made it.

“You should say it.”

“Three nights ago, she was a thief on your bedroom floor. Two nights ago, she was in your bed. This morning, she has to convince two professional examiners she mourned you for four years.” Platon doesn’t raise his voice. He never does when it matters. “I don’t care who you sleep with. I care that your judgment is now the weak point in a plan that has to be flawless by nine o’clock, and the reason is asleep upstairs.”

“The verification holds regardless of what happened between us.”

“The verification holds if she performs and you don’t react to her performing.” He leans back. “Yesterday afternoon, I watched you at the kitchen island while she practiced the widow story for you. You coached her for an hour, and about forty minutes in, she stopped rehearsing and just became the woman, and you leaned toward her before you caught yourself. I was standing right there. You won’t be in the room today, so they won’t see your face. What they’ll see is what she can deliver without you there. You’ll have to just watch while they take her apart. If you can’t, you’ll do something to stop it, and that’s what gives us away.”

He’s describing the exact moment I lost track of the performance and believed her. Piper slid into the invented grief so completely yesterday that for a moment, I forgot I wrote it, and I must have shown him.

“I’ll watch from the security feed,” I say. “You stay outside the office and control who comes and goes. I won’t be visible to anyone.”

“That was always the plan. I’m telling you to watch like an operator, not like a husband whose wife is being interrogated.” He holds the silence until I look at him. “Your face won’t be in that room, Nikita. Your decisions will. If they push her and you send me in, cut the interview short, feed me an answer through the earpiece, or walk through that door, the examiners learn that someone behind the glass has more at stake than an estate review. That’s the tell. Your choices, not your face.”

He isn’t wrong, and I don’t enjoy how well he’s read me. Four years of being unreadable, undone in under three days by a forger I caught robbing me.

“You’ve never said any of this before. In four years, you’ve never once told me who I could or couldn’t want.”

“For four years, you didn’t want anyone close enough to matter. That kept it simple.” Platon drinks his coffee. “You’ve always kept the people who could make you hesitate away from the dangerous work, and I built every protocol around that.” He sets down the cup. “Now the person pulling at your judgment is standing in the middle of it, and I have to rebuild half of how I keep you alive. I’m not judging you for it. I’m telling you Piper is affecting your decisions now, and I’d rather you knew it before nine than learn it the hard way at the wrong moment.”

“I hear you.”