Page 25 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Then he turns and goes back into the security room. The door closes between us, and now, after all these days of wanting only to get out, I’m the one who wants to follow.

10

NIKITA

The club has no name on the door, only a brass plate worn smooth by people who already know where they are. Platon cleared the guest list two days ago and found Vogt’s name on it under a Geneva shell, which is the only reason Piper and I are climbing these stairs in borrowed evening clothes with the cigarette case in my pocket.

We recovered the case from a Gideon courier three nights ago, before it reached the viewing. Platon’s people took it off him in a Newark loading bay with a clipboard and a forged customs hold, no weapons drawn, and Vogt was told only that the piece was delayed in transit. He still believes it’s coming, and the widow controls whether it sells. That is the whole plan. A broker who thinks he’s about to close on a marked Rusakov piece will talk to the widow selling it, and a talking broker leads us up his own chain toward Shilov.

Piper walks half a step ahead of me through the entry, and the room accepts her without a flicker.

That’s the part I didn’t prepare for. She wears the widow like it was tailored for her, and the men at the low tables track her across the floor and read her as Rusakov money: recently bereaved and unattached. She belongs here, and I no longer do. I built rooms like this. I owned three of them once. Now I stand at her shoulder in a well-cut jacket and play the discreet associate, close enough to guard her and forbidden from claiming her, because a dead man can’t put his hand on his own wife in a room full of people who’d sell that information to Rahil by morning.

“Stop glaring at the room,” Piper says without turning her head. “You look like security. Widows don’t travel with security that glares.”

“I look like an associate.”

“You look like a man deciding who to hurt first.” She lifts a champagne flute off a passing tray and doesn’t drink it. “Go be bored somewhere I can see you. Let me work.”

I go, because she’s correct, and arguing would only prove her point.

Across the room, Platon has taken a position near the service corridor with a drink he won’t touch, subtly watching the exits. Maren works the far end of the bar in a green dress she bought for the job and keeps complaining about, her resale credentials real enough to open conversations Piper can’t risk. She’s already three names deep with a Belgian dealer, and every few minutes, she drifts back toward Platon and passes him something between sips without looking at him.

“You’re standing like a bodyguard,” she says under the music, setting down her glass.

“I’m a bodyguard.”

“You’re supposed to be my plus-one. Try to look like you’ve enjoyed a single thing in your life.” She’s gone before he answers, which he wasn’t going to, and he watches her go for exactly one second longer than a man mapping exits would, then catches me watching him do it and returns to the exits.

Piper and I exchange a glance, hearing every word of their exchange through our earpieces.

The room does what rooms like this always do. A woman two tables over describes the Klimt her grandfather took out of Vienna in 1938 like she’s recounting a family recipe, and the man beside her nods along. Neither of them uses the word stolen because in here, the word doesn’t exist. There’s a Scythian gold piece under glass by the coat room that someone walked out of a museum in Kyiv four years ago and will never walk back. Everyone drinks champagne and calls the origins of stolen objects provenance. I spent twenty years in rooms like this and I only see it clearly now, standing in one as a ghost, watching Piper move through it as though she was born to the fraud, which, considering the education Dorian gave her, she was.

No one here looks at me twice, and that was always the plan. I ran the Rusakov family for a decade without letting a single photograph exist, so the men in this room register a broad man in an expensive jacket and nothing more. Vogt does business through screens and intermediaries. He never met me, which is the only reason I can stand this close to his table.

I catch Maren’s eye once as she leans past Platon to set down her glass. She glances from me to Piper and back, one eyebrow going up, and the meaning is plain enough without words. Piper hasn’t broken character once tonight. I’ve broken mine three separate times, every one of them when a man’s gaze stayed on her a beat too long.

Vogt finds us in under twenty minutes. He’s smaller than his reputation, silver at the temples, and his handshake is soft. I doubt he has ever carried anything heavier than a contract.

“Mrs. Rusakov.” He says the name like he’s tasting it. “I confess I didn’t expect to meet you in person. Your husband’s collection has been something of a ghost story in my circles for years.”

“My husband liked ghosts better than guests.” Piper gives him the widow’s cool half-smile. “You’re the man who’s been buying pieces of him.”

“I appreciate good provenance.” Vogt’s gaze moves to me, dismisses me as furniture, and returns to her. “Yours is remarkable. Voss. I knew a Voss once, professionally. Dorian. Are you a relation?”

Piper becomes still beside me, one heartbeat of stillness she covers before anyone but me could catch it.

“My father,” she says coolly. “He passed some years ago.”

“My condolences. He was an artist.” Vogt lifts his glass a fraction in a toast to a dead man he’s about to insult with praise. “The Rembrandt provenance he built for the Antwerp consignment in 2016 is still, to my knowledge, undetected. Shilov’s people still speak of it with a reverence that borders on fear. Your father understood that a document only has to survive the one person who bothers to check it.”

Piper’s right eyelid twitches. A year, a city, a specific job, handed to her across a champagne flute by a broker who knew a piece of her father she apparently didn’t. Her face stays composed, but her eyes narrow by a fraction as she fits the new fact into the history she thought she’d finished sorting. Only the eyes give her away, and only to me.

“He rarely discussed his work,” she says. Her voice holds.

“Discretion is inherited, then.” Vogt’s attention sharpens. “Which brings me to why I hoped to meet you. I understand a certain silver cigarette case has come back into circulation. Rusakov-marked. I have a client with a long memory and a longer reach who would pay generously to complete a set.”

This is the moment we came for. Piper reaches into my jacket, and I let her, her fingers sliding against my chest in a move the room reads as intimate. She draws the case out slowly, and the drag of her hand as it leaves goes through me sharper than it has any right to. She sets the case on the high table between them, and the wolf’s head catches the light.