Page 36 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

The recovered piece is a silver christening cup, and I know it’s real before Platon finishes unwrapping it, because the forged document in its provenance packet is one of my father’s.

We’re in the car coming back from the handoff, a parking structure in Stamford where a nervous middleman traded us a box for an envelope of cash. Nikita has the cup in his lap. I have the provenance packet in mine. I read every recovered packet now the only way I know how: as my dead father’s handiwork, five years after his death, and it doesn’t get easier.

“This one’s his,” I say. “The paper, not the cup. He built this chain. I can show you the tells if you want them.”

“I want them later.” Nikita doesn’t look up from the cup. He turns it under the dome light, finds the inventory number stamped under the base, and he presses his lips together, as he does every time one of his mother’s things comes home. “Right now I want to get it into the house and get you out of this car. You’ve been gray since Stamford.”

I summon a snappy response despite my lethargy. “I’ve been gray since I skipped dinner, which was a choice I made because you scheduled a seven p.m. handoff.”

“I scheduled a seven p.m. handoff because the middleman works a day job.” He finally looks at me, and the look goes on a beat past what the conversation needs. “Eat something when we get back. That’s not a request I’m dressing up as one.”

I don’t argue, which should tell both of us something, because two months ago, I’d have argued on principle.

It’s been three weeks since Palm Beach and seven weeks since Nikita caught me trying to rob this house. That’s the part I keep failing to account for, sitting in the back of a car with six figures of armor in the doors, arguing about dinner with a man the world thinks is dead. Seven weeks of recovered pieces, traced accounts, and the slow closing of the distance between us and Shilov, and somewhere underneath the danger, without either of us deciding it, a life. My files live on the left side of his desk now, sorted my way, which is the wrong way according to Platon and the only way according to me.

There’s a toothbrush in his bathroom that’s mine and a drawer that’s also mine, and neither of us has said a word about how it got that way.

He makes the coffee too strong and cuts it with hot water because he watched me do it once and never asked. I haven’t drunk it full-strength in weeks, though.

I keep waiting for the arrangement to feel like a cage. It keeps feeling like the opposite, and that frightens me more than any room Lazar could put me in.

It’s also been nine weeks since I had a period, but I try not to think about that.

The exchange tonight was seamless, which can be the most dangerous thing there is, because it makes you forget.

I feel it the second we clear the door and the alarm re-arms behind us, the adrenaline going somewhere it has nowhere useful to be. Platon takes the cup to log it. Maren’s already gone up to the third floor, to the studio that started as an argument and became a room. She refused to stop working the resale side and refused to do it from her exposed Queens place with Shilov’s people mapping the sale chain. Platon refused to keep assigning men to guard a storefront when there was a locked wing of a mansion sitting empty. They fought about it for a week, both of them pretending it was logistics, and then her worktable showed up on the third floor and neither of them mentioned winning. Now, it’s the two of us in the front hall of a house that has started, against my every instinct, to feel like a place I live, and the survived-it feeling turns over into something slower and worse than fear, but also much better.

Nikita reaches past me to set the alarm panel, and his arm brushes mine. Neither of us moves away from it.

“You’re still gray,” he says.

“I’m not thinking about being gray.”

He stops talking and reads my face like he expects to have an argument, and whatever he finds there changes his breathing.

I can see when he decides not to reach for me. He’s been doing that for five weeks, handing me the choice every single time, standing there with his hands at his sides while every line of him wants to close the distance, because at some point, he decided I had to decide every time.

I move first. I take a fistful of his shirt and pull, and he comes, careful even now, catching my face in both hands like I might change my mind. I don’t change my mind. I’ve stopped pretending that’s a thing that’s going to happen. His mouth is warm and unhurried, and there’s no fight in this one, none of the adrenaline of the first night or the anger of the club. He’s kissing me like we have time.

“Upstairs,” I say against his mouth. “Your room.”

“Ours.” He says it into the space between us, low, not a correction, just a fact he’s decided to establish right this minute. “It’s been ours for a month.”

I don’t argue with that either.

He undresses me like the clothes are the last thing standing between him and something he’s wanted long enough to have made peace with not getting. There’s no rush in his hands. He gets my coat off my shoulders, then the sweater, and when I reach for his shirt, he lets me take my time with the buttons, watching my hands carefully.

I’ve seen the scars before. Tonight, I put my mouth on the worst of them, the one low on his ribs I’ve never heard the story of, and he stills under me, one hand coming up to the back of my head, not guiding, just holding. The sound he makes is quiet and wrecked, with nothing performed in it.

“You don’t have to,” he says.

“I know I don’t.” That’s the whole point of it. That’s what’s different. Every other time I’ve been in a bed like this, it was strategy, debt, or a decision I’d already half-regretted. This is the first one I’m choosing with my eyes open and nothing to gain, and I want him to know I know the difference. “I want to.”

I drop to my knees. My hands shake when I reach for his belt, so he helps unbuckle it and opens the button. I pull down the zipper and strip the pants and his briefs down his thighs.

His cock springs free, thick and glistening with pre-cum. He inhales sharply when I take the shaft in my mouth.

I take him as deeply as I can. He moans when the head nestles in my throat. I swallow, then suck, hollowing my cheeks while moving my head.