Page 44 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

I look.

The photograph fills the screen. It’s me, in three-quarter profile, coat collar up, stepping through the side door of the Water Mill mansion into the dark. The high, close angle places the photographer near the garden wall, holding steady. Someone took it within the last two weeks. I know because I’m wearing the coat I bought ten days ago, the dark one Piper said made me look like a spy in a play with no budget.

Under the photograph sits one line of text.

Dead men should stay dead.

I ran the Rusakov family for a decade without allowing anyone to photograph me. Private family pictures from before I took over still exist, and a portrait hangs over the staircase at Water Mill, but almost no one in a room like this ever saw them. A handful met me, but they saw a younger man four years ago, before I deliberately changed my appearance. That is why Nikolai Volkov can stand beside a dead man’s estate and stay a stranger. Four years without a current image kept the resemblance to speculation. The photograph on this screen turns speculation into proof. The photographer stood inside my own perimeter, at my own house, and knew which door I use and when I’d use it.

No enemy took this from the outside. There is no outside close enough. Shilov’s people have been guessing for four years because guessing was all the distance allowed. This isn’t a guess. This is a photograph from the garden at night, of the one approach I keep deliberately blind. The estate road has a camera and the public rooms have feeds, but I ordered no lens pointed at the doors I use myself, because I still guard my image. Only a person familiar with that camera map would know to stand exactly there.

Someone standing where I trust no stranger to stand took my picture and had it handed to me between the salad and the auction. The photograph may already be in Shilov’s hands. The burner proves only that someone inside my perimeter passed the image outward, and that whoever received it knew where Volkov would be tonight. They chose to show it to my face instead of simply acting on it. That’s its own message. Whoever sent it wants me to know the distance is gone before they do anything with it. The sender might be Shilov, an intermediary, or the insider working a plan of their own. I can’t narrow it yet. What I can name is smaller and worse. The person who took it has the perimeter, the schedule, and the door.

I set the burner face-down on the table and cover it with my hand. Piper is turning back toward me across the room, so I keep my expression exactly as it was. She leaves this ballroom believing the operation went well.

“I want you to double the house detail tonight,” I say to Platon, my voice pitched for him alone. “The estate rotation comes off, and the external pool goes on the house. I want fresh people whose records you’ve run, and none of them should have worked this property long enough to know its habits. The christening cup and the storage inventory move to the second site before dawn. After that, you find me the waiter.”

“The waiter’s already gone. I checked before I handed it to you.” Platon pockets his own phone. “You need to listen to me. Someone took the picture at the house, Nikita. You understand what that means.”

“I understand exactly what it means.” I make myself pick up the untouched drink and hold it like a man enjoying his evening. “It means I’ve been trusting the wrong perimeter. It means I stop relying on it tonight.”

Piper knows something is wrong before we reach the car.

She waits until we’re moving, the Palm Beach lights sliding past the window and Platon silent in front, before she says it, because she’s learned which conversations belong in a moving car instead of a ballroom.

“Your face shut down about an hour ago,” she says. “You covered it well. You’ve been running security in your head since, and you smiled at three different people while you did it. What happened?”

I could tell her the whole of it. I look at her in the passing light, in the green dress, and decide she gets the part she needs and not the photograph, not tonight in a moving car an hour after I learned my security has a hole in it.

“Chatter that I survived is circulating,” I say. “Adrian brought it to me. Platon’s chasing the source. It’s real. Platon and I are handling it, and I’m not going to pretend it’s nothing.” I reach for her hand to hold it, and she lets me. “I need you closer than usual for a while. This isn’t about whether you can handle yourself. The ground moved tonight, and I want you where I can reach you while I find out how far.”

She’s quiet a moment, watching me decide how much to say, clearly realizing there’s more I’m not giving her.

“There’s something I’ve been sitting on,” she says finally. “I didn’t want to say it until I had more than a feeling. Vera’s been strange for weeks. She cuts calls short when I walk in. She hides her phone. Once she started to say a name and swallowed it. I can’t read what she’s protecting, and reading people is the one thing I’ve never failed at. That’s what worries me.” She turns her hand over inside mine. “I don’t have proof. I have a pattern. I wanted you to have it too.”

I don’t want Vera to fit the pattern, but part of her does. She has been closest to my mother’s things and my family’s paper since before my father died, the woman who produced the complete list and never fully explained why she’d kept it. I consider Piper’s pattern beside Platon’s report on Callum, and I understand only that two people I should be able to rule out have both given me reasons not to.

“I have one too,” I say, because she gave me hers and I won’t take without paying. “Callum’s been leaving the apartment alone. He disappears for hours without notice or explanation, and Platon flagged it tonight.” I watch her flinch at her brother’s name and press on, gently, because she needs the truth more than she needs comfort. “I don’t think Callum took anything or planned anything. He doesn’t have that in him. He does know you’re mixed up with dangerous people, though. He knows there are guards, and when a man walks out of a protected building alone, an enemy can follow him home or lead him into answering a question whose importance he doesn’t understand. That’s the part I can’t rule out.”

She looks out the window at the dark water while I think it over. Vera fits the access. Callum fits the exposure. Between the two of them, they take up the whole drive to the airfield, her suspicion and mine laid side by side.

19

PIPER

Maren catches it before I do, which is the whole reason I keep her around.

We’ve spent the afternoon at the dining table with four years of auction records between us, cross-checking lot numbers against the buyers who moved Rusakov pieces through legitimate houses, and I’ve been talking the whole time. She lets me run for an hour, then sets down her pen with the expression she saves for provenance that doesn’t add up.

“You hear yourself, right?”

“I hear myself finding a pattern in the Duvall sales. Third quarter, the same phantom bidder⁠—”

“I don’t mean the bidder.” She taps the table twice. “An hour ago you said, and I’m quoting, ‘when we get the estate clean.’ Last month you said ‘when I get out of this.’ I already know you want a future with him. You figured that out weeks ago, and you didn’t fight it. What I’m watching now is different. You’ve stopped keeping a way out.”

I open my mouth to argue and find nothing in it. I know I want the future. What she’s put her finger on is that somewhere along the way, I stopped maintaining a Plan B. She watches me arrive at it, and she has the grace not to smile.

“That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation,” she says. “I’ve watched you plan your exit from every situation you’ve ever been in, two apartments, one job, and that colossal mistake, Trevor, whom you dumped before you ever needed to use the escape route you’d built. You don’t build exits from this one anymore. I’m not telling you that’s wrong. I’m telling you to know you’re doing it before it catches you by surprise.”