Page 50 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

He shuts off the engine instead, and the small mechanical click says everything.

A man walks out from behind the harbormaster’s shed, unhurried, hands loose at his sides, and I recognize Lazar Malenkov from the photograph in Nikita’s file. He’s Shilov’s enforcer, and Nikita never says his name without open hatred.

The younger guard opens my door from the outside and reaches in for my arm. The driver gets out, leaves his door open, and comes around the hood without drawing his weapon. That’s the whole answer, delivered in the space of a breath. Neither of them reaches for Lazar. Both of them reach for me. Nikita’s own system chose these men, cleared these men, and delivered me to this dock in a car I climbed into on my own two feet.

Then I move, before either of them can get a grip.

The younger guard is closest, half-turned, still thinking of me as cargo instead of a problem. That’s his mistake, and Platon spent a month teaching me to make men pay for it. I drive my elbow into his ribs with my full weight behind it, exactly as Platon drilled it at the private range, and the air leaves him in a hard bark. I wrench free and yank the heavy aluminum flashlight from my belt, the one Platon insists I carry and I used to think was overkill, and I swing it backhand into the driver’s face as he lunges. The impact jars my arm. The edge catches his cheekbone and opens the skin, and he stumbles into the door of the SUV. The half-second he grabs his face is the half-second I use to run.

I make it five steps. I twist sideways when the next one closes in and keep my stomach away from his fists, a movement I drilled with Platon weeks ago, before either of us knew what I’d be protecting. I reach for the open driver’s door, and Lazar crosses the distance. He plants himself between me and the car before I get there. More of them come out of the shed and the shrouded boats, four, five, too many to count and too many to fight. I search the dock for an exit and find none, so I stop looking for one and start making them hurt.

I kick the nearest one in the side of the knee, low and hard, where the joint has nowhere to go. It buckles and he screams. I claw my phone out of my jacket with the panic button already under my thumb, the one that pings straight to Platon’s watch, a half-second from sending, but one of the men grabs my wrist and slams it against the door of the SUV until the impact knocks the phone from my hand, and it skitters away under the car, out of reach, and the screen is dark.

The two guards I struck get back on their feet and close in with their weapons still holstered. I’m outnumbered and disarmed, but I keep fighting. I rake my nails down a forearm and feel skin come away under them. I throw my head back into a face behind me and hear something crack. I get one more good kick into someone before they pin the leg. I do it because the alternative is holding still and letting them take me somewhere I might not come back from, and being passive goes against my nature.

It isn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. Two men pin my arms while a third grabs my hair and jerks my head back, and I can’t reach anyone else.

That’s when the rear door of a second SUV opens.

He steps out without hurry, wearing the same gray suit he wears to every meeting. His reading glasses still hang from his collar. He must have spent the drive keeping Nikita and Platon buried in paperwork from the back seat of that SUV.

Every unanswered question I’ve carried for two months points to him at once.

Adrian controlled the estate paperwork that always needed one more signature from me, alone, in public. He wrote the emails that kept pushing me into public appearances as the surviving Rusakov. Adrian controlled the lease on the storage unit someone opened from the inside. He knew the camera map well enough to use the blind spot in the garden, and he used the new guard pool to put two compromised men in my car. He spent four years maintaining the estate while Nikita was hidden. Since Nikita’s return, he has sat at his right hand through every meeting, asking his careful, helpful questions while learning every weak point in a security system he was trusted to access. Adrian is the leak.

Adrian adjusts one cuff before he looks at me. “You should’ve stayed a widow at parties, Piper. You were so good at it.”

They force me toward the open door of the waiting vehicle, my arms wrenched behind me, dragging my heels across wet asphalt, and I understand Callum was never at this marina. Adrian took every unanswered question about my brother and used it to build a call I had to answer.

I still don’t know where Callum went on those nights or why he left his phone behind. I only know that Adrian turned our suspicion of him into a road, and the road led straight to me. While Nikita and Platon watched Callum, Adrian built the real trap around me, because I’m the one person Nikita would raze the world to recover. To pull Nikita into the open, Adrian needed only to take the person Nikita can’t afford to lose.

Callum drew me in. Now I’m what Adrian will use to draw Nikita. Adrian spent four years learning every weakness in this system while he stole from it. My forged filing gave him a crisis, and Nikita’s return gave him a target. I’m the leverage that turns one into the other.

22

NIKITA

The conference call ends, and the first thing I feel is a prick of unease I can’t place, because Adrian’s line dropped in the last minute, and he never called back to finish. I know something is wrong before I know what.

Adrian’s voice cuts off mid-sentence when the line drops, and I assume his connection finally failed. Platon gathers the dissolution pages we spent an hour initialing. I climb the stairs into signal, and my phone finds the network, and the notifications arrive in a stack that stops me on the landing.

My screen shows two missed calls from Piper, one voicemail, and a text containing only a set of coordinates.

The voicemail plays into my ear while the floor tilts under me.

Callum’s missing. The internal line traced him to a marina on the Sound. I’m leaving with the secondary detail now. She sounds steady, but the steadiness is thin over panic. It’s the same voice she used the first night in this house when she thought she might not survive it.

The timestamp is almost an hour old, and the coordinates might already be stale.

Almost an hour has passed. She left almost an hour ago on a call that reached her through a line only my own people can use, and I spent that hour in a soundproofed room initialing dissolution pages while someone used my own security system to take her. Every instinct I built over a decade tells me the same thing at once. A threat that comes through your own secure channel isn’t an outside threat. It’s a door opened from inside the house.

“Platon.” I don’t raise my voice, but he reads my face from the bottom of the stairs and drops the pages on the nearest surface.

Her security tracker shows the SUV reaching the marina only minutes ago and stopping there. The vehicle hasn’t moved since it arrived. Her phone last pinged from the same spot and then dropped off the network. I call the escort dispatcher. The line rings and rings, but no one picks up a line that a dispatcher answers inside two rings on a normal day, and the silence tells me more than a voice would have.

“She went to a marina on a call that came through our internal line, and now nobody’s answering.”

Platon is already moving toward the security room. “Then we start with the call.”