Page 52 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Our bedroom is exactly as she left it this morning, which is the cruelty of it. Another jacket is over the back of the chair where she drops it and swears she’ll hang it. Her tea cup sits on the nightstand with half a swallow left and a dry ring beneath it. Her auction files are stacked beside mine on the desk, with her neat annotations in the margins of a provenance report. Just one more sign of how far into my life she’d gotten over the last two months while I was too busy dismantling an empire to notice it had already happened.

I pick up the cup and hold it. The first night she spent here, she lay in a guest room, certain she’d be gone by morning. Now her belongings sit beside mine because she stopped planning to leave. She made that decision in a hundred small permanent ways I was too busy to notice. Now she’s not here, and three children I learned about minutes ago aren’t either, and the man who did this had the console access I gave him along with the trust I never thought to withdraw.

I set the cup down exactly where she left it and leave it there. Moving it would be a small admission I’m not willing to make, that she isn’t walking back in to finish the tea or argue with me about rugs or finally tell me the thing I already know. The cup stays. She is coming back to it.

“I’m going to bring you home,” I say to the empty room, and I mean all four of them. The promise is all I can give her until I find her.

Then I go back downstairs. I can grieve after she’s safe. Until then, Adrian’s properties, shell companies, accounts, leases, and deeds are the only leads I have. Somewhere in them is a place he believes I’ll never think to look, buried under a name he was sure I’d never connect to him.

I start with the holdings he administers directly, because Adrian is arrogant enough to keep her somewhere he controls. Most of the entries are what they claim to be.

The list holds warehouses, parking structures, and a dead man’s real estate kept marketable. There are hundreds of them. Four years of paper I signed off on without reading because Adrian handled it, and every property is a door he could have walked her through. A warehouse in Red Hook leased through a freight company he co-signed. A hangar lease in New Jersey. A dozen coastal parcels held inside trusts three ownership layers deep, each one a place a careful man could make a person disappear.

The dread I’ve carried since the marina hardens into concentration, because a list is a thing I know how to work. Platon takes the properties. I take the money, digging into every account Adrian touched, because the account that pays to keep a secret place running is the thread that leads to it. Whatever he was sure I’d never connect to him, I will connect, if I have to read every line he wrote for four years.

I pick up the phone and start giving orders.

23

PIPER

Iwake up on a bed that isn’t mine, in a room that smells like the sea, and I keep my eyes closed to listen before I let anyone know I’m awake.

At least one person is moving. A chair creaks near the window when a man shifts his weight, and he settles again without hurry, patient enough to wait for me to stop pretending. Someone else may be standing still where I can’t hear him. The last clear memory I have is someone forcing me down in the back of the second SUV. My mouth tastes medicinal, and my head aches behind my eyes. Whatever they used was meant to keep me quiet and undamaged. I take a slow inventory before I move, the same careful sweep I run on a room before I decide how to work it. My wrists and ankles are free, and I’m still wearing the clothes I put on this morning in a house I may never see again. Someone laid a blanket over me while I was unconscious. Nobody bothers to keep a body warm if they mean to throw it away.

I open my eyes and Adrian is sitting six feet from the bed with his legs crossed and his reading glasses folded in his breast pocket, watching me exactly as he watched me across a desk while examiners spread my forged certificate between us. He looks patient, faintly regretful, and in no hurry at all.

“You’ve been out about three hours,” he says. “There’s water and bread on the table beside you. You’ll want the water before you try to stand.”

I look at the water but don’t touch it, and he almost smiles.

“It isn’t drugged, Piper. If I wanted you unconscious, you’d still be unconscious.” He gestures at the room, the good furniture, and the shuttered window with the last gray light leaking around the edges. “You’re a guest here, in the sense that matters. Drink the water. The next part is easier if you’re thinking clearly, and I’d honestly prefer you thinking clearly.”

I drink the water, because the logic is sound, and dehydration is a luxury I can’t afford with three passengers I haven’t told him about. I sit up slowly. The room tilts and settles. Through the gap in the shutters I catch a blade of light off open water, level to the horizon, with no shoreline breaking it anywhere I can see. I do what my father taught me before he taught me anything else, which is to assess my surroundings. This room has one door and two windows, all unusable with someone else keeping me from them. The bed is bolted. The lamp is too light to matter, and the chair is too heavy to lift fast. No clock, which means no precise way to track time passing, which is deliberate. A person who wants you compliant lets you see the time. A person who wants you unmoored takes it away. Adrian took it away.

“Where am I?” I ask.

“Somewhere that took a boat to reach and will take a boat to leave.” He says it conversationally, which is worse than cruelty. “You can spend the evening at the window counting the men outside, or you can sit up and have the conversation I came a long way to have. I’d recommend the conversation.”

I get myself into the armchair across from him, because the bed puts me at a disadvantage, and I refuse to give him an inch.

Lazar stands by the door, broad and silent, with one gun visible and probably more under his jacket. He studies me with the same practical detachment he showed at the marina. Someone told him not to damage the cargo, and I’m the cargo.

“I need to know where Callum is,” I say, before Adrian can start.

“He was in Riverdale when I started the alert. He was never part of this.” Adrian uncrosses his legs and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and for one second, he looks almost kind. “Your brother did nothing, Piper. I knew he had a habit of switching off his phone and slipping his escort. I didn’t need to know where he went. I only needed you to believe that this time was different.” He spreads his hands. “You built the rest yourself. You taught your brother to disappear, so you’ll always answer a call that says he has.”

The floor drops out from under two months of my life. Every dark phone, every lost tail, and every unexplained hour I stacked into a case against my own brother never once proved he betrayed us. I still don’t know where Callum went on those nights, but I took his oldest survival habit, the one I taught him myself in a diner when he was scared and seventeen, and built it into evidence. I sat across from Nikita and helped him conduct an investigation on the one person I was trying to protect. Adrian didn’t have to manufacture any of Callum’s absences. He wound me up, pointed me at my own brother, and watched me do the work.

“You used me against him,” I say.

“I used your love for him against you. There’s a difference, and you of all people should appreciate it.” He settles back. “I don’t waste a good instinct. I find the lever and I pull it. You do the same thing. You’ve done it your whole life.”

“Don’t tell me what I am,” I say.

“Why not? I’m the only person in your life who sees it clearly.” Adrian keeps the same even, reasonable tone he used across the desk during the verification meeting. “You walked into a dead man’s house with a forged certificate and a plan to strip it before anyone noticed. You told yourself it was survival. Your brother’s debt, your mother’s mess, the world owing you a floor to stand on... I’ve read your file, Piper. I know the story you tell yourself, because I tell myself the same one.”

“We’re not the same.”