Page 60 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

“I kept this house hidden for four years and I brought down the man who abducted you. I’m going to make you a functional pancake before this morning is over.” He slides a lopsided one onto a plate and sets it in front of me with a fork, dead serious. “Eat that one. It’s holding together.”

It’s too dark on one edge and folded awkwardly in the middle, but it’s cooked through, and it’s the best thing anyone has ever made me, because he made it in a kitchen, on a morning with nothing chasing us. I eat every bite while he watches me like the pancake is a verdict, and when I tell him it’s good he tries so hard not to look pleased that he gives himself away completely.

Platon arrives while I’m on my second cup of tea, letting himself in with the ease of long habit, because he earned a key years ago.

“You look rested.” He takes the coffee Nikita hands him, black, and stays standing. “I have the last of it, if you want to hear it now or after breakfast.”

“We want to hear it now,” Nikita and I say together, and Platon almost smiles.

“Adrian’s death closed the internal investigation. He was the only person directing the betrayal from inside. The two guards he compromised are in custody and cooperating.” He drinks. “Lazar and the men who surrendered on the island are in federal custody, and every one of them is more interested in a deal than in loyalty to a syndicate that no longer exists. Rahil’s operation is finished. His records are evidence now, and his assets are frozen. The illegal operations are closed, and the remaining Rusakov structures are moving through the legitimate channels we established. There is no active threat left tied to either of you.” He looks between us. “It’s all over. I’ve spent four years telling you that with qualifications, and today, I get to say it plainly.”

Nikita sets down his cup. “I want to step back.”

Platon doesn’t look surprised, which tells me he’s known this was coming longer than Nikita has.

“I want to step back from all day-to-day operations,” Nikita says. “I want you to oversee the restructuring, the foundation transition, and the legitimate businesses once they’re running. You know every part of it, and I trust you to finish it without me looking over your shoulder. I want to spend the next several months learning to make a pancake and being in the room when these three arrive, not signing authorizations at two in the morning.” He glances at me. “For too many years, I’ve been the man everything runs through. I’m done. I want a smaller life. I want this one.”

“I know you do,” Platon says. “I’ve known since the morning you started dissolving companies instead of building them.” He finishes the coffee. “I’ll take it, on the condition that you actually stay stepped back and don’t call me at two in the morning to check my work.”

“I make no promises.”

“You never do.” Platon’s phone rings. He glances at the screen and softens in a way I’ve never seen before, and he answers it with a quiet, “I’m coming out now. I’m finishing up here,” in a tone that is unmistakably not business.

He hangs up into a silence I’m enjoying enormously.

“That was Maren,” I say. It isn’t a question.

“It was.” Platon meets my gaze without a flicker of apology, and that’s how I know it’s real, that he isn’t hiding it. “She’s waiting in the car because she refused to interrupt your first quiet morning. We’ll come back properly after you’ve had a few days to recover.” He sets the empty cup in the sink. “She’d have come in now, but she said, and I’m quoting her, that she ‘wasn’t going to interrupt your first quiet morning in six days just to gloat about being right.’”

I arch a brow. “What was she right about?”

“She didn’t specify.” He almost smiles. “Congratulations to both of you on all of it.” Then he’s gone. I hear the car door and Maren’s laugh through it before it shuts. I sit in the warmth of a morning where the two people who kept us alive are driving off together to a life of their own.

“Did you know?” I ask Nikita when the car’s gone.

“I suspected. Platon doesn’t soften for anyone.” He refills my tea and sits across from me, with his knee against mine. “Maren’s good for him. He’s been alone a long time.”

There’s a plain white envelope with my name written across it in Mila’s blunt handwriting:

Piper—Prenatal Screening Results

Platon brought it with him.

“You’ve been looking hard at that envelope,” Nikita says.

“You have too.”

“I have.” He covers my hand with his. “We don’t have to open it today.”

“I want to.” I turn it over, and I can’t keep the envelope completely steady. It’s almost funny that a piece of paper can do this to me, when I forged a marriage certificate once without my pulse changing. “I’ve spent this whole pregnancy afraid to want anything real, because wanting things I can’t keep is how I grew up. I want to know who they are. I want to start wanting the actual people instead of the idea of them.”

He doesn’t say anything wise. He just holds my hand while I work my thumb under the flap and pull out the card Mila tucked inside, clipped to a cautious report from the maternal-fetal medicine specialist. I read it, and I read it again, and the sound that comes out of me is half a laugh and half something with no name.

“The screen is low risk for the conditions they could test,” I say. “As reassuring as they could make it.”

Nikita stills. “Low risk.”

“Low risk.” I press the card to my chest like it might get away from me. “We’re going to be outnumbered by our own children within the year.”