Chapter 3
PIPER
Nikita’s study smells like leather and the same stale air that fills every room in this mausoleum.
I sit in a wingback chair across from his desk with my hands folded carefully in my lap and my bag on the floor beside me, projecting calm cooperation while every turn of the page makes me reconsider how much evidence he has.
Platon stands between my chair and the door with his arms crossed and his phone in one hand. He hasn’t spoken to me since he escorted me downstairs an hour ago, but the positioning isn’t subtle. He’s good at making custody feel like company though. I’ll give him that.
I slept in the guest room last night, which is a generous description of lying in the dark with my shoes on while two men I’ve never met guarded a hallway I wasn’t allowed to walk through alone. The sheets smelled like fabric softener, but dust lined every surface in the guest room.
I stared at the ceiling and ran through every possible version of the next twelve hours, discarding each one as it failed.
By three in the morning, I’d narrowed my options to cooperate or jump from a second-story window onto flagstone.
I discarded the window after imagining what the landing would do to my ankle.
Nikita sits behind his desk with my forged marriage record, the buyer receipt from Maren’s last transaction, and the message screenshots I used to arrange the estate sales.
He’s been reading for twenty minutes without asking a question, which means he’s either building a case or deciding how much trouble I’m worth.
Every few minutes, he makes a notation on a legal pad beside the documents, and the sound of pen on paper is the only thing keeping the silence from becoming unbearable.
His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, and a cup of black coffee sits beside the documents.
The morning light through the window catches the edge of his jaw, and I make myself read the bookshelf spines instead because I don’t need to know what this man’s face does in daylight.
I especially don’t need to know while he’s holding evidence that could put me in prison.
“You bypassed a timer-lock system with a copied service key,” he says without looking up from the forged marriage certificate. “How did you get the key code?”
“I visited the service company’s office twice under a maintenance inquiry.
” I keep my voice level because I’ve been on the wrong side of enough questions to know when someone is building a file on me.
“The receptionist left an intake binder on the front counter while she handled a complaint call. I photographed the service-key code and had a blank cut through one of my father’s old contacts. ”
“You learned this from your father.”
“My father was Dorian Voss, a document forger.” I give him the version that fits without exposing the whole messy history.
“He taught me provenance records, notary stamps, and how to file through high-volume processing queues. He died five years ago, and I’ve been putting his curriculum to use ever since. ”
Nikita turns a page. “The clerk’s issue seal and officiant signature on your marriage packet are better than most federal work I’ve seen.”
“You keep a lot of federal work on hand to compare it to?”
“Enough.” He doesn’t rise to the taunt, which is somehow worse than if he had.
I hate that the praise pleases me anyway. “I carved it from dental stone. Six hours, if you do it right. I did it right.”
He lifts his head and takes me in with more interest than anger. He’s recalculating, and the new number is higher than the one he started with.
“Why did you choose this estate?” he asks.
“You were legally dead. No public wife was listed. The security contract lapsed eighteen months after your death was declared. The trust attorney filed maintenance reports but never visited, and the timer-lock system your property manager installed was two generations behind current residential security.” I count the reasons on my fingers without thinking about it, and then I stop because the gesture turns my defense into a sales pitch.
“Your estate was the safest entry point I’ve ever found, and I spent four months confirming every detail before I filed anything. ”
“Who hired you?”
“Nobody hired me. I work alone, and Maren helps with the resale logistics.”
He sets the buyer receipt aside and picks up the message screenshots. “These show a chain of buyers Maren contacted through auction channels. How many people know you accessed this property?”
“Maren knows. The buyers know I had access to the pieces, although they don’t necessarily know where I found them.
The service-company receptionist saw me twice but wouldn’t recognize me tomorrow.
” I’ve already done this math. “The town records clerk who indexed the delayed marriage return handled three hundred filings that week. She wouldn’t remember my name. ”
My phone sits on the desk between us, still locked, still in Nikita’s possession.
He moved it from his coat pocket to the desk surface when he sat down, and I’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes with an intensity that probably borders on pathetic.
A notification from Callum flashed at six this morning before Nikita turned the phone facedown, but I couldn’t read anything beyond his name.
As if summoned by the thought, the phone vibrates against the wood. Nikita picks it up and reads the lock screen.
“Celine is calling again,” he says.
“She’s my mother.” I keep my voice even. “She leaves voicemails.”
He sets the phone down without playing the message, and thirty seconds later, it vibrates again with a voicemail notification. Nikita turns the phone toward me.
“You need to unlock it.”
I enter the code without picking up the phone. He taps the voicemail and activates the speaker. Celine’s voice fills the study, thin, annoyed, and painfully familiar.
“Piper, it’s Mom. Rent is due Friday, and I already told the landlord you’d handle it.
I need you to call me back because I already spent what you sent last time on a few things I needed.
I had that hair appointment, Lisa’s party was last weekend, and the streaming bill came out automatically.
I don’t understand why you can’t just set up a transfer so I don’t have to keep calling. You need to call me back.”
The voicemail ends. Nikita taps the screen, and the study is silent again.
She didn’t ask where I am. She didn’t ask whether I’m safe or if Callum is okay. She didn’t ask a single question that required an answer about me rather than my bank account.
This is the pattern. Celine converts every dollar I send into proof that she deserved it, and then she calls for more. She loves me. I believe that. She just treats me like a credit card, grateful when I work and resentful when I decline.
Nikita sets the phone down more carefully than before, and the gentleness of that gesture makes me want to throw something. I don’t need a bratva boss handling my family with kid gloves.
“My mother has depended on me financially since my father died,” I say, because the alternative is sitting here while he constructs his own version from a voicemail and sympathy.
“Callum’s lender is a separate problem, but Celine’s rent, Celine’s bills, and Celine’s inability to hold a job for longer than four months are the reasons I started running estate scams instead of doing legitimate resale work. ”
“You don’t have to explain her.”
“Her dependence is why I robbed you.” The words come out sharper than I intend, but I don’t bother softening them.
The phone vibrates again when Callum sends another text. His name appears on the screen, and the notification preview fills in. Hey, just checking in. The lender says tonight is fine, so there’s no emergency. Do you think you’ll have the rest by then? I hope you’re okay.
He’s pretending his lender is patient. He’s pretending the deadline hasn’t moved again. He’s pretending the apologetic text he sent last night wasn’t followed by three hours of silence because he couldn’t think of what else to say. The casual tone is Callum’s armor, and it’s thinner than he thinks.
He got the sweetness from Dorian, the avoidance from Celine, and the stubbornness from me, which means he’ll keep lying about how bad things are until somebody sits him down and makes him show the real numbers.
I keep rescuing him because I have the skills to solve the problem, and refusing to use them would make me no better than Celine.
Nikita watches me read the text without reaching for the phone.
I wonder if he can see the guilt from across the desk.
“You need to call Maren,” he says. “She knows the buyer’s name, and if you vanish without explanation, she’ll either panic or start covering your tracks in ways that make this worse. ”
My eyes widen. “You’re letting me make a call?”
“I’m letting you make one monitored call.” He turns the phone toward me. “Platon will listen from the line, and you won’t mention my name, this house, or anything about the estate that Maren doesn’t already know.”
“A supervised playdate, then.” I take the phone. “You could have just said that.”
“I could have. I chose the longer version.” He doesn’t smile, but he comes close to it, and I decide not to look at it too directly.
I select Maren’s name and make the call. She answers on the second ring.
“Piper, thank God you answered.” Relief and fury compete in her voice, and her footsteps cross the room in quick, repeated passes. “I texted you four times. I called twice. I told you to leave that house.”
“I know.”
“You’re still there.” She doesn’t phrase it as a question. “You’re still in that house, and something happened, and your situation just changed in a direction you’re not going to tell me about.”