Chapter 7
PIPER
Mila took my blood pressure at eight this morning, asked me nine questions about sleep and appetite and stress, and wrote everything down without telling me what any of it meant.
When I asked whether I passed, she said health isn’t a test and I should stop treating my own body like a hostile witness.
I’ve been thinking about that for three hours, which is two hours and fifty minutes longer than I meant to.
The car turns off the Long Island Expressway a little after eleven. Platon drives. Nikita sits beside me in the back with a wool coat and a driving cap he put on somewhere around Douglaston, which does almost nothing to disguise a man his size.
“You look like a spy in a community theater production,” I tell him.
“I look like a man in a coat.”
“You look like a man in a coat who’s six foot four and hasn’t been photographed in four years, which is a problem, because Queens has cameras.” I turn in the seat. “Why are you here? Platon could’ve done this. I could’ve done this with Platon.”
Nikita watches the storefronts slide past the window. “Two men sat outside your friend’s studio for nearly four hours this morning.”
“They left at nine forty,” Platon says from the front. “My detail confirmed it twenty minutes after we pulled out of the estate.”
“They left,” Nikita agrees. “They know the address. They know she’s connected to the sale. If they come back while you’re inside, I’d rather be in the building than back at Water Mill, nearly two hours away.”
He says it like a logistics decision. I let him have that, because arguing would require me to name what it actually is, and I’m not ready to do that in a moving vehicle.
Maren’s workspace occupies the ground floor of a converted garage off Thirty-Seventh Avenue, behind a roll-down gate she painted teal four years ago and has never once repainted.
One of Platon’s people raises the gate as we turn onto the block.
Platon drives straight in, and the gate comes down behind us before Nikita opens his door.
As far as anyone watching the street is concerned, two women are pulling estate records for a scheduled verification. Nikita never appears on the sidewalk at all.
Maren waits beside her workbench with her arms crossed.
“This is absolutely not happening,” she says before the gate finishes coming down.
“Maren—”
“There’s a plumbing van at the end of my block that has never once been on my block, Piper, and the two men inside it have not gotten out to plumb anything.
” She points past me toward the street. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that men who sit in parked vehicles are never good news, and I’ve now had two sets of them in one day. ”
“Those are ours,” Platon says.
“That’s what I said. Two sets.” Maren gives him the same quick, unflattering assessment she gives a credenza. “You’re the one who texted me a secure number yesterday with no explanation.”
“I am.”
Maren folds her arms and looks him over one more time, unimpressed on principle. “Your text had no greeting, no signature, and no punctuation at the end.”
“The number was the message.”
“The number was alarming.” She turns from Platon to me, because I’m the safer person to blame and we both know it.
“You disappeared into a dead bratva boss’s mansion for two days.
You called me once, from your own phone, with somebody listening.
You asked me to pull buyer records and then you hung up.
Now you show up with a security detail and a man in a costume. ”
“He’s not in a costume,” I say. “He’s in a coat.”
“Piper, I’m serious.”
“I know you are.” I set my bag on her workbench. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I’m going to explain what I can.”
“You’re going to explain all of it.”
The workspace smells like lemon oil and old wood and the burnt coffee she’s been reheating since roughly 2019.
Rolling racks of tagged clothing line the back wall.
A walnut credenza sits under a tarp with an inventory number safety-pinned to the corner, and beside it, three mid-century chairs wait in a row with their price tags facing outward.
Her laptop lives on a workstation shelf under a layer of resale-site stickers so thick I haven’t seen the actual casing since 2021.
The blue binder sits open beside the laptop.
“I pulled everything after you called,” Maren says. She drags the binder toward her. “Payment records, message threads, broker contacts, the whole resale chain for the last four months. I’ve been sitting here since seven trying to figure out what I was looking at.”
Nikita moves toward the workstation, and Maren puts her hand on the binder without looking up.
“I don’t know you,” she says to him. “Piper reads it first.”
Nikita stops. He doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t glance at me for backup. He steps back and puts his hands in his coat pockets, and he does it so easily that I have to look away.
Platon watches the whole exchange with an expression I can’t read.
I open the binder.
Maren logs every sale by buyer and date, with a printed message thread stapled behind each entry.
I find the sale of the watches, icon, and cigarette case on page eleven.
The buyer used the name Peter Halloran, which is almost certainly not his name, and the appointment thread runs eight messages long.
I read it twice.
“Maren, you need to read the third message.” My voice comes out wrong on her name.
She leans over my shoulder.
Before we schedule, I need to confirm the seller’s provenance history. Is she connected to the Voss name?
The message is dated four days before the appointment. Four days before he ever set foot in that dining room. Four days before he opened the case and found the crest and started photographing it like he’d discovered something.
He came to confirm what he already suspected.
“I answered that,” Maren says. She speaks more quietly now, and the anger is gone.
“I told him yes. I told him the seller had estate-liquidation experience through her father’s business.
I thought he was checking credentials, Piper.
Buyers ask about provenance experience constantly, and Voss is a name in this industry, and I thought I was helping you close. ”
“You were.”
“He came here looking for your father, and I confirmed the connection for free.”
Nikita crosses the room. He reads the thread over my shoulder without touching the binder, and he exhales hard through his nose.
“He was hunting the Voss name before the crest ever surfaced,” he says. “The Voss name confirmed your connection to your father. The crest confirmed you had access to marked Rusakov property.”
I grip the workbench and read the message a third time.
I spent four months confirming the lapsed contract, the dormant trust, and the town’s delayed-return process. I chose the Rusakov estate, and I chose it well. Shilov’s people noticed the moment a Voss touched it.
“How long has my name been on that list?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet.” Nikita straightens. “Somebody in Shilov’s network kept your father’s name active after he died, and they connected it to you before that buyer ever entered the mansion.”
Maren sits down hard on one of the mid-century chairs, and I don’t have the energy to tell her the tag is still on it.
My phone rings.
Callum’s name fills the screen, and for one absurd second I think about not answering, because I’ve absorbed as much family history as I can hold today.
“Hey, are you okay?” I ask.
“Pipes, there’s something I didn’t tell you yesterday.” There’s no shop compressor behind his voice anymore, just the quiet of a house in the woods.
I close my eyes. “You should tell me now.”
“The guys who came to the shop. When I said I didn’t know where you lived, one of them laughed and told me it didn’t matter.” He stops for a second. “He said Dorian’s kid would turn up eventually. He used Dad’s name like they knew him.”
I lower the phone and tap the speaker icon. “Callum, you need to repeat that last part. Two people are listening now, and they both need to hear it from you.”
He repeats it. The workspace is silent by the time he finishes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“You were already scared.” Callum’s voice cracks on the second word and he pushes through it.
“Every time something goes wrong, you fix it by working harder. I’ve watched you do that since I was twelve, and I thought if I handed you one more thing you’d just take that on too.
” He exhales. “Dad’s been dead five years, and I didn’t want to be the one who told you he’s still ruining our lives. ”
I press my palm against the workbench and hold on to the edge.
“You should have told me,” I say. “I’m not angry with you. I just can’t protect you from what I don’t know.”
“I get that now. Vera made me eggs and asked me nine questions and I ended up telling her the whole thing before I told you, which is honestly the most embarrassing part.”
“That sounds like Vera.” I press the phone harder to my ear, wanting the sound of him closer.
“She’s terrifying. I like her.”
When I hang up, Nikita is already watching me, and he hasn’t moved to take the phone or issue an instruction or do any of the twelve things a man in his position would be entitled to do.
“Platon should debrief him properly,” he says.
“He needs a structured interview, recorded, with follow-up questions about faces, vehicles, timing, and anything else he’s holding.
He’s twenty-three and he’s frightened, and frightened people withhold in pieces.
” He waits. “That’s your brother. You decide. ”
Two days ago I’d have said no on reflex, because letting bratva question Callum sounds like the beginning of a story that ends badly for both of us.
Callum also sat on the one detail that mattered for a full day, and he’ll do it again, and the next thing he withholds might be the thing that gets him killed.