Chapter 28
NIKITA
Piper is holding court by the terrace doors with one hand supporting the full weight of her stomach, and I can’t stop looking at her.
About five months have passed. A specialist ultrasound later showed two boys and a girl.
We waited this long on purpose. Mila calls the shower late, but by our standards it’s the right time.
Piper wouldn’t hang the nursery curtains until the last illegal operations stopped, and I understood why.
Neither of us wanted to build a room we might have to abandon.
The operations are gone now. Only two final ownership transfers remain, and the house my mother once filled with music is full of people again.
None of them is here because they fear me.
Piper is almost thirty-five weeks along with triplets, which Mila says is a small miracle of stubbornness, since many triplet pregnancies deliver around thirty-four weeks, and the cesarean to bring them out is scheduled for the end of the week.
I stand at the edge of it with a glass and let myself savor the moment.
Piper catches me watching and lifts an eyebrow, which in the shorthand we’ve built means you’re brooding at your own party. I lift my glass half an inch, which means I’m allowed, it’s my house, and she almost laughs before she turns back to the woman she’s talking to.
“…the restoration piece is the part I keep getting stuck on,” Piper is telling the foundation’s new program director when I drift closely enough to hear.
“Returning a stolen piece is clean when you can find the family. Half the time you can’t, so we’re funding conservation training instead, putting the money where the next generation of people who protect this work will come from.
” She sets a hand on her lower back. “Two scholarship cohorts are committed for the fall, one in provenance research and one in restoration.”
She built that. My mother’s foundation used to launder paintings. My wife-to-be turned it into the thing its letterhead always claimed to be and runs it like she was born to the work.
“You’re staring again,” she says without turning around.
“I’m admiring the program director.”
“The program director is sixty and married.” She finally turns, and there’s the ghost of the grin she saves for me.
“I’m admiring her boss.”
Callum finds me by the drinks table, which he approaches carefully, still not sure I won’t have him thrown out of rooms.
“The apprenticeship’s good,” he says, before I ask, because his sister taught him to get ahead of the question.
“The fabrication shop, the one that does the restoration mounts and the crating. I’m learning the joinery side.
It’s a real trade, not a favor.” He says the last part firmly, watching me to see if I’ll correct him.
“It isn’t a favor.” I hand him a soda, because he’s twenty-three and driving his mother home tonight.
“You passed the shop’s skills test. The shop doesn’t take anyone it would have to carry, and I told the managers not to make an exception for family.
” I watch the disbelief work across his face, the same disbelief his sister wore for the first month in my house, when every good thing looked like a trap with better bait.
“You built the mounts for the Kandinsky restoration last month. I saw the invoice. Nobody signs off on work like that as a favor. You’re there because you’re good with your hands, which I understand runs in your family. ”
Callum lowers his shoulders half an inch.
He’s spent his life being the one Piper protected, the debt she carried, and one more reason she never believed she could stop watching the exits.
Watching him earn a thing on his own is one of the quieter pleasures of the last six months, but I don’t tell him that, because he’d hate it.
“She worries you’re managing me,” he says.
“She worries about everything. It’s why she’s still alive.” I clink my glass against his soda. “You’re not being managed. You’re being employed. There’s a difference, and your paychecks come from a company that keeps audited books now, so it’s an honest one.”
Celine stays sober and near the edges because she knows she hasn’t earned an easy place in Piper’s life.
I watch Piper cross to her and how carefully she manages it, the hug that lasts exactly as long as it should and no longer, with Piper ending it before Celine can turn it into another interaction she has to manage.
Celine is still Celine. She’ll say something sharp before the afternoon’s over, or she’ll start drinking and talk too fast, or she’ll cry at the wrong moment and make it about herself.
Even so, she’s on time because Callum picked her up, she’s clear-eyed for now, and she brought a gift she wrapped herself.
Piper set the boundary months ago, and Celine has held to it.
That deserves some credit. For Celine, honoring the boundary is an act of love she learned far too late.
Piper comes back to me looking strained.
“She did well,” I say.
“She did.” Piper leans into my side, and I take some of her weight because she’s earned the right to give it to someone.
“She RSVP’d three times to make sure I still wanted her here.
She never once did that when I was a kid and it actually mattered.
” She watches her mother accept a coffee from a server and stay near the edge of the conversation, sober and present without trying to pull the room toward herself.
“I keep waiting for it to hurt less that she can do it now, when she couldn’t do it then. ”
“It’s allowed to hurt and be good at the same time.”
“When did you get wise?” She tips her head against my shoulder.
“I fell for a con artist. I had to learn to read the room.”
Vera moves through the party like she owns it, because in every way that matters except the deed, she does.
She has repositioned two flower arrangements, redirected the caterers twice, and corrected a server’s pour without breaking stride. Now, she descends on Piper with the signature energy she reserves for people she has decided to keep alive.
“Piper, you will sit down before you fall down.” Vera takes her by the elbow and steers her toward a chair. “You will let me bring you a plate, because you’re carrying three new members of my family and I didn’t spend forty years in this house to watch you deliver them on the terrace.”
Piper sits. She knows better than to argue with Vera, a wisdom it took me three decades to acquire.
She called her Piper instead of the girl.
For two months after Piper moved in, Vera called her nothing at all, addressed her in the third person while she stood in the room, talking around her like a stain she hadn’t decided how to remove.
Then it was the girl, which was worse and better at once, an acknowledgment shaped like an insult.
It took Vera months to use Piper’s name, and she just did it in front of both families without appearing to notice.
Piper notices. She looks at me over Vera’s shoulder, her eyes wide, and I lift my glass another half inch, and this time, it means I know, I heard it too. Hold still and let it happen.
Angelina finds me where I’ve drifted back to the terrace doors.
“You’ve got the look,” she says, following where I’m looking, at Piper. My sister is thirty and reads me faster than anyone alive except Platon, a skill she developed by learning to read our father before he spoke.
“What look do I have?”
“The one Mama used to get.” She says it gently, because she knows what she’s handing me.
“In the early home movies, Mama would watch Papa across a room without knowing the camera was on her. That was before he hardened.” Angelina slides her arm through mine.
“You look at Piper like Mama looked at Papa in nineteen eighty-something, before the business hardened him enough that he stopped looking back.”
I don’t have a dry answer for that. Arkadi Rusakov spent my whole childhood teaching me that a man in his position couldn’t afford to love anything he wasn’t prepared to lose, and I spent four years dead proving him right.
I’m standing in his house holding a glass to celebrate impending fatherhood because a forger walked in and taught me he was wrong.
“He looked back sometimes,” I say. “When you were still too young to remember his face. There’s a film of your christening where he holds you the whole service and never once checks the room.
I found it going through Mama’s things. I didn’t know he had it in him either, until I watched my hard, careful father doing it on a Sunday, soft for the length of one home movie.
” I have to stop for a second. “I’d like these three to have that version of me on film and in their memories.
I don’t want them to have the other version. ”
“I remember enough to know you’re doing the opposite on purpose.” She squeezes my arm. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, and I’ve watched you do some very impressive things, most of them illegal.”
Platon appears at my other side, because he has a talent for arriving exactly when a moment threatens to become sentimental.
“The last two monitored transfers clear Thursday,” he says, quietly, under the party noise.
“The Geneva structure and the shipping entity will be finished after that. There’s nothing left with a false floor.
It’s all disclosed, all legitimate, and all boring.
” He surveys the room like a man checking exits out of habit he no longer needs.
“You built something worth having, and then you gave it away and kept the only part that mattered. I didn’t think you had it in you. ”
“Neither did I.”
“Maren says—” He stops, because Maren has appeared across the room and is giving him a look that means she wants him for something, and he looks toward Maren and forgets the rest of the sentence. “I’m being summoned.”
“Then you should go.”
He goes. I watch Maren catch his hand as he reaches her, easy, unhidden, the two of them folding into a conversation with someone’s grandmother like they’ve been doing this for years.
Six months ago, Platon would have stayed against the wall.
Now he lets Maren pull him into the middle of the room, though I catch him checking the terrace doors over her shoulder.
I know how it started, because Platon told me himself, once, in the fewest words he could manage.
He was the one who installed the security at Maren’s studio the week the men came for her binder.
He stayed three nights on a cot in her back office while his people swept the block.
On the third night, she stopped pretending to be afraid of him and started arguing with him about coffee, and Platon, who has survived two bratva wars and my funeral, told me he had no defense prepared for someone arguing with him purely for the fun of it.
They have been together quietly ever since, through the kidnapping, the search, and the long grinding months of paperwork after.
Watching them now I think the war took a great deal from all of us and, on its way out, handed a few of us back something better than what it took.
Angelina starts gathering everyone near the terrace doors for photographs. Piper pushes herself up out of her chair, then stops and grips its edge.
I’m across the room but I’m always watching her now, and I see her close one hand around the wood, as she freezes in a way that isn’t the tired stillness of eight months carrying triplets.
She breathes through something and then makes herself smile at whoever she’s talking to, and I set my glass down and start moving before I’ve decided to.
“It’s nothing,” she says when I reach her, which is what she says about everything. “They’re Braxton Hicks. Mila said—” Piper tightens her grip, pales, and stops talking.
I crouch in front of her chair. “Count it for me. Start now.”
She does. At forty seconds, she catches her breath. When it passes, she looks at me, and under the calm she’s performing for the room I can see that she knows this is a week earlier than Mila planned.
Mila is already there. She places one hand on Piper’s stomach and checks her watch. Mila doesn’t need to reassure the room. Her calm is enough.
“That lasted forty seconds,” Mila says. “How long ago did the first one start?”
“The first was ten minutes ago, maybe less,” Piper says.
“With triplets this far along, we don’t wait for another.” Mila straightens. “The hospital is twenty minutes if the drive is clear. Nikita drives, I ride with you and keep her monitored, and I’ll call ahead so the delivery team is scrubbed and ready before we’re through the doors.”
The room hushes around us, both families turning, the party congregates around her chair. I feel the old thing rise in me, the pressure to control the space, account for every exit, move everyone according to a plan, and for once, it has somewhere useful to go.
I don’t panic. I execute, because that’s how I’ve always loved her, with action, a plan, and the route to the hospital already mapped in my head.
“Vera, her bag is on the second shelf in the blue room.” I’m already lifting Piper’s coat.
“Callum, your mother rides with Angelina. Platon, you clear the drive and take the lead car.” I put an arm around Piper and she gets to her feet.
She locks one hand around mine, the other low on the stomach where our children have just announced they’re finished waiting.
“Everyone follows. Nobody speeds. Mila’s in the car with us. ”
Vera has the bag before I finish the sentence.
Callum carries his mother’s coat to Angelina’s car, and Celine follows him without argument.
Platon is at the front door with a phone against his ear, clearing the drive, and the machine I spent a decade building for war turns out to work just as well for this, for getting one frightened woman safely from a chair to a car while people who love her move in formation around her.
Angelina lowers her camera when she looks at me, and I nod.
She brings it up again, and no one questions photographs after that.
Five years ago, I would have checked where the camera was aimed before I moved.
Today, I don’t think about my face appearing in a photograph until we’re already through the door.
Piper looks up at me as I walk her toward the door, past the silver-wrapped gifts for babies who’ve decided not to wait for them to be opened. She looks frightened, but she keeps moving toward the door.
“Are you ready?” I ask her.
“I’m not ready.” She crushes my hand as another contraction begins. “You’re driving because it’s happening anyway.”