Page 2 of Protecting His Finch

“But the pack has might,” Jacobi finishes solemnly and tips his whiskey out of respect. Then he asks the million-dollar question:

“What’s keeping you here?”

3

ARCHER

The girl.

There’s always a girl.

Finley Larkin was thirteen years old when I first met her. She had frizzy chestnut hair. Strong eyebrows. Big, doe-brown eyes.

And she’d been covered in blood. Like a newborn.

It was supposed to be a clean hit.

I was twenty-seven then. Freshly brought under the wing of the Rossi family, their newest recruit. The job was simple: eliminate Marcus Larkin, a low-life who was behind in his debts and had gambled his way straight to the grave and, thus, he was my ticket to earn my place in the family.

He’d never seen me coming.

It’d taken all of thirty seconds to break the lock on his door, sneak inside, and find him. He was boiling pasta. A fresco of Mother Mary hung over the stove. The TV was going—Jeopardy!, maybe.

I believe a man has a right to know why the devil has come for him. So as I pressed the muzzle of my silencer to the soft crease in the back of his head between his spine and his skull, I told him, “Catherine Rossi sends her regards.”

I pulled the trigger, and he dropped.

But no one had said anything about a little girl.

Marcus crumpled to the floor like a bag of laundry. But she stood there. Eyes wide. Frozen. Splattered with her father’s blood.

“What do you want me to do with her?” I’d asked over the phone, my voice trying not to shake. Praying, praying with everything in me that the next words out of the Madam’s mouth weren’t to finish the job.

Instead, there was a long silence on the other end. Then: “I’ve always wanted a daughter.”

Finley has been living with the Rossi family ever since.

For a while, she was sent away to boarding school. She’d come back for the summers, but for the most part, she kept to her room. Out of sight. Around the house, people started calling her “little finch.” Bird in a cage.

Now, she’s twenty-one. Home for winter break from her second year at an elite fine art institute. And Finley Larkin is—

“—smoking hot.”

From the mouth of Raphael Rossi. My charge. Catherine Rossi’s son has the complexion of a geisha—pale as a ghost, soft uncalloused hands, and a shock of white-blond hair and ice-blue eyes.

He’s a typical golden child: spoiled, entitled, and has never been told no. He believes he can have anything he wants, and, unfortunately, the object of his want lately has been Finley Larkin.

Which is why I can’t leave. The girl has lost enough because of me. I’m not about to leave her at the empty mercy of Raphael Rossi. As long as I stay on payroll as his bodyguard, it’s my job to make sure he doesn’t leave my sight. Sure, as a member of the family, occasionally I’m tasked with certain stickier duties. Taking out the trash, so to speak. Roughing up those in debt.

But my main duty is to follow Raphael around like a shadow. I have a room at the Rossi Estate. I stay nearby. Just in case.

In turn, I make sure he’ll never lay a hand on Finley as lo

ng as I’m there.

“Check it out,” he says. We’re at the Fox Den, a club he owns, which mostly serves as a front to launder the family’s dirty money. It’s a nasty club at night, but worse during the day. The floors are always sticky, like a movie theatre.

Raphael is supposed to be working. It’s Finley’s twenty-first birthday today, and they’re hosting it at the club. Which means food orders, restocking the bar, making sure everything is set up for the DJ. But instead of working, he flips through his phone for hours. He turns the screen to me.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com