Page 48 of Protecting His Finch

We can’t discuss it over the phone, not in so many words. But I know what she means.

My life for Finley’s.

“I understand,” I tell her. “But I need to know she’ll be safe. You don’t look for her. You don’t chase her. This ends any debt between you and her.”

She lets out a soft sigh. I can nearly feel it on the back of my neck, and it makes my hair stand on end. “Sweet Nathaniel Archer,” she says, and the cloying way she says my name feels like a razor blade tracing my skin. “You’ve fallen for my finch. You’d sacrifice everything for her—but would she do the same for you?”

My teeth grind until I feel like my molars might snap. “Let her go,” I say. Simple. Short.

Again, she considers. “I accept,” she says finally.

She hands the phone back to Jacobi.

“The wharfs,” he says. “Tomorrow at seven. Don’t be late.”

Then he cuts the line. I’m stuck listening to the dial tone, but my fingers won’t unlock around the receiver right away.

Relief floods my chest. Finley is safe. Finley will be okay. Finley can live the life she deserves—finally free of the Rossis’ grip around her throat.

But my blood freezes as well, numbing me from the inside out.

Because I’ve made a deal with the devil, and now I have less than twenty-four hours to live.

My life for Finley’s. That was the trade.

I’d make it again in a heartbeat. But that doesn’t make the deal any easier.

I finish off my whiskey sour. It might be my last, but I can barely taste it. I tip the bartender double and go back into the cool sunshine.

23

FINLEY

Archer is different when he comes back to the house.

He pulls up in Sid’s fire-engine-red truck, and when he steps out, I know something is wrong. It’s in the way he stands—the square shoulders. The tenseness in his jaw. The way his eyes sweep across each corner of the room, around every shadow, as though he’s waiting for someone with a knife to pop out from the dark.

He’s quieter than normal. Drawn into himself.

He speaks with Sid for a while. I come over and knock my shoulder against his.

“Did you get what you needed?” I ask.

“What?” His eyes, unfocused, now focus on me.

“From town. You said you needed to pick up something.”

“Oh. Right.”

And that’s it. He doesn’t say anything more, doesn’t go into detail.

I drop it. He’ll tell me when he’s ready, and right now, he’s a million miles away.

I borrow Tasha’s laptop and start diving into research about our route. I start daydreaming about Canada. It isn’t where I thought I’d end up, but honestly, I never had many plans for the future away. I research art schools. Cities I might be comfortable in.

Tasha and Sid have dinner with us, but they’re staying elsewhere tonight. They’re going to stay with Sid’s sister for the night—Tasha says it’s to help babysit her new niece, but there’s something cagey in Sid’s smile when she says it.

I think he’s afraid of us, and afraid of what might happen if we stay here much longer. I can’t blame him. I would be, too.

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