Page 11 of Protecting His Finch

He leans in again, but this time I wiggle out of his embrace and start walking quickly to the car.

“What about a kiss at least?” he calls to my back.

“I’m cold!” I tell him and rush to the street.

Archer stands waiting by the car.

“Miss,” he says with that low, steely voice of his, and immediately I feel safer.

He opens the door for me, and I climb inside, like Alice crawling through the rabbit hole.

8

FINLEY

The drive home is a blur.

The Rossis have rented a limo for the occasion. Raphael sits next to me, and I hear the chaotic, muffled noise as he watches videos on his phone. Archer sits across from us. There’s a train track of lights along the roof of the car that slowly alternates colors. Black glass divides us and the driver.

I stare out the window. We’re sailing over a bridge to take us out of Brooklyn and upstate. The city skyline twinkles, so bright it desecrates the stars.

I toy with the collar of my dress. I think about the car careening over the bridge and into the water. It feels like relief.

Being married to the bottom of the Hudson River would be better than being married to Raphael Rossi.

I’d like to tell myself that there are good things about this arrangement. That maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all. Petty and insufferable. But not a bad guy.

But it’s his cruelty that scares me the most. I see it in the glitter of joy in his eyes whenever the conversation turns to business or violence. When we were younger and he was maybe thirteen or fourteen, he loved “playing pranks”—bleach in the shampoo bottle, rocks in the dog’s food bowl, construction nails tucked into the fingers of my gloves. He’d wear this sharp, leering smile every time my hand came back bloody.

I don’t want to know what his adult “pranks” look like. But I don’t have a choice.

I belong to the Rossi family. First as the ward, now as the wife.

We drive back to the Rossi estate mostly in silence. By the time we get there, the headlights have to carve moon-white columns through the Upstate darkness, and I’m tired. So tired.

Archer climbs out first and opens the door for me. I don’t take his hand, I don’t look him in the eyes. I don’t want to attract anyone’s attention. I just want my room, and my bed, and sleep.

The estate looks like a Gothic castle in the dark, the kind of place Mary Shelley might’ve written stories about. The tall doors open for me before I get there, the doorman as wordless and expressionless as a gargoyle. I take off my shoes and feel the polished floors under my feet as I quickly climb the main staircase and dash down the hall to my room.

I open the door, and immediately the hairs on my arms lift. My desk lamp is on. I never leave it on. But there it is, and there she is—Catherine Rossi. The Madam herself.

There’s a reason she strikes fear in the hearts of some of the most powerful mafia families in New York City. It could be her husband’s legacy, or her own crooked reputation, but I think it’s the way she carries herself. She’s thin but not willowy—strong, tall. Her blonde hair is sometimes curled, but today she wears it stick straight, and it falls with the sharpness of a guillotine axe around her shoulders. She has Raphael’s blue eyes. Even now, sitting at my desk, her feet on the opposite chair, she wears the air of someone who could kill you with a smile.

Catherine is in all black, as though she’s dressed for a funeral. Maybe she is.

She has my sketchbook in her hands, and she’s flipping through the pages. Slowly. Examining each drawing. My heart goes chaotic in my chest—those are private. Mine.

But I don’t say anything. I can’t.

Those blue eyes lift to me, and she smiles.

“Close the door, darling,” she says—ordering me around as though I have walked into her room, not my own.

I do. I can’t help but stare nervously at her long fingers around the pages of my notebook. Has she seen the sketch of my…uh. You know?

“These drawings are beautiful,” she says. “You’re getting better every time I see them.”

“Thanks.”

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