Page 3 of Protecting His Finch

He’s pulled up Finley’s Instagram. Her last post is a shot of her painting. She’s wearing overalls and a crop top, and she has her hair pulled back from her face. She’s covered in paint, her canvas a blue-and-green abstract, and she had paint smudged on her clothes, on the bridge of her nose. She’s giving the cameraman a wide smile—one of those caught-off-guard, genuine smiles—and my heart tightens like a fist.

“She’s your sister,” I remind him.

“Adopted sister,” he scoffs. “Which basically just makes her my hot roommate.”

I swallow back revulsion.

“Oh!” Raphael leaps up out of his seat. “It came in!”

He jumps at a man holding a FedEx package. Like a child at Christmas, he rips it open. He opens the black box to reveal a Japanese-style blade.

It’s a short sword, maybe a foot long, and it was definitely not in the budget for Finley’s birthday expenses, but Raphael has a habit of getting away with mishandling family funds.

“What the hell is that?” I ask.

“It’s a tanto, my uncultured friend. The Samurai used it.”

I want to tell him owning a sword doesn’t make him a Samurai. It makes him a white savior who won’t give up his Digimon trading cards. But I button my lips.

Raphael has a weapon kink. Like most people who have never actually seen the damage these weapons can do, he’s obsessed with them. He has a collection of Japanese swords, German daggers, and old muskets and rifles.

He zigs the blade through the air and, with a cruel smirk, puts it up to my throat.

“How about it, Archer?” He says. “Want to fight me?”

He is about as strong as a sea slug. One punch and I’ll likely break every bone in his face. The thought is tempting.

I don’t budge, even with his fresh blade kissing my throat. “Pass.”

“Chicken.” He retracts the weapon and hands it off to the man who delivered it, pressing his palms together. “Put it in my office. Namaste.”

4

FINLEY

It’s my birthday, but I can’t cry if I want to.

And trust me. I want to.

There’s an extravagant party prepared for my twenty-first today. They’re hosting it at the Fox Den, my adopted-brother’s nightclub. The club has been evacuated for the evening, the whole space soon to be filled with people I don’t know who claim to be celebrating me. I’m dressed in a white dress with long sleeves, a short hem, and a lacy collar that climbs my throat.

It feels appropriate. I’m a thing on display, the Rossi family pet.

I feel nothing like myself in these clothes, in this house. I stare at the three-piece folding mirror on my dresser and try to make sense of the structure of my face. I feel like a Picasso—early Picasso, cubist period. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I am geometric, sharp, and foreign. My eyes are slit like a cat’s, my cheekbones sharp under all this contour, my nose small and pointed.

I draw the brush over my cheek, applying my makeup like war paint.

It’s T-minus thirty minutes until go time, and I’m relishing every second I have alone.

Well, almost alone.

“Do you want to explain how you live in an actual castle?”

I sigh. “It’s not a castle.”

“But it’s also not, not a castle.”

Those are my friends—Marie-Ella and Tasha. Their voices overlap on my computer monitor, which is perched precariously on the very edge of the dresser.

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