Protecting His Finch: A Bodyguard/Mafia Princess Romance Read online

  PROTECTING HIS FINCH

  ADORA CROOKS

  Copyright © 2022 by Adora Crooks

  All rights reserved.

  Book Cover by Wolfsparrow Covers

  Editing by Sandra @ One Love Editing

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  1. Archer

  2. Archer

  3. Archer

  4. Finley

  5. Finley

  6. Archer

  7. Finley

  8. Finley

  9. Archer

  10. Finley

  11. Archer

  12. Archer

  13. Archer

  14. Finley

  15. Archer

  16. Archer

  17. Archer

  18. Finley

  19. Finley

  20. Archer

  21. Finley

  22. Archer

  23. Finley

  24. Archer

  25. Finley

  26. Archer

  27. Finley

  28. Archer

  29. Archer

  30. Finley

  31. Archer

  32. Finley

  33. Archer

  34. Archer

  Doctor All Nighter

  About the Author

  Also by Adora Crooks

  1

  ARCHER

  They always beg.

  “Please, amico.” Spittle flies from his lips as he cries out. “I didn’t do this thing. You must believe me.”

  I hunch over a pool of blood, cleaning off a pair of pliers with a dirty rag.

  The truth is, it doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m not here to be convinced.

  I’m here to do a job.

  We’re in an empty boat basin on the river. I can hear seagulls cawing outside. The low horn of a freighter blares.

  We’re alone. The area has been cleared out. It’s just me, my partner Jacobi, and this unlucky bastard. He’s tied to a chair, arms and legs wound up with rope.

  We’ve been at this for hours, and now, his time is up.

  Yet still, he keeps at it.

  “I have people to take care of, you understand?” he pleads. “Don’t you have a family? Friends? Someone you love? Please.”

  Jacobi pats my shoulder. Twice. It’s my signal. “Let’s finish this,” he says.

  I set the pliers aside. Now, I pull my sidearm from the holster under my gunmetal-gray blazer.

  I unlock the safety and look him in the eyes. He deserves that, at least.

  “Stop begging,” I tell him. “You don’t want to go out begging.”

  His eyes go wide as the realization hits. “Padre Nostro,” he murmurs, his voice shaking, “che sei nei cieli.”

  Then I put my finger on the trigger.

  2

  ARCHER

  “I’m getting out,” I announce.

  Jacobi’s cue clicks against the white ball, and number seven kisses the pocket but doesn’t go in. The edge of his mouth twitches.

  “You say that every week,” he grunts.

  “I mean it this week.” I bend over the pool table and line up my shot. “I’m done.”

  Aim, click. I get two stripes in the pocket.

  The Rusty Nail is a dive bar in Astoria, Queens. It’s always a ruckus; heavy rock music pumps through the crappy speakers while tattooed and leather-adorned men and women curse each other out across the bar. But when Jacobi and I are in the zone, man-to-man with a game of pool, all the other noises die out.

  That’s just the way two former army guys work. We’re used to finding calm in the middle of the storm.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” Jacobi says. “You know that?”

  “Yeah, well. This idiot is kicking your ass, old man.”

  But I’ve spoken too soon, and my next play lands a solid in the pocket.

  Jacobi’s shoulder knocks mine as he takes my spot. “Age before beauty, princess.”

  We’ve known each other long enough that this is how we show affection—healthy, combative ribbing. I first met Jacobi nearly a decade ago—but back then, he was General Jacobi to me. I was on my second tour in Iraq, and we’d bonded in a way that men bond when they’ve both seen shit they should’ve never had to see.

  The two of us were recruited into a private black ops-team, code-named Wolfpack. Since then, we’ve been brothers for life.

  Jacobi is forty-three, with leathery, tanned skin and a completely shaved head. But he’s worn many hats with me. Mentor. Boss. Friend. And now, coworker. He’s been Catherine Rossi’s soldier and bodyguard for years. And when a spot opened up on the payroll, he thought of me.

  It pays to know people in dangerous places.

  So, really, I have only him to blame for my situation.

  “Alright,” he humors me, “Where are you going this time?”

  “Somewhere warm,” I tell him. “With a beach.”

  “We have a beach. Rockaway.”

  “Try someplace where I don’t have to move aside used needles and condoms to lay down a towel. I’m talking clean water. Coral reefs and rainbow fish and mai tais.”

  Jacobi sinks one ball. Then another. Then he gets in a rhythm, and I feel my victory slip further and further from my fingers.

  “Send me a postcard, will you?” he says.

  “Yeah.” But the thought has dried up like autumn leaves. Or maybe I’m just a sore loser. I give my whiskey sour a stir and a sip and feel my vision disconnect.

  Jacobi must sense the change in temperature, because he rises then, putting his pool cue to the side. “In all seriousness,” he says, and his voice is low now, intense, so I make a point to listen, “you don’t want to die here. You’ve served the family well. Eight years. I’d put in a good word with Madam if you want to retire. Just say the word.”

  “I know you would.” I drain my glass until it’s empty and suck the cherries from their stems. Dinner of champions. Then I recite the Wolfpack credo: “A lone wolf has bite—”

  “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.

  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 tantō, 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.

  The three of us bonded our first year at the Prisedell Art Institute. We shared the same floor in our dorm room and spent the whole year crammed in Marie-Ella’s room, complaining about our roommates, sharing our term projects, and binge-watching Gossip Girl.

  Marie-Ella is an Upper West Side hedge-fund child, whose dream it is to be featured in Fashion Week, and who should be far more stuck-up than she is.

  Tasha is a sculptor, who dropped out after the first year and went into pre-med instead. Overachiever.

  And then there’s me. Finley. Painting major, the awkward black sheep in the flock.

  I use my real last name—Larkin—when I’m with them. It’s easier than telling them I’m a Rossi. To New Yorkers, the Rossi name carries as much weight as Gambino or Genovese. The Rossi family is the most infamous mafia crime family currently alive and thriving in the city.

  According to the papers, the Rossi family should have crumbled when their don, Marco Rossi, was gunned down by a rival gang. Instead, Marco’s widow, Catherine Rossi, took the helm with her son, Raphael, at her side.

  Let’s be clear: Catherine “Madam” Rossi is the most feared woman—or man—this side of the Hudson River.

  Everyone bends to her. Including me.

  Which is why I’m going to dress up and smile and tell everyone what a wonderful time I had at the party tonight. Because the Madam expects it.

  Which is also why I haven’t told Marie-Ella or Tasha about my family. I’m terrified they would run for the hills.

  I wouldn’t blame them, either.

  I put the brush down. “What do you guys think?”

  “The face, flawless,” Marie-Ella says, gesturing grandly. “The eyes, not so much.”

  “Too dark?”

  “Too depressing,” Tasha scoffs. “You’re going to a birthday party, not a funeral. Lighten up, yeah? Not many people get to say they kicked off their twenty-first at a nightclub.”

  “You might find someone special,” Marie-Ella adds. “A hottie?”

  “I don’t think so. My brother will be there.”

  “Ugh,” Marie-Ella groans. “That capital-C Creep?”

  Just then, there’s a knock on the door to my bedroom.

  In my most paranoid moments, I’ve wondered before if there are hidden microphones in my room. That way, the Rossis could keep an eye and ear on me to make sure I’m not speaking ill of them. I wouldn’t put it past them. My body tenses at the sound of the knock, and I swivel around in my chair to face the door.

  “Yes?”

  The door cracks open. It’s Archer. His broad frame is tucked into a black suit. Those dark eyes land on me, his mouth a tight line underneath the trimmed beard that climbs his strong jaw.

  “Twenty minutes to exit, Miss Finley,” he informs me.

  “Thank you, Archer.” I smile brightly. It’s my job to be compliant, even to the help.

  He nods curtly and closes the door again.

  My feelings about Archer are…complicated.

  He terrifies me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. Standing over my father’s corpse. Gun in hand.

  But he’s haunted me in other ways lately. In my dreams, he comes into my room. He puts his lips on mine. He dips his hand between my legs, and he tells me to be quiet.

  I wake up wet and trembling.

  It’s a crush. That’s all. A terrible crush on a terrible man.

  And, like all things, it will die. Eventually.

  “Oho-kay,” Marie-Ella says once he’s left. “Who the hell was that?”

  “Archer?” I shrug. “He’s just…the family bodyguard.”

  “Oh, excuse me.” Tasha makes her wrist limp, mocking my fanciness. “The family bodyguard.”