Killing Me Softly: A Romantic Suspense Anthology, page 119
“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. And 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 Luca 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 Luca 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 Luca 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 long 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.
Luca 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!” Luca 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 Luca 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 racist who won’t give up his Digimon trading cards. But I button my lips.
Luca 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 lacey 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 window, Catherine Rossi, took the helm with her son, Luca, 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 bastard 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.”
Marie-Ella clicks her teeth. “If I had a bodyguard like him stomping around the house all the time, the batteries in my vibe would explode!”
Marie-Ella and Tasha burst into laughter at that.
I can feel my face go hot. I put my hand on the laptop lid. “I’ve got to go.”
“You’re such a prude!” Marie-Ella whines.
She’s not wrong.
I open and close my hand in a wave. “Love you.”
“Love you too—happy birthday!”
They’re still singing happy birthday when I close the laptop.
Now, in the silence, I can feel the buzzing. It’s as though a violin string is connected from my heart to between my legs. Archer’s presence has plucked the cord, and now both are vibrating.
Compared to my friends, I am a prude. I blush at sex jokes. I clam up when the topic comes up in conversation.
But it’s a choice I’ve made. A careful, thoughtfully considered choice.
The truth? I’m nearly twenty-one, a fully bloomed, fully in-control woman, but I’ve never had an orgasm. I’ve tried. Countless times. I’ve tried touching myself. I’ve used a vibrator. I’ve read articles, watched porn, and even bought an instructional book I kept tucked under my pillow: Your Orgasm And You!
But no luck. Just wall after frustrating, impenetrable wall.
Which makes sense. I’m trapped in the walls of this house. Trapped in the walls of my mind. Trapped.
The only thing that makes me feel free is art.
Which is why I use the spare seconds of time I have left to pick up my sketchbook and my pen.
This time to sketch—this will be my birthday present to myself.
I lie back in my bed—a king with a rust-colored duvet and plush purple pillows—and put my notebook on my knees. I turn to a clean page (I’ve nearly run out of space in this one) and uncap my pen.
As I decide what to draw, it dawns on me: What if, instead of fearing you-know-what, I tried…studying it?
Across my bed, I can see my reflection clearly in the vanity mirror.
I take the soft lace between my fingers and tug my dress up my thighs. I roll my panties off one leg and let them hang from my ankle.
Finally, I part my thighs so I can see what lies between.
I’m aware of what’s there. I’ve studied anatomy. I’ve done countless sketches of nude, live models. I’m not shy about other people’s parts.
Yet my own, somehow, remains a mystery to me. A Pandora’s box that refuses to unlock.
I position my sketchbook on my thigh and start to draw. I outline my legs. The round moons of my buttocks. And then I go in. I draw small curls for the dark patch of hair there. I trace the tip of my pen on the page and map out my pink nether lips. The delicate slit of me.
I’m glistening in the mirror. I slip my hand down and, carefully, use the tip of my finger to part my lips. I gasp. They’re so slippery. The shock of pleasure at just the small touch is overwhelming, and I grit my teeth against it. I know better. I know to stroke these flames will only lead to panting, painful frustration.
But I can’t help myself. I ache. I watch in the mirror as I gently run my finger across my seam. My toes curl into the mattress. I find my core.
Do I dare test my luck and press my finger inside—?
The door opens.
No knock. No preamble. It just…opens.
“Oh!” I retract my hand and snap my knees shut. My notebook tumbles forward in my lap.
Archer, having already stepped inside, immediately turns his head to face the wall.
How much did he see?
His face is beet red, jaw clenched. There’s a vein that climbs from his ear up his forehead. Even here, I can see it throbbing.
He saw enough, I’d guess.
“Your presence is requested. Downstairs.”
His voice is coarse in a way I haven’t heard it before, like wool.
I clutch my notebook awkwardly to my lap. “Thanks. I’ll be right there.”
He nods tightly and then exits as quickly as he entered, shutting the door behind him.
Dear God. Did that…just happen?
I smother my face with my pillow and scream into it.
5
Finley
The Den is chaotic.
Strobes and colored lights flash over the dance floor. The music is a loud pulse that makes the floor shake.
I don’t know anyone here. My only friends—Marie-Ella and Tasha—are safely at their own homes for break and far away from here.
But at this party, I’m a Rossi. And Madam Rossi expects her children to behave.
So I smile. I hug acquaintances as though they’re old friends. I imagine everyone here is a friend of the family’s—which means they’re all on the wrong side of the law, or they’re unlucky enough to be in Madam Rossi’s pocket. Needless to say, they’re all incredibly nice to me.
Madam Rossi is, after all, the queen of New York. And I’m her favorite pet.
Then I see him. Archer. He’s sitting in a booth with my brother and two women at the far end of the club.
Bodyguards are—I’ve decided—a different species. He sees things before anyone else does. And it’s as if he can feel my gaze, because he turns and his eyes meet mine.
The second he makes eye contact, I break it. I look at the bar. At my nails. At anything else. When I glance back toward him, however, he’s still looking at me.
My heart beats a little faster. This time, I don’t break first. Instead, I decide to head his way. I walk right up to their table. “Hi.”
“The birthday girl herself!” Luca launches himself at me and pulls me into a tight hug. His cologne is sickly sweet and overpowering, and I nearly choke on it.
“Thanks, Luca,” I wheeze.
“Come! Sit with us! Girls, vamanos!” He ushers the two women out, and I scoot into the booth. I’m sitting between the two of them now. I pull at the hem of my dress a little, adjusting.
Archer says nothing. He just stares ahead, still as a gargoyle. Now that I’m here, he won’t look at me at all.
“What are you drinking?” Luca asks.
“Nothing.”
“Twenty-one! And drinking nothing! Here, have mine.”
He shoves his drink in my face. It’s an amber liquid, but all I can see are his lip marks on the glass. My brain immediately goes backwash, bacteria, spit.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve become a bit of a germaphobe. The only thing I can control is my own cleanliness, and sometimes, my brain starts to fixate. His glass makes my skin crawl.
But I can’t say that. Instead, I smile politely and say, “I’d prefer tequila, if you’re offering.”
“The birthday girl gets what she wants! Coming right up!”
Luca leaves the booth. Archer’s eyes follow him.
Now we’re alone. Just me and Archer.
For a while, we just let the music speak for us.
“Not a dancer?” I ask.
“I’m on duty.”
“Right.”
The stretch of emptiness between us is debilitating. The strobe lights turn his face blue, then red, then blue again.
The dance floor is washed in turquoise. It looks glassy, and then there’s movement across the floor, like a shadow running away from its body. It looks like a trick of an eye, until I see it—the dance floor is lined with glass. Large orange-and-red-spotted koi fish dart back and forth in the tank installed underneath the floor.
