Page 1 of Iridescent
Prologue
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
“Did she pick up?”
Xavier stands on the other side of the kitchen island, his phone clenched in one hand. His eyes lift to mine as I settle onto the stool, and his expression tightens my stomach before he says a word.
“Voicemail.” He manages a faint smile, but the line creasing his forehead says otherwise.
“Did you try texting her?”
He angles the lit screen toward me. A thread of messages fills it—some read, most unanswered. “Tenth one this week. Either she’s overwhelmed, asleep, or my mother is managing her again.”
Three months.
Three months since Guinevere last allowed Xavier to see his sister without standing within earshot, and now even Elise’s phone has become another door closed in his face.
A breath leaves me, tight with frustration. “She needs help, Xavier. Guinevere can’t keep deciding how much of the world Elise is allowed to survive.”
Even saying it aloud makes me recoil. Elise isn’t incapable. Frightened, yes. Traumatized, absolutely. But not incompetent. She is twenty-one years old, a grown woman, and Guinevere still treats her fear as proof of ownership. She has made a religion out of her daughter’s fragility, worshipping it when it obeys her and weaponizing it the second anyone suggests Elise deserves a life beyond those walls.
What she needs is air. Autonomy. A chance to actually live.
“You know what happens when I try to bring in another specialist.” Xavier sets his phone aside, disdain hardening the gold-brown of his eyes. “My mother thanks them for their concern, dismisses them by lunch, and spends the rest of the week convincing Elise that wanting her to get better means we don’t love her as she is.”
Right.
Elise has been terrified of the world beyond that house since the kidnapping, and Xavier has spent years trying to get her real help. The best trauma specialists. Private psychiatrists. Exposure therapists. Anyone his money can bring to the Riviera. Guinevere refuses them all with the same benign smile. Elise is her life, she says. Her daughter. Her miracle. Her responsibility.
I shudder at that and take a sip from the glass of water Xavier has barely touched. He works a hand through his thick, damp hair, leaving the dark strands in disarray, and my eyes follow the beads of water trailing down the side of his throat to the collar of his white T-shirt.
He got back from work an hour ago, showered in time for dinner, but I doubt either of us has the appetite for it now.
My shoulders sink as I take in the worry carved into the hard planes of his face.
Elise was my first glimpse into the anatomy of his relationship with hisparents. He spoke about her often, but never them. Not really. They spent most of Xavier’s childhood absent from his life, oppressively present in hers, and indulgent with Lucien, the son raised to inheritSereno Group. No one had to explain the hierarchy to me. It was everywhere.
If not for the slight resemblance between the siblings, I might’ve wondered if my husband had been dropped into that family by accident.
Xavier refuses to exhume his childhood for anyone, least of all himself. What little I know lives in the ink mapped across his back and arms, in the scars he never explains, in the way certain questions make his body go taut.
There are entire histories buried under his skin. Ones I am desperate to understand, if he ever lets me close enough to unearth them.
I reach for his hand and lace our fingers together, staring at our wedding rings as they glint beneath the recessed kitchen lights. His hand dwarfs mine, broad and warm around my smaller fingers, the matching bands making the difference between us feel almost sacred. A quiet smile finds my mouth.
For better, for worse.
“The annual dinner Elise mentioned.” I tip my head back, taking him in. “Let’s go this year.”
“Fuck no.” His answer is immediate, tension locking across his broad shoulders. Still, he doesn’t pull his hand from mine. “I don’t want you anywhere near them. You know how they treated you that night.”
Don’t I?
Xavier took me to meet his parents, and the Navarro family made sure I understood how unwelcome I was. Not with anything so merciful as a direct insult. No, they were too well-bred for that.
They refused to get my name right. Let their smiles cool the second Xavier looked away. Asked whether boxing had left me with “any ambitions beyond bruises,” then laughed it off over wine.
I was slower than I’m proud of to realize I wasn’t his fiancée to them. I was an inconvenience they were waiting for him to outgrow.
