Page 2 of Iridescent
“You mean how they treatedus.” I press a soft kiss to the back of his hand and hold it to my cheek. “Don’t downplay what it cost you just because they aimed at me too.”
His face shutters, but not quickly enough to hide the damage.
We went because Guinevere had called him home claiming she missed him. According to her, his absence was ruining her health, and she feared grief would kill her before she ever saw her son again. She spoke like a woman already arranging flowers for her own deathbed, and despite knowing better, Xavier capitulated.
As dinner crawled on, the truth became obvious. Guinevere didn’t call him home because she missed him. Sentiment might as well have been poison to her. She needed him because Sereno Group required financing for a London port redevelopment, and the family whose private investment arm controlled the deal wouldn’t take a Navarro call. Xavier, unfortunately for them, knew their only son from university.
Xavier refused outright. Alejandro Navarro’s expression hardened. “You insolent little ingrate,” he said, his voice a low, civil thing that curdled the room. “You forget yourself. I gave you a name, a roof, a future. You do not get to stand in my house, breathing the life I paid for, and pretend you owe me nothing.”
The audacity of it was so egregious I nearly cracked a molar from how hard I was gritting my teeth. Xavier had worked himself to the bone building Aureon from nothing, and not one of them had called to ask if he was eating, sleeping, surviving over the years. Only Elise, whenever Guinevere permitted her the latitude to reach for him.
What disturbed me most wasn’t Alejandro’s cruelty. It was the ease with which everyone absorbed it. Guinevere kept sipping her wine, one pale hand arranging food on Elise’s plate with suffocating precision. Lucien, newly appointed director of development at Sereno Group, sat beside her with his attention buried in his phone, too comfortable in the family rot to look up.
Alejandro kept going, throwing insult after insult, while Xavier remained impassive and remote, his silence somehow more damning than any defense he could’ve offered.
When Alejandro realized Xavier wouldn’t grant him the dignity of a response, he raised his hand.
The room narrowed to one terrible truth: this was what Xavier had beenraised inside. Not just distance.Violence.
I moved before the hit could land, catching Alejandro’s wrist mid-swing. The joint turned beneath my grip, delicate as a bird bone. One more degree, and I would’ve broken his fucking arm.
I almost did.
The fucked-up part is, I wanted to. The shock on Alejandro’s face fed a viciousness in me I knew should shame me. It didn’t. My injury was still fresh; even the suggestion of violence could make me tremble. But in that moment, I didn’t fucking care. I wanted him to feel it. The fear. The helplessness. The sick little revelation of realizing another person could decide how much pain your body survived.
Xavier stopped me before I could.
His disappointment was so palpable it lodged behind my ribs. That was the night he finally told me about his childhood—some of it, at least—and why he ran away from home at nineteen.
We’d been together three years by then, and his family remained a locked room between us. Every time I asked, his expression would shutter and he’d steer the conversation somewhere safer. I learned, eventually, not to knock too hard against doors he wasn’t ready to open. So when he finally let me inside, the relief was immeasurable. The truth wasn’t easy to hear—far from it—but he had trusted me with it.
“I remember every second of it. But this isn’t for them, Xavier. It’s for your sister. She needs you.”
My family is enormous, loud, and constitutionally incapable of minding their business—the antithesis of his. I may never fully understand what it cost Xavier to grow up without the certainty of being loved loudly. What I do understand is loyalty, and Elise is the one person in that family Xavier will never let himself abandon.
Besides, it will not be in that house.
The Sereno Annual Dinner is held every November, and this year, the Navarros have chosen a private ballroom at one of their estates, with board members, investors, donors, and half the family’s social circle in attendance.
Alejandro Navarro can be many things, but he is not stupid enough to strikehis son in public.
I don’t want to go. I’d rather drink broken glass than spend another evening breathing the same air as that family. But the last time I spoke to Elise, she pleaded with me to ask her brother to come.
Her voice has been sitting wrong with me ever since. That, and the fact that her phone has stayed unreachable.
If this is the only place Xavier can look his sister in the eye and know she is still herself in there, I will stand beside him.
“One hour,” I tell him. “We go, you see Elise, and we leave. If your father so much as raises his voice, we leave. If your mother starts on either of us, we leave. If you look at me once and say you want out, I will get you out before she finishes blinking.”
“You shouldn’t have to do that for me.”
“I know. I’m choosing to. Forus.”
He lets out a long, exasperated breath. “Amor.”
“Don’t amor me.” I abandon the stool and hoist myself onto the cold marble island, scooting across the polished surface until my knees hang over his side. He steps into the space between my thighs, bracing both hands on the countertop. Those golden eyes darken a shade with reluctant heat as I loop my arms around his neck, trying not to drown in the clean warmth of him and the faint trace of his cologne. “Come with me,” I whisper. “For Elise.”
His jaw flexes as he dips his head, lips brushing my ear. “You’re not playing fair, baby.”
