Iridescent (The Eclipse Duet #1)

Prologue

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

“D id 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 his parents.

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 inherit Sereno 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.

“You mean how they treated us .” 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 been raised 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 strike his 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.