Chapter 2
Maya
“Tie it tighter, do something right for once, Maya,” Valeria hisses, trying her absolute best to pull her eyebrows together to show her anger. The Botox makes it impossible.
I have no idea why she’s even using it; she’s only twenty-seven.
She’s young. The toxin only serves to age her.
After every doctor's appointment where she gets more of that poison injected into her skin, she comes swaying home, unable to wait even a single second before taunting me with her new face. If she thinks I’d be jealous, she’s dead wrong.
I’m still twenty-five. Wrinkles are the last thing I fear.
Her, on the other hand? I’m completely terrified of her.
Especially when she’s in one of these unpredictable moods.
I pray to escape this room with my dignity intact.
Aware that her frozen face has failed to convey her frustration, she turns to her hands, clicking her fingers at me like I'm a dog.
“Faster, Maya! We don’t have an eternity,” she huffs.
I sigh, using all my strength to tug the silk draping from her back, watching the corset of her dress cinch her waist into an impossibly small ring.
God, I know that hurts. Her breaths come out short, and I could swear her eyes roll back into her head for a split second from the pure lack of oxygen.
I instinctively widen my stance to catch her if she passes out, but she just swats me away like a nuisance.
She truly is a vision, though. She’s wearing a turquoise gown with every single inch of the fabric meticulously stitched with glittering Swarovski stones.
Her bleached-blond hair is curled to perfection, reaching all the way down to her butt.
The makeup she has on is elegant, not overdone at all, enhancing her doll-like features instead of overwhelming them. She looks like a masterpiece.
Then, she hits me over the head with one of her makeup brushes. Hard. I didn’t even do anything.
“How about you go get yourself together instead of staring at me like a creep, Maya?” She mumbles, her lips pursed around her lipstick.
Yeah, right. Like I have a choice. I’m coming with.
I tried my best to get out of it, but Graham was insistent.
Just like he’s insistent every single time.
I can’t really say no to the powerful man whose roof I’m currently living under.
So off I go to these stupid events, surrounded by these stupid, empty rich people, feeling completely out of place. Like I don’t belong anywhere.
Because I don’t.
“I have no idea why he keeps insisting you come with. You ruin our image, in my opinion,” Valeria continues, checking her reflection from another angle.
“You’re just… so ordinary. Everything about you is ordinary.
I hear them whisper, asking who the nobody is that keeps accompanying us to these events.
I never tell them you’re my sister. Why can’t you just stop being…
” She pauses, searching for the exact words she knows will cut the deepest into my chest. “Ordinary. Like a plain sheet of paper. Like nothingness.”
I quickly turn around so she doesn’t see the tears welling in my eyes, desperately trying to compose myself.
I’d love to think that she’s too busy with her makeup to notice—but she notices everything.
She relishes in my pain. My pain, to her, is like water to a parched man.
She feeds off it. She needs it to survive.
And the worst fucking part is that nothing she says is inherently wrong. On the contrary, she’s right. I am nothingness. Ordinary. A plain sheet of paper, just as she calls it.
I count inside my head to keep the breakdown at bay.
One. I’m going to get out of here soon.
Two. I am enough. I am worthy. I don’t need to constantly prove my right to exist.
Three. She’s just miserable. So she wants me to be miserable, too.
Swallowing down the tightening in my throat, I finally force out enough strength to speak. “I’m sorry, Valeria. I’ll try my best not to embarrass you or your husband.”
If my unpolished nails were any longer, they’d do some serious damage to my palms from how hard I'm clenching my fists.
“Doubt it,” she laughs, shaking her head. “Off you go, go get dressed. Wear black—it’ll hide the fact that you’ve gained a few pounds.”
The minute I finally set foot outside her bedroom, I can actually breathe.
Fuck. Valeria is like fire. She’s gorgeous, but she burns.
She kills. She sucks all the oxygen out of the room, leaving everyone else gasping for air.
What’s the benefit of being beautiful if you suffocate everybody around you?
That, I shall never know.
But when I step into my own room in their massive mansion, the air gets trapped in my throat all over again.
There is a dress laid out across my bed.
My eyes widen to the size of saucers when I realize what it is. It’s vintage Versace. It’s a dress that Valeria would have sold one of her own kidneys for. She talked our ears off about it for a solid week, completely obsessing over it.
But it wasn't gifted to her. Her millionaire husband bought it for me.
My trembling fingers find the small card resting on the fabric, and my heart stops completely as I read Graham's handwriting on the note:
“My dear Maya, ’it’ll look better on you in every universe. In every life. And even if a thousand women wore it, you’re the only one who would leave a mark.”