Page 68 of Iridescent
“You were the closest thing he had to a son.”
Silence settles over the room.
I look away first, out through the floor-to-ceiling glass, my jaw locking so hard it aches. Outside, the sky has darkened to ink.
My marriage. My family. Isabel. Eduardo’s estate. Less than twenty-four hours, and everything has gone to hell.
I turn back to her. “When did my mother know?”
“I told her yesterday. We met with the notaire this morning.” Isabel presses her lips together, like she already knows how that sounds. “I shouldn’t have said anything, but I was upset, and she sounded so…” She swallows. “Kind. Concerned. And after everything she said, I came to find you. She told me you wouldn’t refuse Papá’s wishes.”
Right.
I place my elbows on the desk and brace my head between my hands. Getting any closer to this will only make the damage worse.
A slight touch on my face snaps me out of my exhaustion and confusion at once.
I knock her hand away, not caring if it slams against the damn wood.
She winces, rubbing at her wrist. “I-I’m sorry. I was trying to see… what happened to your face?”
My anger surges up, instant and monstrous, crashing through me with a force I didn’t know I was capable of.
I glare at her. At the fucking audacity. At the way she still doesn’t seem to understand the line she keeps crossing. I should’ve shut it down in the car yesterday, the second she pulled that stunt. But I made the mistake of showing restraint, knowing the state she was in. Clearly, that was my mistake.
“Do not touch me again,” I say, my voice low enough to make her go still. “Yesterday, I let it pass. That was consideration, not permission. I’m married, Isabel. Get that through your head, and do not make me repeat myself.”
Tears gather in her eyes again, but they stirnothing in me.
“I promised Eduardo I would see you protected. That promise still stands. But do not confuse that with anything else. Do you understand me?”
She nods, biting her bottom lip, and when she finally speaks, the words come out low and unsteady. “You hate me, don’t you? You always have. Since we were kids. You hate me for everything that happened, and now you’re going to leave me, just like everyone else did.”
I don’t know what she expects me to say. Hate is too simple a word for whatever sits between us. Hate would require heat. Choice. What I feel when I look at her is older and colder than that—duty, fatigue, and a debt that never stopped collecting.
I have known Isabel since I was seven, back in the coastal town in Spain where our families decided familiarity was close enough to fate. She had always been sensitive, easily overwhelmed, soft in a way that made people protective of her. Until today, I thought that softness, along with how close our families were, was the reason mine wanted us together. Maybe that was part of it. But by the time I was old enough to object, her mother was dead, mine had already turned expectation into obligation, and saying no would have made me the villain in a story I’d never been given the power to rewrite.
We became official at nineteen. At least that is what our families called it. In truth, it was never what she wanted it to be. That same year, my father beat me until part of my scalp split open because I’d refused to become the son he wanted, unlike Lucien, who had always known how to wear obedience like virtue. That was the night I finally walked out of that house, emptied my mother’s jewelry case, and fled back to Spain.
Eduardo found me a few weeks later, halfway through a part-time shift I’d taken while trying to get back into university and finish the economics degree I’d been forced to abandon. He took one look at me, told me to stop being proud, and dragged me home with him. I lived under his roof from nineteen until twenty-three, long enough to finish my degree.
During those years, refusing Isabel outright felt even more impossible. Eduardo had given me shelter, and I knew exactly what it would look like if I repaid that by humiliating his daughter. So I stayed, and I let the thing exist in name more than substance. I told myself time might do what duty had not,that affection might grow where obligation had taken root first. But every time Isabel reached for more, I gave her the same answer: not yet. We never got past that. Maybe some part of me knew we never would.
By twenty-three, she was offered a postgraduate conservation placement in Greece. She took it, and whatever had existed between us ended there. Not long after, I left for London to begin my master’s in finance.
A year later, at twenty-four, I met my wife. Until her, I had never understood why people spoke about love as if it were something worth destroying yourself for. Yara made me want the kind of life I’d long ago taught myself not to reach for—a home that felt warm when I walked into it, children with her eyes and my name who would grow up knowing what safety felt like and never fear the sound of their father coming down the hall. A life that belonged to me because I chose it. One look at her, and the future stopped feeling like a sentence. It started feeling like something I would burn the world down to keep. I loved her with a force that should’ve warned me. Instead, it drove me into several stupid decisions that still haunt me.
After I proposed, I went back to that house because by then my mother had started reaching for me again, and some damaged part of me wanted to believe I could walk back in as a man they could no longer control. Maybe I wanted to see whether they would look at me differently now. They didn’t. All I did was drag my wife into the line of fire.
I stare at the folder in front of me and let out a slow breath. Eduardo had done too much for me to dismiss this out of hand. But obligation has limits, and mine ends where my wife begins.
“Your father entrusted me with seeing his instructions carried out, and I will honor that. But from this point forward, every matter concerning the estate goes through the notaire and my counsel. No private meetings. No calls. No messages. You will have the legal protection your father intended. What you will not have is personal access to me.”
“Xavi.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Please don’t say that. I’m trying so hard to be strong right now. I have no one left.”
“You have my mother.”
Her eyes widen.
