"Mia, you've been like this since yesterday." His patience cracked, and beneath it was the cold authority of a man who ran the Jade Quarter, a man unaccustomed to being challenged in his own house. "Since you can't do much, the least I expect from you is to take care of the household, cook, and look presentable for me. Stop behaving as though any of this was a big deal."
"Yes." I pressed my knuckles against my mouth to muffle the sound of my breathing. "It was unimportant."
Yes, he had bought me a gift. One that had first adorned the neck of his childhood flame, worn against her skin, warmed by her pulse. And only when it went missing from his pocket would he have thought to offer it to me. A hand-me-down dressed up as devotion. Charity wrapped in a velvet box.
"I can never make you happy, no matter how hard I try." The tears fell freely now, but my voice held. "Also, Xavier. My favorite gemstones have been sapphires since I was a child. Never once in my life have I worn diamonds."
I ended the call and set the phone face-down on the conference table. The screen went dark. The room was silent.
And I sat there, alone, in the empire that was never mine.
After that night, I buried myself in work at the family's downtown offices, staying late enough that the cleaning crews learned my name. I rarely returned to the brownstone Xavier and I shared on the east side of the Jade Quarter. The distance unsettled him. I could tell by the clipped voicemails he left, each one a degree cooler than the last.
One afternoon, my phone buzzed with a number I knew too well. Jane Salvatore. My mother-in-law, a woman who had never once looked at me without the faintest curl of disgust on her painted lips, as though I were something unpleasant tracked in on the bottom of a shoe. She had always regarded me as a dirty orphan girl, unworthy of the Salvatore name, unworthy of breathing the same air as her precious son.
"Mia." Her voice came through the receiver like a razor drawn slowly across silk. "Xavier tells me you've been fighting with him. That it was your behavior that embarrassed us at the Valducci banquet. Even though you were born with nothing, no family, no one to teach you how to carry yourself, the least you could do is not drag my son down to your level."
She paused only long enough to inhale.