“Miss,” Melaina calls to me, and I need a couple of seconds to swallow my snarky mood before turning around with a polite smile on my face. I’m met with two pairs of very blue eyes staring at me. Their gazes drop to my hands, settling on the colorful kitten ornaments I made this week. Damalis blinks, and Melaina furrows her brows before speaking again. “I need two bottles of Rosa’s special honey.”
“Of course. Anything else?” I reply, nodding.
“And a hundred grams of the mixed dried fruits,” she adds.
“I’ll take a few vanilla beans,” Damalis says next, and I nod again as I move through the shop.
First, I grab Melaina’s fruit mix. Then Damalis’s vanilla beans. Finally, I step behind the counter and reach up to the shelf above my head, taking two bottles from the neatly lined row.
“Anything else, ladies?” I ask after packing their purchases along with everything they handed me in their baskets.
“I’ll take some of the cookies too,” Melaina says. “I promised myself I wouldn’t buy them this year because I’m on a diet, but they’re irresistible.”
She looks at the basket of decorative ornament balls on the counter almost sadly, as if the cookies themselves were actively coercing her into breaking her diet. Poor Melaina. I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.
Instead, I smile, because I understand the feeling—and the joy those cookies bring is absolutely worth the dietary slip. For most of my childhood, they were the reason Christmas was my favorite time of year.
Except for the four years I spent off the island attending college, I helped my mother make them every year—even back when she worked at the orphanage. Rosa Marchesi’s cookies are, without a doubt, irresistible.
“I’ll take some too,” Damalis announces, eyeing the basket with an expression completely different from her friend’s. While Melaina looks consumed by guilt for giving in to temptation, Damalis looks like she’s about to lick her lips. God, not laughing at them is becoming harder by the second.
I add the ornament balls to their bags and finish ringing up their purchases at record speed, determined to get them out of here before one of them says something irresistibly funny and I burst out laughing. It wouldn’t be out of malice—but I doubt they’d understand that, and I’ve just come home. The last thing I need is to become village gossip.
I let out a relieved breath when they walk out the shop door, leaving me alone—but the breath is quickly followed by a smile.
It’s good to be back.
CHAPTER 2
NERO ZANTHOS
I bring the coffee cup to my lips. The kitchen—bright with sunlight and the lights still on—is calm and quiet, by some miracle whose patron saint I don’t know the name of, but whom I should probably thank anyway.
Since I moved into this house, silence has always been a rare artifact, especially on the eve of any important event. I let out a long breath and lift my gaze from the counter to the white-paneled walls.
White is everywhere. On the walls, the furniture, the décor, the appliances. And yet, even after all these years, no matter how many times I see the color spread throughout the house, I still don’t understand my mother’s absolute belief that this kind of clinical elegance can be called sophistication. But it’s not as if I care.
Her footsteps sound in the hallway almost as if summoned by my thoughts. I know it’s her because no one else walks like Lysandra Zanthos—gliding, floating over the floor, as thoughtouching it were far too mundane a gesture, beneath her. Her look of disapproval arrives before the good morning.
“How many times do I have to tell you that you are not a servant who needs to eat in hiding in the kitchen, Nero? Why didn’t you have the table set earlier if you wanted breakfast?” she says, and the prejudice embedded in her words is something I will never grow used to, no matter how long I’ve been exposed to it.
It took a long time before I felt confident enough to try changing some of my adoptive mother’s perceptions. But after countless attempts she didn’t even acknowledge, I simply gave up for the sake of peaceful coexistence. I no longer reprimand her.
She’s an adult woman. She knows she’s wrong and insists on staying wrong. There’s nothing I can do about it—and I’m not required to participate—so I refuse to respond to her comment.
In silence, I rise from the stool and carry my now-empty cup to the sink. My peripheral vision perfectly captures the absolute horror spreading across my mother’s face as she watches me perform yet another of the banal gestures she believes to be beneath her—beneath us.
“I don’t spend a fortune paying staff so you can do their work, Nero!” she snaps. It’s almost funny. Almost.
Except it’s absurd. First, because if anyone knows how much the staff earns, it’s me—not Lysandra. Second, because it’s definitely not a fortune. And finally, because the belief that this justifies not doing the bare minimum—like putting my dish in the sink—is incomprehensible. But I say none of that.
“Good morning, Mother. How are you feeling today?” I ask, walking toward her. I reach her and place a gentle kiss on her forehead. She wraps her arms around me in a habitual embrace.
“Good morning. I’m worried—and as if that weren’t enough, you insist on behaving like the servants, testing my patience at this hour. Give me strenght, Nero,” she complains, tilting her head so her eyes can meet mine without loosening her arms, despite the tone she’s using to scold a thirty-year-old man.
Whether or not I should move out is a constant question in my mind. Over and over, though, I reach the same conclusion: no.
The house I came to live in when Lysandra and Konstantino Zanthos adopted me is large enough to offer space and privacy. That’s all I need.
