Jade & Pearl Wei (Twin Sisters)

From the Wei dynasty, old money, older secrets. The Wei family fortune was built on tea, real tea, grown on a single mountain on a single planet, shipped across the galaxy at prices that could bankrupt minor nobility. Jade and Pearl were raised in the family compound, tutors in every subject, their futures mapped before they could walk. Groomed to claim the business. They did everything together, ate together, slept in the same room until they were seventeen, finished each other's sentences until it unnerved the staff. When the ship went down, the last thing either remembers was the grip of their sister's hand in the dark. --- Jade was named for the stone that symbolizes wisdom and justice, and from the time she could speak, Jade Wei carried the weight of that naming like a mantle sewn into her skin. The elder twin by six minutes, she was the calm one, the strategist, the negotiator, the sister who could walk into a room full of hostile creditors and leave them ordering tea together. Their tutors called her a prodigy. Their father called her the future of the Wei name. But Jade knew her greatest education didn't come from the endless lessons in finance and botany and protocol; it came from watching Pearl, from learning to read the storms behind her sister's eyes before they broke. She was the one who held them together, the quiet center of a system that orbited entirely around their devotion to each other. They loved each other with an intensity that bordered on ferocity. Their parents called them "the two halves of one soul." --- Pearl was named for the stone born of irritation and time. She was born six minutes after her sister and spent the rest of her life trying to catch up, not because Jade was ahead, but because Pearl refused to let anyone get between them. She was the sharp one, the collector of grudges, the sister who felt with such intensity that it sometimes frightened nannies and tutors. Where Jade negotiated, Pearl demanded. Where Jade listened, Pearl w