Page 3 of Cruel Riches

1

Alexis

5 weeks earlier

“What if it all goes wrong?”

My sister Sascha’s forehead was lined with concern, and her eyes were wide.

I patted her shoulder. “It’ll be fine,” I said, even though my stomach was twisting nervously.

Today, we were meeting with our estranged grandparents. Estranged probably wasn’t the right word for it, though. Complete strangers was a more apt term.

They were my mother’s parents, and they hadn’t seen her since she was fifteen years old, which meant we’d never met them. They knew we existed, because my mother had sent them brief letters about us when we were born, but that was it. We’d never heard from them, and they’d never tried to see us.

The two of them came from ‘respectable’ families on Avalon Island—which meant old money—and they’d tried to raise their three children in the same manner they were accustomed to. For my mom, that meant they were overbearing, far too strict, and massively controlling.

Her siblings seemed to receive much better treatment than her, and her parents constantly gaslighted her into believing it was her own fault. She was a problem child, they said, and that meant she deserved all the ridiculously over-the-top rules, curfews, and bans from having friends outside of their ‘appropriate’ social circles.

When she was fifteen, she couldn’t take it anymore, and she ran away in the middle of the night. Her parents barely even looked for her. They asked around for a few days, and then they cut off her access to any of their credit cards and told everyone they knew that she was simply having a ‘wild phase’.

That so-called wild phase lasted forever.

Mom floated between friends’ houses for a few months, essentially homeless, and she switched herself to a public school, seeing as her parents refused to pay for her elite prep school anymore. When she was sixteen, she moved in with a close friend she made at that school—Peter Covington. He and his family loved her like she was their own, and she thrived under their roof. She received good grades in her senior year and was accepted into a small art school in Avalon City, and Peter got into a journalism program at Blackthorne University.

By then, the two of them were no longer friends. They’d fallen in love. They finished their education, got married, and moved to Thunder Bay, where they had Sascha and me.

Thunder Bay was a nice little town on the southeast of the island, solidly middle-class and well away from Mom’s stiff parents, and we had an idyllic childhood there.

Until we didn’t.

When I was nine and Sascha was twelve, we were forced to flee the island with our mother. Our father had been accused of the most heinous crime ever committed on the island, and that made all of us persona non grata.

People didn’t care that my sister and I were just kids. They didn’t care if we thought he was innocent. To them, we were just the relatives of the Blackthorne Butcher, and that meant we were guilty by association. As if the desire to murder was contagious, and we might snap at any moment and follow in our father’s footsteps.

It was so bad that we had to change our names to avoid the constant media hounding and death threats from random people, even after we moved to the mainland. My name used to be Alexandra Covington, but from the age of nine onwards it was Alexis Livingston.

Sascha—who used to be Sarah—and I spent the rest of our childhoods in northern California, hundreds of miles away from Avalon Island and its hateful citizens.

Now we were back.

Mom thought we were crazy for wanting to return, but we had our reasons. Besides, it had been ten years since all the shit with our dad went down. No one would recognize us. Especially with our dyed hair and different names.

Sascha kept fretting. “I bet they’ll hate us.”

“Stop,” I said, holding up a palm. “They wouldn’t have agreed to meet us today unless they wanted to get to know us, right?”

“I guess so. But what if they think we’re too much like Dad?”

My lips tightened. “Would that really be the worst thing?”

“Sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—”

I sighed and cut her off. “It’s fine. I get it. But don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“I hope so,” she said gloomily.

I raised a brow. “This was your idea, remember? We can cancel if you don’t want to do it.”

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