Page 1 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

CHAPTER ONE

JESSIEHARGREAVEHADbeen taught to believe that there were two kinds of people. Thefrightenedand thefrightening.

Raised by a narcissistic, sociopathic millionaire crime lord, she and her sister Maren had been taught to hold the wants and needs of others in low esteem. All that mattered—all that could ever matter—was whatyouwanted. And what you could manipulate others into giving you.

Their soft, flighty mother had never been able to stand up to their father, and eventually she’d gone away. Off to greener pastures with easier rich men who didn’t demand quite so much in return for a life of luxury.

That left Jessie and her sister behind.

“I am frightened now. And we aren’t frightening,”she could remember Maren whispering tearfully after she sneaked into Jessie’s room the night their mother had left.

Poor Maren, who had the same peculiar mind as Jessie but with the focus skewed less toward facts and numbers and more toward human frailty and emotion. It overwhelmed poor Maren at times. Jessie felt like protecting her sweeter, softer sister was her greatest mission.

Eighteen months younger than she was, Maren was her baby sister, and Jessie would die for her if need be.

She just felt having minds like theirs meant no one should have to do anything half so dramatic as dying. They’d been given the gift of great thought. So they ought to be able to use it to solve their own problems.

“There must be a secret third option.”

She’d said that so pragmatically she’d believed herself instantly.

“What is it, Jessie?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

And so she had. They had.

They were neither frightened nor frightening. They had learned to thrive in the shadowy space between extremes.

They had become gray opportunists who used the frailties of those who fancied themselves asfrighteningagainst them.

Jessie hardly saw herself as Robin Hood, though she didonlyrob the rich. It was just she wasn’t handing out alms to the poor. Unless she consideredherselfa member of the poor. And hey, for a long time, she had been.

But she wasn’t now. Neither was her sister, thanks to all their work.

They’d spent the past three years playing in casinos and private high-stakes poker tournaments, amassing wealth, gambling it and turning it into yet more wealth.

This game was the last game.

She hadn’t learned much from her father, other than what a person ought not to do.

She and Maren had decided at twelve and thirteen that they wouldn’t be part of their father’s games, but they’d also decided they’d have to have a clear path to escape before they tried to make a move.

Their father was like them. He didn’t miss anything. They’d have one shot; it would have to be perfect. They’d had to get IDs—their father had never provided them with any—birth certificates, falsified naturally—and figure out where they would stay.

They squirreled their contraband beneath the floorboards of their bedroom in their father’s compound, and then finally, they’d made a real plan of escape.

Their father used them to exploit banking systems—that was his world. He had an obscene amount of money and made more loaning it to people he could exploit for favors.

He used Maren and Jessie to help with those things.

Jessie could remember when her father had asked her to get all the info she could from talking to a certain man at a train station, and she had. She’d pretended to be lost and he’d talked to her to calm her down.

“His name is Marcus,”she’d told her father.“He has a granddaughter he loves very much. Her name is Eloise. She and her parents live in London.”

If only she’d known then how her father would use that information.

The images still haunted her. Every image did.

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