Page 86 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SHEWASSTILLSPENTin the aftermath of what had passed between them, her body vibrating with the pleasure that she’d found in his arms, and he was moving to the nightstand, grabbing his phone. “Yes?”

She listened intently, worry for her sister filling her chest.

“I see. Thank you.” He hung up the phone. “Your father is dead.”

She did not know what she had expected to feel under the weight of such an announcement.

But the burst of joy that went through her was not expected. Still, she supposed it was fair.

He had threatened her baby, and he was gone.

He was gone. All the power that he’d had all this time over her life, over her choices, over her safety, and he was gone.

“What happened?”

“He decided to have a gunfight with the police rather than going quietly. It is better this way, Jessie. Even from prison, he could have...”

“I know,” she said. “I do. I... I know that it’s for the best. I’m not sad.”

“Good,” he said. “It’s a good thing, too, that I am confident now that I’m not without feeling because I might’ve thought so now. It’s cold-blooded to be happy that your father is dead, I suppose.

“But it’s for our baby. I am happy for our child that he won’t be there to cast a shadow over their life.”

“No. He is gone.”

And she realized then they didn’t need to stay married. Because she was safe. Maren was safe.

There were choices now.

Choices she’d never had before.

This was real freedom.

“I’m free,” she said.

“You are,” he agreed.

And she looked at Ewan, and she knew that his father’s death had not brought that same freedom.

She wished that she could fix it. That she could break open the thing inside him that still held them in chains, but she didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t know how.

She felt helpless then. Helpless to do anything but hold on to him. “I love you,” she said. “I want to say it now, now that I have all the choices in the world. All the freedom in the world. Nothing is hanging over me, and nothing holding me back. I love you.”

“Jessie...”

“Why don’t you feel the same? Why did your father dying not make you feel this? Because I no longer live underneath his shadow, and neither do you.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“Why not? Why does he get to decide who you are, what you are? He was cruel, unimaginably so. He left a little boy to wallow in his grief, and he caused him more pain.”

“I thought that when my father died, I thought that when I got my revenge on him, everything would be right. But it wasn’t. I was left with nothing more than emptiness, and do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because my mother is still dead. He did not kill her. My brother is still dead, and he did not kill him. It was...the hand of fate. I don’t know. But they are dead, and there is nothing in this whole world that I could do to fix it. Revenge did not fix it. Nothing can. The world is the same as it ever was for me.”

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