Twenty-one-year-old Dr. ESSIE OPENWATERS is brilliant, beautiful and a loner. Raised by her Kootenai Indian father in an abandoned wooden shack, Essie grew up friendless, motherless, and poor. She was stronger, faster, and more intelligent than her classmates. A year after her father was killed, she received an early scholarship to college. Five years later she earned her second PhD at Stanford University and began her dream job as a research scientist in a national laboratory. While struggling to adapt to meet the laboratory’s teamwork expectations, Essie’s life flips upside down when her discovery pits her against a psychopathic billionaire who perceives Essie’s death as the only way to protect deep secrets that could destroy him.