An empire Marnie Courtland was about to bring toppling down on his head.
“She was the principle news anchor of his highest rated news show,” Josh said, the loathing dripping from his voice. “Progressive, tough, fair-minded—she had the perfect reputation. Dad taught her everything he’d learned working his way up and then gave her free rein. Only he started to get complaints.”
Danny’s eyebrows went up. “Explain?”
“Well, she apparently skipped that ethics class that journalists are supposed to take. She pressured sources, threatened to blackmail the people who had evidence that disproved her story, and left a paper trail of some truly batshit, unhinged emails and direct messages that people brought to Dad because he was the man in charge of the network.”
“His circus,” Danny said, because that’s how Felix had referred to it during those covert, hidden, lost years when they met once every couple of months for the weekends that kept Danny barely fed enough on Felix’s presence, his love, his skin. The years of being a dirty little secret and of drinking to cover the pain.
“Yes, and his monkeys.” Josh’s lips twisted sardonically. “He said that a lot. But he had proof—has proof—that she’s a freakshow nightmare of bad behavior and bullying.”
“But he’d mentored her from the beginning,” Danny said. “So he felt responsible.” Just because he’d broken up with Felix hadn’t meant he’d stopped watching him work. Marnie Courtland’s onscreen presence, her turns of phrase, her woman-on-the-street approach, all of it had the earmarks of Felix’s time in the anchor’s seat. Fox had spent a good ten years there, and had made the news station particularly his own by hard work and by learning a trade he’d only pretended to have in order to land the job. Bitterly, Danny remembered how they’d laughed while planning the original grift on Josh’s mom. They’d tell her Felix was a journalism major. All the rich Americans in Europe were journalism majors: lots of syllables, not a lot of job opportunities. It was perfect.
Little did they know the grift would put Felix in a position with Josh’s grandfather that would let him work his way through the ranks as a junior reporter and then an anchor and then a program director, turning Hiram Dormer’s most neglected businesses into a Chicago entertainment staple.
“Yeah,” Josh said, his betrayal palpable. “He did. Like he’d made this monster, so it was up to him to sort of gentle it into the real world.”
“Unlike the original Frankenstein,” Danny said, lips twisting. It had been their only paperback that first summer, and sometimes he wished they’d had something longer—hell, Pride and Prejudice would have at least made them laugh. But Frankenstein it had been, and apparently Felix had learned the lesson too well.
“I hate that fuckin’ book,” Josh said brutally. “Anyway, so Dad pulls her into his office, tells her straight up that people have the goods on her and she might want to get ahead of the situation, issue apologies, call in a lawyer, and she says, ‘You mean you’re not going to back me?’”
Danny’s eyes went wide. “That’s… ovarian. Very, very ovarian.”
Josh smirked. “Well, I hope I can be that ovarian if I ever get busted, because my balls would have been shriveling into little hairy raisins at that point. But not her. Dad said, ‘Marnie, what you were doing was illegal!’” Josh scrubbed his face with his hands. “You have to hear him tell this story,” he said brokenly, “because I’ve heard it a dozen times. He told Mom, me, his lawyers, friends. And every time he tells it, his voice just… wobbles, and he’s surprised. Every damned time he tells it. He tells her she was wrong—she’d been caught blackmailing people, bullying them, threatening them with her social media platform, and he doesn’t want that behavior representing his news network or his company as a whole. And she looks him dead in the eye, musses up her hair, and screams, ‘Harassment!’ Then she runs through the newsroom screaming, ‘Felix Salinger threatened my job if I told the truth! He’s been plagiarizing my work for years—he uses and harasses every woman who works for him.’”
Danny snorted, hating to even hear it, because it was so antithetical to everything Felix had ever stood for.
“Yeah, I know,” Josh muttered. “She was standing right on the soundstage where they were filming live. She finished it up by sobbing, ‘I just couldn’t take the lies anymore.’”
“I saw that part,” Danny said, his voice hard. “Just like the rest of the world. Sixty thousand times. Didn’t believe it once.”
Josh’s face crumpled a little, and he almost wrecked his perfect outfit by wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Danny produced a handkerchief from one of his pockets and handed it over, his own eyes burning.
The story had broken two weeks ago, and the media frenzy had only gotten worse. Marnie had gotten up in front of national TV and told the world that Felix Salinger was a backbiting misogynist, a harasser, a bully, and Felix—Felix had twenty-year-old secrets to hide, including the biggest one of all.
He wasn’t Josh’s father.
Josh’s entire inheritance—and all of his and Julia’s social standing—would come into question if that came out, and Danny knew Felix. Just because he was a criminal didn’t mean he was a bad man. And he’d do anything to ensure Josh’s future and protect Julia’s good name.
“He can’t go up against her,” Danny said, massaging his temples with his fingertips. “If people look into his past, before his interaction with Marnie, they’d find… oh so many things.”
“I’d give up everything,” Josh said, looking miserable. “I’d give up the money, the property, the house. But… but it’s not even mine to give up.”
“It’s your mother’s,” Danny said softly. Even when things had been at their worst—when Danny had felt like every breath filled his lungs with broken glass—he’d never blamed Julia Dormer-Salinger. Her father had been a monster—he’d left the works to Felix, who had turned the three stations into a network empire and insured her fortune for life. But if Felix lost his money and prestige, so did Julia. They could lose everything. “She doesn’t deserve to lose her home.” And even if she could keep the house, the things in Chicago that made it home—her work with the businesses, her work with charity foundations, her friends and acquaintances—those things would be gone.
“No,” Josh said. “She’s offered. She’s gathered her lawyers together—they have all Dad’s evidence, by the way. He’s got a rock-solid case for slander, malicious mischief, filing a false report. But Marnie’s created such a… a media juggernaut. It’s going to take a doomsday device to blow her up before she takes out the entire network. But her story was her only story. Now that Dad’s no longer running things at the station, they’ve got nobody bringing in contacts, and nobody will work with her—they all know she’s poison. The network is going to go bankrupt, and my parents are going to lose—”
“Everything,” Danny said.
“Dad already lost you,” Josh told him. “I… I don’t want him to lose what he’s worked so hard to build.”