The Boss's Possession

The first bullet took out the whiskey glass. Dominic Holloway was ten, still in his school uniform, doing maths homework at a corner desk seventeen floors above the street when a professional came through the terrace door and killed his father. Patrick Holloway put himself between the window and the desk. The homework stayed in the leather folder until somebody threw it away. Years later, a reporter walks into a gala in a temp waitress uniform. Morgan Wren works for the Chronicle. She has published three pieces on Patrick Holloway's death and she does not believe the official version of any of them. What she wants is five minutes alone in a private study. What she gets is caught, with a listening device, by the son. He does not call the police. He offers her a job. *"My personal assistant quit this morning. The position starts Monday. Salary is seventy-five."* He has his reasons. Somebody inside his own company is feeding Raymond Shore information, and Dominic has decided that the reporter who broke into his study is the closest thing to a weapon he owns. She has hers. The inside of Holloway Industries is where the story is. What neither of them is ready for is a photograph in Patrick's handwriting, dated and labelled *Catherine Marchetti, 1987. The one who got away* — a woman with Morgan's jaw, Morgan's nose, Morgan's unafraid eyes. The other complication is Elena Marchetti, Morgan's sister, who has her own sealed record, her own debts, and a habit of breaking into the wrong offices. From there it runs through a loan shark's fine print, a silver sedan pulled over on the Tappan Zee, a safe that opens on a lie, a bomb, a hospital that turns them away and a hospital that does not. This is a contemporary billionaire romance built on a decades-old murder, in which the assistant is the investigator, the boss is the client and the mark at once, and the word on the last paper lantern belongs to neither of them. Closed-door, ending on a barge on the Hudson with a brother who has not called in three years and a sister with a pink pixie cut handing out hot chocolate.