Chapter 4 - Blood Family
I do not remember the drive back to the estate.
I remember red lights.
I remember Elena gripping the dashboard when Prescott took a corner too fast.
I remember calling the house seventeen times and getting no answer from Adrian.
The eighteenth call connected.
Dr. Shah picked up.
“The boys are safe,” she said before I could speak. “Adrian Mercer is in the downstairs salon. Security would not let him enter the medical wing.”
I looked at Prescott.
He exhaled once.
“Good.”
Not good.
Nothing was good.
But the sentence kept me from ordering the car through the front gates at full speed.
When we arrived, Adrian stood beside the fireplace with a glass of bourbon in his hand.
He was forty-one, six months younger than me, and had spent our whole lives making danger look like a dinner invitation. We had grown up three houses apart. When my father died, Adrian had been the one who sat beside me until sunrise. When I took control of the Mercer organization, he had managed the corporations, the unions, the legitimate holdings, and enough of the illegal ones to know where every body was buried.
Some of those bodies, I now realized, might have been buried by him.
He looked at Elena first.
“So that’s her.”
“You know her?” I asked.
“No. But Genevieve mentioned a lab technician who had become inconvenient.”
Elena went rigid.
I closed the distance between us.
“Why were you at Latham?”
Adrian sipped his drink.
“Because Genevieve asked me to be.”
“Lie again.”
He smiled faintly.
“There he is.”
“Who?”
“My cousin. I was starting to think grief had made you soft.”
I knocked the glass from his hand.
It shattered against the hearth.
Prescott closed the doors behind us.
Adrian looked down at the broken glass, then back at me.
“You want the truth? Fine. Genevieve discovered a research program Franklin had been involved with. She thought it had something to do with the boys’ future care. She became obsessive.”
“She predicted their leukemia.”
“She predicted everything. That was Genevieve. Every shadow was a conspiracy until one finally killed her.”
Elena stepped forward.
“She wasn’t paranoid.”
Adrian looked at her as if she were furniture.
“You were paid to file specimens.”
“I was paid to keep records. That’s why I know Dr. Yates altered them.”
His eyes flickered.
Tiny movement.
But enough.
“You knew,” I said.
He shrugged. “I knew Franklin cleaned up sensitive files.”
“Why?”
“Because the research program wasn’t authorized the way it should have been. Wealthy families funded it privately. The results could have ruined institutions.”
“And you protected him.”
“I protected us.”
That word.
Us.
Men like Adrian loved that word when they meant themselves.
I placed Genevieve’s letter on the table.
He did not touch it.
“She wrote your name.”
“I can see that.”
“She said you knew.”
His face lost a degree of color.
“Knew what?”
“That her crash wasn’t an accident.”
For the first time, Adrian stopped performing.
It lasted maybe two seconds.
Then the mask returned.
“You’re grieving all over again. I understand.”
“Did you kill my wife?”
“No.”
“Did Franklin?”
“No.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
I grabbed his jacket.
Prescott said my name once.
Not to stop me.
To remind me my sons were upstairs.
I released Adrian.
He smoothed his lapels.
“You want somebody to blame because that makes this simpler. But the boys are dying from cancer, Lawson. Not from me. Not from Franklin. Cancer.”
Elena said, “Their treatment records were altered.”
Adrian turned on her. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Dr. Shah’s voice came from the doorway.
“She knows enough.”
Everyone looked at her.
She held a tablet.
“I compared the twins’ pharmacy records with the molecular screening Elena brought. There are inconsistencies.”
Adrian’s expression changed.
“What kind?”
“The kind that require immediate reporting.”
I stepped toward her.
“Will they live?”
She met my eyes.
“I found an alternative treatment pathway that should have been considered months ago. The old St. Catherine’s samples may make it faster and safer. If they still exist.”
“Where are they?”
“The archive was transferred when St. Catherine’s program closed. According to the chain of custody, all pediatric research specimens went to Northlake Biologics.”
Prescott knew the name.
“So do I,” I said.
Northlake Biologics occupied three sterile buildings near the river and officially manufactured tissue-culture materials.
Unofficially, Adrian Mercer owned thirty-two percent through shell companies.
Adrian stared at the floor.
The room became silent enough to hear the grandfather clock in the hall.
I said, “You own the place where my sons’ samples went.”
He looked up.
“I own part of a holding company that invested in Northlake.”
“Same thing.”
“No.”
“Where are the samples?”
“I don’t know.”
I moved closer.
“Then learn.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”
That answer frightened me more than a confession.
“What does that mean?”
Adrian rubbed a hand across his mouth.
“It means Franklin made deals after Genevieve died. Northlake took in private research material. Some of it went off-book.”
Elena whispered, “He sold patient samples?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Dr. Shah’s face hardened. “You didn’t have to.”
My phone buzzed.
A message from the forensic team.
We recovered deleted video from the estate generator corridor.
I opened the attachment.
The footage showed the intruder entering through the hidden service tunnel.
Thirty seconds later, another man appeared behind him.
He did not enter the generator room.
He handed the intruder an access card, pointed toward the medical wing, and walked away.
The image was grainy, but the face was clear enough.
Prescott leaned over my shoulder.
“Jesus.”
Elena covered her mouth.
Adrian did not ask to see the screen.
That told me everything.
I held the phone up anyway.
The man in the video was Adrian’s personal driver.
Adrian closed his eyes.
“Lawson—”
“You have one chance.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
My chest went cold.
“What wasn’t?”
He opened his eyes.
“The outage.”
I waited.
He looked toward the ceiling, toward the floor above us, where my sons were fighting for time.
“I sent someone to retrieve the report and the necklace before you understood what they meant.”
Elena whispered, “You tried to steal evidence from dying children.”
“I was trying to stop a war inside this family.”
I stepped so close our foreheads nearly touched.
“You started one.”
Adrian’s voice fell.
“You still don’t understand. If those samples are where I think they are, Franklin won’t let you take them.”
“Why?”
“Because they prove what Genevieve discovered.”
“What?”
He looked at me with something I had never seen in him before.
Fear.
“Your boys were not the first children Franklin treated this way.”
Upstairs, one of the medical alarms began to ring.
May you like
Adrian’s face crumpled.
“And if you expose him, you expose me too.”
