Chapter 1 - The Bio-Hazard of Bloodlines
The plastic sandwich bag felt heavier than the solid gold Rolex on Ethan Blackwood’s wrist.
Through the cheap, condensation-fogged plastic, his twenty-three-year-old face stared back at him. It was a mugshot of his own desperation. He remembered the exact smell of that clinic—chlorine, cheap vinyl, and the clinical humiliation of selling his genetic material for five hundred dollars to pay off his final semester of pre-med before he abandoned medicine for the cutthroat, high-margin world of venture capital.
"Who gave you this?" Ethan’s voice didn’t sound like his own. It was the dry, rasping tone of a man who had just realized the foundation of his skyscraper was built over a sinkhole.
"We told you," Tyler said, his tiny frame shuddering so violently that his wet sneakers squeaked against the Italian marble foyer. "Mom did. She kept it in the locked tin under her bed. With the clinic receipts."
"And the contract," Ryan added, his blue eyes—Ethan’s eyes, wide, hyper-focused, and terrifyingly intelligent—staring unblinkingly. "The one that said 'Donor #8841-B'. That’s you, isn’t it?"
Ethan didn’t answer. His mind was calculating, executing a rapid-fire risk assessment. This is a setup. A high-level corporate extortion scheme. He was currently in the middle of a hostile takeover of Vanguard Biogenics. His enemies knew his medical history. They knew about his brief, disastrous marriage to Victoria Vance, a woman whose family defined old New York money and even older malice. Victoria had divorced him five years ago, claiming his infertility was a "genetic insult" to her lineage.
But Victoria was dead. She had died in a private helicopter crash over the Swiss Alps eighteen months ago.
Or did she?
"Come inside," Ethan ordered, his tone clipping the air like shears. "Now."
He didn’t offer them hot cocoa. He didn’t wrap them in cashmere blankets. He ushered them into his sterile, silver-and-white kitchen and immediately pulled two sterile cotton swabs from a first-aid kit in the pantry.
"Open," Ethan commanded.
Tyler looked at the swab, then at his brother. "Is that for a DNA test?"
"You're smart for an eight-year-old," Ethan murmured, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"We're nine," Ryan corrected, opening his mouth without hesitation. "And we know we look like you. We don't want your money, Mr. Blackwood. We want your blood."
Ethan paused, the swab hovering inches from the boy’s cheek. "My blood?"
"Mom has acute myeloid leukemia," Tyler said, his voice dropping to a whisper that cut through the sound of the rain lashing against the glass. "She’s HLA-identical to us, but her bone marrow is dead. The doctors at Bellevue said the donor registry is empty. They said... they said if we had a biological father, his match probability would be the only thing left. But she wouldn't look for you. She said she signed a paper promising never to find you."
"So you stole the file," Ethan deduced, his chest tightening.
"We didn't steal it," Ryan said, pulling a damp, folded piece of letterhead from his wet jacket. "We found where she hid it. And we found this newspaper clipping of you. It says you're worth three billion dollars. We don't care about the billions. Can you save her?"
Ethan took the letterhead. It wasn’t from a standard fertility clinic. The logo at the top read: Vance Genetic Research Initiative.
His breath caught. Vance. His ex-wife’s family clinic. The one he had donated to when he was a broke student—years before he had even met Victoria.
Suddenly, the security panel on his kitchen wall flashed red.
A high-priority alert bypassed his silent mode. A text message from an unknown, encrypted number appeared on the screen, reflecting in the dark polished granite countertop:
May you like
"Do you like your Christmas presents, Ethan? They have your eyes. But they have my blood. Let’s see which one runs out first."
Ethan’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket. The caller ID read: VICTORIA VANCE.
