A Brother’s Blood

"What do you want?" he asked.

Adrian smiled without humor. "There he is. Every Blackwood problem has a purchase price."

"You came here knowing you might save your nephew and refused before hearing the risks. That makes this a negotiation. Name your terms."

"My terms are that you learn what your company did before my sister puts your name on Milo's chart."

Sloane stepped between them. "This is not the time."

"It was never the time. Dad's funeral wasn't the time. Your pregnancy wasn't the time. Then Milo got sick, and I was supposed to forget because Blackwood money bought a nice pediatric wing."

Rowan's face changed at the word Dad. "What happened to your father?"

Adrian turned on Sloane. "You didn't tell him."

She looked through the narrow glass panel in the door. A nurse adjusted Milo's pump. "I told him our father died."

"You said heart failure," Rowan replied.

"His heart failed after an experimental drug destroyed it."

Mara leaned forward. "Which drug?"

"BVX-17," Adrian said. "Blackwood Ventures funded the trial at Vale-Ashbourne Clinic. Dad was the principal investigator until three participants developed myocarditis. He tried to suspend enrollment. The sponsor threatened the clinic's credit line, and somebody altered the adverse-event reports. He dosed himself to prove the batch was contaminated."

Sloane had spent years refusing that final detail. "He took it because Adrian swapped his sample labels. Dad believed the dose had already cleared quality control."

Adrian flinched. "I was twenty-three. The lab director told me to relabel a stability sample. I didn't know it was going to him."

"You knew enough to hide the email."

"I found the email after he died."

Rowan's voice lowered. "When?"

"The week Sloane started writing to you. I sent copies to Blackwood compliance. Your office answered with a settlement threat and a nondisclosure agreement."

Theo opened his laptop. "Give me the date."

Adrian laughed. "Your signature was on the letter."

The typing stopped.

Sloane looked at Theo. His precise lawyer's face held for two seconds, then the color left it.

"I signed hundreds of outside-counsel notices," he said. "If the clinical report was routed as threatened litigation, I may not have seen the underlying file."

"You signed the threat," Adrian replied. "That was enough for us."

Rowan took the chair opposite Sloane's brother. "I was on the venture committee. I approved continued funding after the safety review. The report presented to us showed no treatment-related cardiac events."

"Convenient."

"Criminal, if someone falsified it."

"Your company buried my father. Now you want his son on a collection bed."

Sloane slapped both palms on the desk. "Milo is not Rowan's company. He is five. He paints dinosaurs with the wrong number of legs, and he thinks every nurse lives at the hospital. You can hate Rowan after you help him."

Adrian's eyes shone. "You choose them every time. Dad chose the clinic. You chose Rowan."

"I am choosing my child."

The words left a clean wound between them.

Mara gave Adrian the consent packet again. "A matched related donor is preferred, but we still need confirmatory high-resolution typing, infectious-disease screening, blood counts, and a physical exam. Most adult donors receive filgrastim for several days and donate peripheral blood stem cells by apheresis. Milo's protocol may favor marrow collected under anesthesia. We decide after the transplant conference. You can withdraw at any point before conditioning begins. Once we destroy his marrow, withdrawal could kill him."

Adrian read the page this time. "How soon?"

"Confirmatory results can be expedited within twenty-four hours. If he remains stable, conditioning would start after we control the infection."

"And if he doesn't remain stable?"

"We adjust. I won't offer certainty I don't have."

He signed the screening consent, pressing hard enough to emboss the sheet beneath it.

Sloane reached for him. Adrian stood before she could touch his arm.

"This is for Milo," he said. "It buys Rowan nothing."

"Understood," Rowan replied.

"And I want an outside investigation of BVX-17. No Blackwood counsel, no family office."

Rowan looked at Theo. "Retain an independent firm and give them a direct line to the audit committee. Preserve every trial record."

Theo nodded. "The board can block access."

"Then document who blocks it."

Mara took Adrian to phlebotomy. Sloane stayed behind, picking at the edge of the donor brochure.

"You should have told me," Rowan said.

"I tried telling you things."

"About your father, when we were together."

"You defended Blackwood Ventures every time it came up. You said your family invested in cures while mine ran a clinic that couldn't pay its nurses."

He remembered the argument and the careless arrogance of winning it. "I was cruel."

"You were accurate about the payroll. That made it worse."

He sat beside her. Their shoulders almost touched. "I will investigate even if Adrian withdraws. Even if the result clears him as a donor. Even if you never forgive me."

Sloane turned the brochure over. "Promises from Blackwood men should come with chain-of-custody seals."

"Then watch what I do."

Her gaze lifted to his. Weariness had stripped away her defenses. Rowan wanted to brush the loose hair from her cheek. He kept his hand on his own knee.

An hour later, Mara confirmed Adrian's blood counts were adequate and sent him to a hotel across the street with instructions to return at six for infectious-disease testing. Sloane walked him to the elevator.

Mara had explained the donation schedule twice. Five days of filgrastim could mobilize enough stem cells for collection, but Milo might not have five stable days. A marrow harvest under anesthesia would move faster and leave Adrian sore, anemic, and exposed to the clotting complication already noted in his chart. Adrian chose the operating room. He signed before Sloane could ask him to reconsider, folded the risk sheet, and tucked it into his coat without reading it again.

"I meant what I said," she told him. "I chose Milo. I still love you."

Adrian pressed the call button. "Those sentences used to fit together better."

The doors opened. He kissed her forehead and left.

At five forty the next morning, Mara found them outside Milo's room. Adrian had missed his appointment and stopped answering his phone.

Theo traced his key card to the hotel. Rowan and Sloane crossed the street with security and entered room 814 after the manager opened it. The bed had not been slept in. Adrian's phone lay smashed beneath the desk.

On the carpet beside the bathroom, a dark line of blood led to an open window.