Chapter 3 - THE BROTHER WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEADThe hospital went dark before Adrian Blackwood could take another step toward his son.
One second, the hallway blazed with sterile white light. The next, darkness swallowed everything.
Machines screamed.
Nurses shouted.
Somewhere behind the trauma-room doors, Ethan’s heart monitor began releasing a frantic, uneven alarm.
Beep. Beep. Beep-beep-beep.
“No!” I lunged toward the sound, but a massive hand closed around my arm.
Adrian pulled me against him as gunfire shattered the ceiling lights.
Glass rained over us.
His men formed a wall in front of the trauma room, weapons raised, while red emergency lamps flickered to life along the floor.
Then a distorted voice poured through the hospital speakers.
“Hello, Adrian.”
Adrian froze.
The voice crackled with static, but beneath the distortion was something raw and personal.
Something familiar.
“You took my name,” the speaker continued. “You took my empire. Now I am here to take your son.”
Adrian’s face emptied of color.
One of his men whispered, “Boss?”
Adrian stared at the ceiling.
“Damian,” he said.
The name moved through the hallway like a blade.
I looked at him. “Who is Damian?”
He did not answer immediately.
Instead, he turned toward the trauma room where Ethan lay bleeding behind locked glass doors.
When Adrian finally spoke, his voice was almost unrecognizable.
“My brother.”
The speaker laughed.
“You always were slow to admit the truth.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened. “Damian died twelve years ago.”
“No,” the voice replied. “You left me to die twelve years ago.”
A security monitor at the nurses’ station suddenly flashed on. Grainy camera footage showed masked men moving through the hospital’s lower level. They wore black tactical uniforms and carried weapons marked with a silver serpent.
Adrian’s men reacted instantly.
“The Serpents,” one said.
I turned to Adrian. “What do they want with Ethan?”
Adrian looked at me, and for the first time since he entered the hospital, I saw fear in his eyes.
“Damian’s blood type is the same as mine,” he said.
I felt my stomach drop.
The trauma-room door opened, and a doctor rushed out holding a printed laboratory report.
“Mr. Blackwood, we have a problem.”
Adrian grabbed the paper.
The doctor’s voice trembled.
“Ethan’s genetic markers are highly unusual. We ran the paternity panel twice.”
Adrian’s eyes moved across the page.
His expression hardened.
Then he looked at me.
“What does it say?” I whispered.
He handed me the report.
At the bottom of the page, beneath rows of numbers I did not understand, was a conclusion written in clinical black letters.
PATERNITY PROBABILITY: ADRIAN BLACKWOOD — 0.00%.
The corridor tilted beneath my feet.
“No,” I said.
Adrian’s stare became colder than the guns surrounding us.
“You told me he was mine.”
“He is.”
“The test says otherwise.”
“I don’t care what the test says!”
Another page slid from behind the first.
The doctor pointed to it.
“We compared the child’s sample to another profile in the restricted donor registry.”
Adrian read the name.
His hand began to shake.
DAMIAN BLACKWOOD — PATERNITY PROBABILITY: 99.98%.
Silence struck harder than the gunfire.
Adrian stared at me as though I had become a stranger.
“You were with my brother?”
“No.”
“Do not lie to me now.”
“I never met Damian!”
The speakers hissed again.
Damian’s laughter filled the hospital.
“Perhaps she never knew which brother she was with.”
Adrian looked ready to tear the building apart.
But before he could move, Ethan’s monitor produced one long, flat tone.
The doctor spun around.
“His pressure is crashing!”
I shoved past Adrian and slammed both hands against the trauma-room window.
“Ethan!”
Doctors surrounded my son. His tiny body jerked beneath their hands while blood soaked through fresh bandages.
The doctor turned toward us.
“We need the donor now!”
Adrian ripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve.
“Take mine.”
The doctor hesitated.
“The paternity test—”
“I do not care whose blood made him,” Adrian growled. “Use mine to keep him alive.”
At that moment, the hospital speakers crackled one final time.
“Touch the boy,” Damian said, “and everyone in this building dies.”
Adrian stared into the darkness.
May you like
Then he held out his arm to the nurse.
“Let him try.”
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