Chapter 14 - The Test Adrian Was Afraid to Take
Adrian read the message three times.
Then handed it to Dr. Chen.
“What does that mean medically?”
Dr. Chen frowned. “Without context, nothing.”
“His blood,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“Elias said to look at Adrian’s own blood.”
Nora crossed her arms. “Could be manipulation.”
“Probably is,” I said. “But the whole nightmare began with genetics. Test him.”
Adrian nodded immediately.
Dr. Chen hesitated. “We can run compatibility and sequencing, but full analysis won’t be instant.”
“Do what you can.”
A nurse drew six vials from Adrian.
He watched the blood fill them with an expression I could not read.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That is never true when you say it.”
He looked at me.
“My father used to take me for blood tests when I was a boy.”
“How often?”
“Every three months.”
I frowned. “That’s not normal.”
“I know that now.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That we had a family heart condition.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“What happened after the tests?”
“Usually nothing. Once, when I was thirteen, I got very sick afterward.”
My skin prickled.
“Sick how?”
“Fever. Joint pain. Rash. I was in bed for a week.”
“Did they give you anything?”
He thought.
“An injection before the blood draw.”
Nora looked sharply at Varen, who had been moved under federal guard to a room down the hall.
“We need to ask him.”
Adrian’s expression hardened. “I’m done asking that man for truth.”
“Unfortunately, he has information.”
“I’ll get it.”
I pointed at him. “You will ask with words.”
He sighed. “You’ve ruined all my hobbies.”
Despite everything, I laughed.
An hour later, Varen sat across from us in a small family consultation room with a federal agent outside.
Adrian placed the blood test memory in front of him.
“When I was thirteen, what did you inject me with?”
Varen looked genuinely confused.
“I wasn’t your physician then.”
“Bellini was.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know?”
Varen hesitated.
“She ran tolerance trials.”
I closed my eyes.
“Again,” I said, “normal English.”
“She exposed carriers to engineered proteins to see whether immune response could be altered.”
Adrian’s face turned cold. “She experimented on me.”
“Yes.”
“When I was a child.”
“Yes.”
“Did my father know?”
“Yes.”
That one word broke something in Adrian.
He stood and walked to the window.
For years, I had believed his father had made him hard through expectation, violence, and business.
I had never imagined medical experimentation was part of the inheritance.
Varen continued cautiously.
“If Elias is telling you to examine Adrian’s blood, he may know whether those childhood trials had lasting effects.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“Antibodies. altered immune markers. perhaps chimerism.”
Dr. Chen, who had joined by video, frowned. “Chimerism?”
Varen nodded. “If cell infusions were used.”
Adrian turned. “Whose cells?”
Varen looked sick.
“I don’t know.”
Nora said, “Try harder.”
Varen stared at his hands.
“Bellini kept cord blood from family births.”
The room went still.
I whispered, “She injected Adrian with someone else’s cells?”
“Possibly.”
“Whose?”
Varen closed his eyes.
“Rafael’s children.”
Adrian’s face emptied.
“Matteo and Elias?”
“I don’t know which samples survived.”
I felt physically ill.
“So Adrian could carry cells from his own biological nephew-slash-brother-whatever-this-family-is?”
Dr. Chen actually rubbed her forehead.
“Genetically, the terminology is less important than the laboratory effect.”
“Thank you for being the only sane person here.”
She gave me a tired smile.
The preliminary results arrived that afternoon.
Dr. Chen came to my room personally.
“Adrian’s blood is unusual.”
He stood beside me.
“How unusual?”
“Two distinct populations of white blood cells.”
I stared.
“Meaning?”
“Microchimerism. Small amounts of genetically distinct cells in his bloodstream.”
Varen had been right.
Adrian looked at me.
“Could those cells affect Lucia?”
“Potentially, if inherited or if they influenced immune expression, but inheritance does not work quite that way. We need sequencing.”
“Do it.”
“We are.”
She looked at me.
“There is something else. Lucia’s blood after transfusion is stabilizing faster than expected.”
“Good?”
“Very good.”
I exhaled.
“But we also detected an unusual cell population in her sample.”
My body went cold again.
“From the transfusion?”
“Possibly. We are sorting donor cells from her own.”
Adrian asked, “Could Bellini have contaminated the donor blood?”
“That is one possibility.”
Nora’s phone rang.
She listened, then looked at us.
“Federal lab finished testing the blood Bellini left.”
“And?”
“It matches Elias.”
Rafael’s hidden son.
Dr. Chen looked startled. “Then Lucia received some emergency bank blood, not his sample.”
“Correct.”
“So Bellini gave us usable compatible blood and then disappeared with Elias.”
I frowned. “Why help?”
No one knew.
Then Adrian’s phone rang.
Unknown number.
He answered on speaker.
A man’s voice.
“Adrian.”
The resemblance was in the voice too.
Lower, rougher, but unmistakably familiar.
“Elias?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Not important.”
“It is to me.”
“You always sound like you own the room.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened. “Apparently we share that trait.”
A short laugh.
Then Elias became serious.
“Mara didn’t steal me.”
Everyone froze.
Rafael, listening through Nora’s call connection, said, “Elias?”
The line went silent.
Then Elias whispered, “Father.”
Rafael began to cry.
Elias continued.
“She saved me.”
Nora frowned. “From whom?”
Elias answered with one name.
“Lorenzo Moretti.”
Adrian’s grandfather.
The patriarch everyone believed had died peacefully twenty years ago.
Elias’s next words erased that belief.
“And before you ask, Adrian—Lorenzo is still alive.”
After the call ended, Adrian remained motionless beside the window. I knew better than to fill the silence too quickly.
Finally he said, “If Lorenzo is alive, then almost every story I was told about my childhood can be questioned.”
“Not every story.”
He looked at me.
“You hated peas.”
His mouth twitched. “Still do.”
“You broke your arm jumping from a garage roof at eleven.”
“That was strategic experimentation.”
“That was stupidity.”
He laughed once, then became quiet again.
I reached for his hand. “They manipulated facts. They manipulated fear. They manipulated us. But they do not get to own every memory too.”
His thumb moved across my knuckles.
“That sounds like something your grandfather would say.”
May you like
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m finally learning to say it myself.”
Outside the room, agents prepared for another impossible search while Lucia slept beneath blue NICU light.
