Chapter 2 - PROJECT V17
Matteo brought Liana into his private study while Nico slept in her arms, one tiny fist still tangled in the fabric of her uniform. The room smelled of cedar, leather, and a fire no one needed in the warm afternoon. He offered to put Nico in a crib brought down from the nursery, but the child stirred the moment Liana shifted him. She kept holding him. Matteo sat across from her, empty-handed and suddenly younger than his reputation. “Tell me about Daniel,” he said. Liana flinched. She did not want Daniel reduced to symptoms and dates. Matteo seemed to understand. “If the same doctor treated both boys, every detail may matter.”
So Liana told him. Daniel had been healthy from birth. Six weeks before his supposed death, he began waking at night, drenched in sweat, crying until his body trembled. His heart would race, his hands would twitch, and afterward he would collapse into a sleep so deep she checked his breathing every few minutes. Dr. Harlan called it reflux first, teething next, then anxiety after a viral infection. He prescribed drops. Liana still had the bottle in her apartment. Matteo ordered security to retrieve it. She immediately refused. No armed strangers were going into Daniel’s room. Matteo’s jaw tightened, but he changed his order. “Then you go with them.” It was the first time Liana understood that beneath his control was fear, not merely authority.
At her apartment, Daniel’s absence filled every room more completely than furniture ever had. His stuffed rabbit still leaned against the sofa. Three bottles stood upside down on the drying rack. A tiny blue blanket hung over a chair. Liana forced herself into the nursery and found the brown medicine bottle in a drawer beside his hospital bracelet. Under the changing table she discovered the pajamas he had worn during his final week. There, near the shoulder, was the same faint square discoloration left by adhesive. She sat on the floor, clutching the sleeper until one of Matteo’s guards quietly looked away to give her privacy. Then she remembered something: after the funeral, her neighbor Mrs. Park had taken out the trash because Liana had been unable to do it.
Mrs. Park could not recover the discarded patch, but she produced something worse. An envelope had been pushed beneath Liana’s door the week Daniel died. Mrs. Park had forgotten it in a stack of mail. Inside was a photocopy of Daniel’s medical chart. One line had been circled in red: Medication Administration — V-17. No drug name. No dosage. Beneath it someone had written by hand: YOUR SON WAS NOT THE FIRST. Liana gripped the wall. Matteo arrived less than twenty minutes later. He read the page once and started making calls with the controlled speed of a man who was accustomed to turning fear into action.
By midnight, his attorney, Gabriel Ross, had found Project V17. A Varric charitable foundation had transferred nearly five million dollars to Mercy Saint Pediatrics over three years for what public records described as infant cardiac-monitoring research. Matteo stared at the electronic approval attached to the grant. His signature was there, but he swore he had never authorized it. Worse, Daniel’s name appeared on a participant list as Patient 041, status withdrawn, the withdrawal date matching the day he was declared dead. Nico appeared too: Patient 017. Sofia Varric’s digital signature was attached to Nico’s enrollment, but Matteo said his late wife would never have approved a secret experiment on their child.
Police located Dr. Harlan at the airport before dawn attempting to travel under another name. Liana insisted the police remain involved, even when Matteo’s private security could have reached the doctor faster. “I will not trade one secret system for another,” she told him. Harlan was brought to an interview room with attorneys and investigators present. Without his white coat, he looked ordinary: thin hands, gray hair, a wedding ring he kept spinning around his finger. He refused to speak until Matteo placed the transparent patch in an evidence sleeve on the table. Harlan stopped moving. “Where did you get that?” “From my son,” Matteo replied. Liana leaned forward. “And what did you put into mine?”
Harlan finally admitted V-17 was not a legitimate study. The patch was a delivery system for low doses of stimulants, cortisol regulators, and cardiac agents designed to create symptoms without leaving obvious evidence. Children of wealthy or powerful parents were made mildly ill so frightened adults would bring them to clinics, private consultations, or monitored rooms where conversations could be overheard and secrets collected. Judges, executives, politicians, union leaders, financiers—anyone with influence could be pressured through a sick child. Liana asked why Daniel had been included. Harlan could not look at her. “Control group,” he said. Ordinary families were used to calibrate doses because the architects of the program believed fewer important people would ask questions if something went wrong.
Liana crossed the room and slapped him before anyone reacted. “His name was Daniel,” she said through tears. “He liked bananas. He hated peaches. He laughed when I sneezed. He would not sleep unless I left the bathroom light on. He was not a control group.” Harlan lowered his head. Yet when she accused him of killing Daniel, he shook his head. “The dose should not have killed him.” Daniel, he said, had reacted violently because testing revealed a rare inherited arrhythmia called VCM-2. Matteo went still. His older brother had died young with an inherited rhythm disorder, and the Varric family carried the mutation.
The contradiction hung in the room like smoke. Liana had no known Varric ancestry. Daniel had the Varric mutation. Nico, Harlan said, had tested negative. Matteo’s face tightened as possibility became terror. Both boys were nine months old. Both had been born at Saint Catherine’s Hospital less than an hour apart. Matteo finally whispered, “Run DNA.” Liana immediately said no, not because she doubted the logic, but because she felt the floor of her life opening beneath her. If the tests confirmed what everyone was thinking, Daniel’s death would no longer be the only thing she had to mourn. Her entire memory of motherhood would be forced into a new shape.
May you like
Samples were collected before sunrise. A preserved vial of Daniel’s blood still existed from his final admission. Matteo used every legal channel Gabriel could find to expedite the testing. Four hours later, Gabriel entered the Varric study carrying a sealed folder. Nico sat on Matteo’s lap, unusually quiet. Liana stood by the window, both hands locked around the sill. “Just say it,” she whispered. Gabriel looked at them with the expression of a man who wished facts could be kinder. “Nico is not biologically related to Matteo.” Liana’s knees weakened. Gabriel continued. “Nico is biologically related to Liana.”
No one spoke. Nico looked toward Liana and reached for her, just as he had in the foyer. Gabriel opened the second page. “The preserved sample from Daniel Graves shows that Daniel was Matteo’s biological son.” Matteo closed his eyes. For nine months he had loved a child who did not share his blood. For nine months Liana had raised the child who did. And twenty-two days earlier, Matteo Varric’s biological son had died in Liana’s arms. Liana began to sob. She reached toward Nico, then stopped because the truth had suddenly made even love feel as though it required permission. Matteo saw her hesitation. His own face broke. “Take him,” he said. “He is my son. And he is yours.”
