He sucked in a sharp breath, trying to anchor himself in his body again. His hand went to his coat pocket, curling around the smooth edge of his phone. Cold metal. Something real. Something he could do.
He had to make the call.
Alon. Adrian’s half-brother. A long shot, and Logan knew it. But still—a shot. If he wasn’t a match, there was a possibility, a sliver of hope, that Adrian’s father might be. The odds were thinner than thread, but thinner than thread was still something.
And then there was the international donor registry. Maybe, somewhere across an ocean, someone carried the same genetic imprint. A stranger withmatching marrow, a stranger who could unknowingly save a man they’d never met.
Butmaybewasn’t good enough. Not anymore. Not when the clock was ticking so loud it drowned out everything else.
Then—
“Logan.”
The sound of his name, spoken low and steady, cut through the storm in his chest.
“Son, look at me.”
Logan swallowed hard, dragging his gaze upward, trying to hold himself together. His father was looking at him the way he always did when things fell apart—with calm, with command, with a steel spine that had weathered too many storms.
“Make the call,” Robert said simply. There was no space for panic in his voice, no room for doubt. “Come on.”
Logan hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen of his phone. The silence stretched between them.
His father stepped closer. “I’ll talk to the authorities,” he said. “I’ll contact the organizations in Israel. If we need legal channels, embassies, whatever it takes. We’ll go through the proper people. We’ll move fast.”
There was no emotion in his tone, but that was what made it feel real. This was what his fatherdid. He didn’t fall apart. He didn’t lose control. He made things happen.
Logan nodded once, but his fingers trembled where they rested against the cool glass of his phone. Everything felt distant, surreal. His feet were still in the hallway, but the rest of him? Gone. Drifting in a haze of helplessness. In that other place—where Adrian’s hands were cold, wherehis eyes fluttered shut and didn’t open, where Logan couldn’t reach him fast enough.
Adrian’s getting worse.
Not better.
That thought sent chills through his veins, freezing his blood as it ran through his body like ice.
His world was cracking, piece by piece, and he couldn’t hold it together with just his bare hands.
“Logan.”
His name again, sharper this time, cutting clean through the fog.
It jolted him. Pulled him back into his body.
His spine straightened, his hand steadied, even as the rest of him threatened to fall apart. There was something about his father’s voice—solid, commanding, undeniable. It was the tone he used in boardrooms and behind closed doors, the one that had turned empires around and silenced rooms full of men with just a few clipped words.
But this wasn’t business. This wasn’t a deal to close or a market to sway. This was Adrian.
Logan couldn’t afford to collapse beneath the weight of it, no matter how badly he wanted to. Not now.
There had always been something in Robert Vaughn that demanded control. It was in the way he stood, the way he spoke, the way he moved through the world like gravity bent to him. People listened when he talked. People followed when he led. And growing up, Logan had hated that. He had felt like a product on an assembly line, molded and measured against an image he never asked to be.
His father wasn’t warm. He wasn’t gentle. He didn’t offer praise or patience. He offered expectations. Pressure. Dismissal, when Logan didn’t meet the mark.
So Logan stopped trying.
He pulled away in college, stopped calling, stopped returning home. They became little more than two names in the same family tree, linked by blood, separated by everything else.
In the past year, something had shifted.
