❦ . ❦ . ❦

After all the bizarre events in the past few months, Laurence had believed he'd been more than prepared for whatever other curveballs life would throw at him. And yet, as he stood in front of a mini columbarium in a well-decorated space, he couldn't stop the unnerving sensation from getting to him.

He felt like he was in an unpleasant dream, from which he hoped to wake if he just closed his eyes long enough. But try as he might, the strong scent of lilies in the small room wouldn't disappear.

Laurence looked outside through the wide-open door, surveying the landscaped plot on Sunday morning. Rose bushes surrounded the larger columbarium and a few mausoleums on the opposite side of the Dayspring Memorial Garden. The park seemed like an exclusive resting place that only the selected bigshots could afford. It was no wonder Laurence hadn't heard about it until now.

"So? Is this place something you own too?"

Isaac responded with an affirmative silence.

Laurence turned back to the dual cremation niches before him and read the inscription on top of the black granite tiles.

A light and a hope. Until we can sing together and dance among the blossoms again. Until our new beginning.

The bottom compartment had the engraving of the name 'Isla Marie Ruiz,' which Laurence didn't find surprising. It was the texts on the niche above Isaac's mother's that made his surroundings appear narrower and narrower, with the goal of smothering him.

Laurence's insides flipped. He felt like throwing up, overwhelmed by the sight of the writings on the first tiny unit that held a cremation urn.

Laurence Villegas
Born: August 19, 1994
Died: January 13, 2023

"So I'm really dead," he said, disbelief shadowing every syllable.

It must have been ironic to voice it out loud while he was still here, talking around his own remains, but it didn't come off strange when he considered the statement might not be too far from reality. Because for the rest of the world, Laurence Villegas, son of Christopher and Sienna, older brother of Louie James, was truly gone.

"A day before your first death anniversary last month, I visited the parish church where your family was buried," Isaac spoke for the first time since they'd arrived at the place. "I have wanted to have their remains transferred here since I was fairly certain you'd wish to be together with them. But it was only early this year did I get the chance to make the arrangements."

Distracted, Laurence nodded. He barely grasped everything the young boss had told him, for he had a single-minded focus on another important question at the moment.

"You said I was murdered, yeah?" he asked in a murmur. "Who is it? Have you found out the idiot who wanna kill me for whatever stupid reason?"

A dead air slipped by. Laurence sensed the battle occurring inside the younger man's head.

And when Isaac spoke at last, ominousness tainted his words. "Do you want to visit RPI?"

❦ . ❦ . ❦

The vibe that welcomed them when they set foot at the Raguel Penal Institution, also known as RPI, was far from how Laurence had pictured it. Outside, a couple of people in orange uniform shirts were either performing exercise routine in the concrete court or tending to the soil and plants in a mini vegetable garden.

Isaac and Laurence followed an officer inside the building. They passed a recreation room where most female inmates and a few males were busy crafting boxes and other home displays from old magazines and beads.

Once they wended their way into the dimmer hallways of the cellblock, where a few convicts remained locked up, the drearier side of the prison began to feel all-too-real for Laurence. He winced when he caught sight of a man throwing them a malicious smile from behind the bars.

The atmosphere became grimmer and Laurence grew more apprehensive the deeper they walked into the detention area. He'd wanted to turn back and run away since earlier, not because he was afraid of the place, but because he worried about the idea of facing a criminal, someone who was said to have killed him.

Isaac had not mentioned a name, but the young boss had warned him of the probability that the person would not be in the perfect state of mind, so a proper conversation with them might not be totally possible.

"Remember, Laurence, whatever happens in there, I want you to keep your calm and don't do anything drastic," Isaac had said, which only caused Laurence to be more anxious.

Laurence approached the visiting room with tentative steps. He took a seat. To calm his nerves, he asked about the phone he always saw in crime TV shows, but the prison staff told him they could hear and talk to the person on the opposite side of the booth without the device.

Isaac stood back at the corner of the room, as though he was just there to observe and guard Laurence. After a few minutes of dreadful waiting, another officer brought in a male prisoner.

Through the glass partition, Laurence examined the appearance of the person. The guy was a tad shorter than an average Perlientan man; maybe even Florence had a few centimeters over him.

Laurence could not see the face well at first, and only when they were sitting in front of each other did he notice the emptiness in the person's gaze.

Recognition struck like a bulldozer. Laurence could not identify him a minute ago because the person was someone who'd always been mistaken for a teenager. Yet, his current unshaven, grungy face made the man look his actual age, if not older.

Laurence's thoughts spun. His heart hammered against his chest while he scrutinized the various scars that marked the guy's neck and a few on his face.

"Kian," he uttered under his breath, denial burdening his voice.

The man on the opposite side of the transparent wall finally reacted. His shoulders twitched, while his once blank expression flitted away, only for fear and surprise to plunge into his round eyes.

"Wh-who are you?" Even his quavering voice created the impression that Kian had aged. Agitation had replaced the confidence that had often laced his words in the past.

"Is it... is it really you, Kian?"

"Hey, who are you? I don't know you, but how in the name of Satan do you know my name? Tell me, who are you?" Kian leaned toward the glass partition and glowered at Laurence. Red veins manifested in the white area of his eyes, and his pupils had expanded even more. "Is it you? Are you... you're the devil? Hey, tell me. Are you the person behind... that devil, are you that devil?"

Laurence ignored the gibberish as he attempted to bridle the commotion in his head. His disbelief at the sight in front of him pressured him to flee from the place, but his desperation for the truth compelled him to stay. "Did you really kill m..." He choked. His vision stung. "Did you really kill your friend?"

Another set of emotions sprang into Kian's crazed eyes. The man froze for a second before glancing around the room; his face was of someone scared. He slumped back to his chair, dropped his head, and gripped his hair with both hands. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. My God, forgive me. I'm not a bad person, no. I'm sorry. I had to do it. It wasn't his fault. I'm sorry."

Plea. Despair. Fear. Regret. Laurence heard every single one of it messing his friend's tone. He inhaled, fighting for breath. There was too much air around him and not enough of it at the same time. Flame engulfed his lungs, surged across his throat before the sensation burned his nose and mouth.

"Why?" Laurence asked with a gasp. He squeezed his left fist with his other hand. Every inch of his body trembled, much like his speech. "Why are you sorry?"

"It was me. It was my fault Rence died." Kian brought his palms over his ears and furiously shook his head. "I'm sorry. I didn't want it to happen. He was a good guy. I'm not the monster. No, I'm sorry. Don't blame him. But that person... it was the devil. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"What do you mean it was your fault? What in the world... what's your damn fault?"

But Kian was no longer listening. Instead, the man kept crying apologies to no one in particular, behaving like someone possessed by a weeping spirit.

"What the fuck do you mean?" Laurence asked again, raising his anguished voice a notch. He leaped from his chair and slammed his palms against the concrete desk. His lips quivered as he all but begged, "Tell me these are lies, Kian. I'll believe you. Just tell me you didn't kill anyone."

He was primed to climb the counter, break the glass partition with his fist. To reach his friend in the opposite room and shake him with so much force. All of that, only to bring Kian back to his senses and get him to admit everything was an elaborate prank.

However, Isaac was quick to approach and hold him by the arm, whether to restrain or pacify him.

Two correctional staff also had to intervene. They flanked Kian, and each gripped the man on either side of his elbows.

Laurence pressed on with his inquiries, but it was already futile as the officers took the thrashing and screaming prisoner away.

A torturous silence stayed in the wake of his friend's exit and stifled Laurence. He stood, aghast, staring at the dim, empty booth. Tremors trailed all over his limbs.

"We have to go, Rence."

Laurence aimed the condemnatory gaze at Isaac. "Did you know?" he asked, the question brimming with accusation. "You knew it was Kian."

Isaac's lack of response was all the proof Laurence needed to infer the younger man's guilt. He let out a laugh, curt, broken, as a sense of betrayal slinked within his chest. Even so, he pushed himself to keep the surge of anger in check because he was aware it was not fair to take the nasty emotion out on his former underclassman. He understood that, in his own way, Isaac had tried to protect him from this painful revelation.

"I want to know the whole truth. No, I need to know." With his unsteady forefinger, he pointed at the door where Kian and the officers had disappeared. "Why was Kian in there? We're here to see the murderer, ain't we? So why was he there? Why was my friend in there?"

Laurence looked at Isaac without blinking once, even when the corner of his eyes began to moisten. Through his obscured vision, he made out the young CEO's expression of pity. But he didn't need that. He didn't need anyone's sympathy. He needed someone to be honest with him.

"Let's get out of here first, Rence," Isaac said softly.

Because he no longer had the strength in him to challenge the suggestion, Laurence let the young boss guide him outside.

Isaac held the other man on the shoulder and rubbed his upper arm until they reached the car in front of the correctional facility. He opened the door to the passenger side and helped the still-shocked Laurence settle on the seat, all the time being gentle with his gestures. He took his place behind the wheel, picked a bottled water from the portable mini fridge, and handed it to his companion.

"Have you calmed down yet?"

"What else do you know about this whole mess, Ice? Please, tell me what's going on here?" Laurence glared at the plastic bottle in his tight grip.

The young boss must have comprehended it was not the right time to beat around the bush, so he went straight into disclosing the information he had. He told Laurence that after a month in the hospital, Kian had been brought in by the police for interrogation about the incident that had killed his friend. The authorities had reason to suspect that the car crash on the Friday night of January 2023 was not an accident because, during their initial investigation, they'd found out that the vehicle's brake system had been tampered with.

"On top of that, Kian didn't acquire any fatal injury during the collision because his airbag had deployed on time, while yours..." Isaac gave Laurence a cursory look. "The investigators discovered that someone had also tinkered on the sensor of your airbag to prevent it from working."

"But was that enough to suspect Kian?" Laurence demanded, clutching the water container so much that his hand hurt. "Even if those damned authorities were right that someone had messed with the car, how sure were they that it was Kian's doing? He was a victim too, ain't he? Not like he walked out of that situation totally unharmed, so why'd he risk his own life just for that fucked up shit? What he'd gain from it?"

Laurence couldn't accept anything he'd just seen and heard. All of it must have been a lie. "He's my friend. No way he was gonna kill me for what? Just for the hell of it? There must be some misunderstanding here. Do the fucking police even have the right to keep him in there? Ain't it in their damned rules to have enough evidence before detaining someone? Or did they just do that based on their fucking gut feeling?"

"It's true. They should have probable cause to issue an arrest warrant. The thing is, they found a strong proof, which pointed at Kian being the perpetrator." The young boss fished his phone from his jeans, and Laurence got a glimpse of him browsing through a cloud storage. "I was able to pull strings with the authorities to give me a copy of their files. I have also hired a PI to do a separate investigation about the whole incident."

Isaac clicked on an image before passing his phone to the other man.

Laurence held his free hand open. Hesitated. He bit the inside of his cheek and curled his fingers. He shut his eyes, bracing himself for what he was about to see, before accepting the device from Isaac.

On display was a screenshot of a text message.

From 12-11101516-3:

Make sure you do the job properly. You want this promotion, don't you? You can only have the chance if you get rid of Laurence Villegas.

"That was from Kian's SMS inbox," Isaac said, "the same number was found in his call log, indicating he and the sender of the text message had contacted each other a few hours before he met up with you on that day of the incident."

Laurence stared vacantly at the phone, unsure how to react. In the past few hours, he'd gone through a lot of emotions that it was as though he'd run out of anything else to feel. He had nothing left for denial or for fear about the new discovery anymore. He was drained, and yet, his rage had yet to subside.

"But something was certainly strange about the fact that the message and call on that day was the only contact the person had made to your friend. The investigators could find nothing else, even when they recovered any deleted data from his device."

"Did they trace it?" Laurence asked. His voice had gone quieter, but the storm within him was so loud that he missed some of Isaac's words. "Did they find the bastard who gave the order to Kian?"

The young CEO got his phone back and studied the screenshot of the message as well. "The police tried, only for them to be directed to an automated operator. My people also contacted the local networks to inquire about the unknown mobile number, but every single one of those companies got back with a response that there was no such number registered under them. It turned out the person used the free online SMS service and phone callers, and these digits were not an actual mobile number, but the display name those free messaging sites require you to fill in."

"So there's no way to find the bastard," Laurence stated more than asked, tasting bile in his mouth.

"I had some people try to track them down through their online activity, too, after we found out the call and message were delivered through the internet, but that person seemed to be utterly cautious and cunning." Isaac's lips twisted into a caustic smirk. He apprised Laurence of what the suspected mastermind had done to hide their location, mentioning technology jargons that the former construction worker could not understand.

Laurence couldn't have cared less about the complex stuff. All he gathered from what Isaac had told him was that the person was hell-bent on murdering him if they were willing to do anything complicated to carry out their scheme.

"And about Kian, throughout the procedures, we could not get any crucial information from him because all he told the court were the same things you heard him say earlier. That he was sorry, and it was his fault you died. In the end, he pleaded guilty to your murder."

Laurence ground his teeth. He turned his hardened eyes at the entrance of the prison building. "I have to find that person," he said in a tone that was both calm and menacing. "I feel like there's something wrong here. It couldn't be Kian. We'd always been like brothers to each other. How could he kill me just for a pathetic excuse of a promotion?"

Only with the younger man's lower-than-ever voice, Laurence could imagine the darkness falling upon Isaac's face.

"That has always been the plan from the start, senior. I will not stop searching for that person. I have vowed I'll make them pay for whatever they did to you, so I'll hunt them down wherever they will hide, even if I have to chase them to the deepest pit of hell."

AN: Chapters 29 and 30 will be posted on December 14 and 28 respectively. ;) Well, December 28 is tentative because I'll not be home during Christmas until 27, so I might be too tired and lazy to do anything on December 28. :P