Chapter seven: Dead End

Serena’s POV

“Fuck!” The scream ripped out of me before I could think, before I could breathe. The room spun, and every syllable of he’s dead clawed through my skull like broken glass.

“This is not the time for you to fall apart, Serena. This isn’t helping us. It’s not getting us anywhere.” Lucas moved toward me like he was approaching a ticking bomb.

“Fall apart?” My voice shot up, cracking like something inside me finally snapped. “You think this isn’t the time for me to fall apart?”

He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Which somehow made it worse.

“Someone killed my son,” I said, my voice shaking so hard it barely sounded like mine. “Someone murdered my child. They would’ve killed me too. And I still can’t figure out who sent them. And you’re really standing here telling me to hold it together?” I shoved at his chest, fists weak but furious. “Are you insane?”

“Serena.” His hands closed around my wrists gently, guiding them down before I hurt myself more than him. He tilted my face up with steady fingers, grounding me without trying to cage me. “Listen to me. We’re going to find who did this. I already promised you that. No matter how much they clean up after themselves, no matter how long it takes, we’ll get them. But right this second, breaking down isn’t going to help. We need to think. We need to act. We need anything we can get our hands on.”

“I-I can’t,” I whispered, shoulders trembling. “I can’t stop seeing Liam’s face. He’s just... gone. He’s gone and I wasn’t there and—”

“The phone,” one of Lucas’s men cut in quietly, turning toward him.

Lucas didn’t let go of my hands. “What about the phone?”

“We can track the phones of both men. There might be something on them—messages, call logs, anything. Whoever hired them had to contact them somehow.” The man moved closer, lowering his voice even if the whole room felt like it had already frozen.

My tears slowed, not because I wasn’t grieving, but because grief had made room for something sharper. Rage. Hope. Something unstable.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and forced myself to look at the photos of the dead men. Their faces. Their wounds. The ugly finality of it all.

“Whoever killed them wasn’t careful,” I murmured, staring at the details like they were the first real breadcrumbs I’d seen. “If they left anything behind… anything at all… we’ll find something.”

Lucas tightened his grip on my hands, steadying me.

And for the first time since the news hit me, I felt something other than pain.

Lucas didn’t say anything at first. He just watched me, like he was trying to measure how much more I could take before I shattered again. Then he turned to his men, voice low, controlled, and terrifying in that calm way he had.

“Walk me through everything,” he said.

The man nodded once, pulling a tablet from under his arm. “We don’t have their phones,” he reminded gently, “but we tracked their last movements.”

Lucas’s jaw flexed. “Go on.”

“They crossed the border early this morning. Used forged identities. Expensive ones. They didn’t even go through the main checkpoints. Someone smuggled them out.”

A cold, hollow feeling slid down my spine.

“They didn’t run alone,” I whispered. “Someone helped them.”

“More than someone,” the man replied. “They boarded a private jet. Two seats booked under alias names. Cash payment. No luggage. Straight into another country.”

I stared at the images on the screen as the man scrolled. Grainy footage. Two men wearing caps pulled low, shoulders hunched, walking fast toward a back entrance of an airstrip hangar. One of them glanced over his shoulder before disappearing inside.

Lucas leaned in, eyes narrowing. “Rewind that.”

The man scrubbed the footage back a few seconds. Lucas pointed at the frame.

“There. That car.”

A black SUV just at the edge of the shot. Tinted windows, clean plates. Too clean.

“That wasn’t theirs,” Lucas muttered. “So whose is it?” I asked.

“We’re finding that out.”

The room felt suddenly too small, too hot. Like the walls were listening.

The man continued, “Here’s the key part. Before they boarded, one of them made a call through the public signal booster outside the hangar.”

I sucked in a breath. “A call to who?”

“We only managed to extract the number route,” he said. “Not the full trace yet. But…”

He hesitated, and my stomach tightened. I hated pauses. Pauses meant ugly things.

“But what?” Lucas snapped. The man turned the tablet toward us.

A series of digits filled the screen, familiar in a way that made my skin crawl.

Lucas froze, I blinked at the number once. Twice.

My heart dropped so fast I swear the floor quivered, it was from my phone.

"T-that's impossible, that's my number, but there's fuckin way I called them, I don't even know them!" I yelled, feeling my throat tighten.

"This is serious, whoever did this, is covering their routes too fucking well," One of the men said, hissing.

"But there has to be something you can do, find the real number of the person who made that call, I couldn't have ordered my own son and self be killed," I said, trying to sound as calm as I could.

"I know, everyone here knows you didn't do it, but, it's tricky, we need, their phone, with that, it's the most easiest way to find out who's been communicating with them before," Lucas said.

"But how do we get their phone? it's impossible," I said.

"That's where you leave me, I'll handle it,"