Page 48 of Peripheral Vision (Tethered in Darkness Duet #1)

Chapter

Thirty

FLETCHER

T he world stopped spinning. From the moment it registered that she was gone.

At first, I couldn’t get the words out to Nathan.

They had floated in the thick haze that had become my mind, mixing with the dull ache pounding in the back of my skull ever since.

We’d decided to reconvene back at her house, and it was too silent without her here, as if the air had even paused to take in her disappearance.

“What do you mean, they took her?” Nathan asks, his voice sharp and brittle with disbelief.

“I mean, I had driven her to the bar to quit her job and she never came back out!” I roar, fury and fear blending into a dangerous concoction.

I tell him that Callum definitely had something to do with it, that he had been working up top in the network.

In fact, I am so sure that he is The Muscle.

I don’t know how I know, but it is too coincidental to be anything but that.

I am going all but mad, about to rip through the very layers of the earth to bring her back when Nathan has to bring me back down.

“If you lose control, Fletcher then they’ll have you, too.

Then who’s going to bring her back?” The words strike their mark of course, sinking deep.

But that doesn’t make it easier to breathe, doesn’t stop the wildfire of helpless rage that is threatening to consume me.

If only we could find Callum… we could beat the information out of him.

But we haven't made any progress in the days since. There hasn’t been a hint, a whisper of her whereabouts, or if she’s alive.

They left her phone with her bag, so I don’t even have a way to track her if I wanted to.

There were no cameras in the alleyway so there was no way to get a look at the vehicle that had taken her, either.

I don’t know why I listened to her. I should have just gone inside despite her protests.

She’s gone because of me.

I let the thought fester, gnawing at the edges of my sanity like a vulture hovering over a carcass.

The air in the dimly lit room feels suffocating, heavy with the weight of my failure.

When I find them—because if isn’t an option—when I find them, they’re going to wish they were never born.

It has been three days since she went missing.

Three days without having my eyes on her, three days without touching her, three days without her fighting me. It’s torture.

“Fletcher… I think—I think you need to see this.” Whatever Nathan is looking at, it isn’t good, not much makes him falter.

I walk to where he is sitting at the dining room table, Alaska laying at his feet.

I brace myself, but nothing could have prepared me for the red that filters across my vision at the sight of Dylan bleeding.

At the sight of her bound. Nathan stands up and walks away, knowing that I wouldn’t want him staring at this.

She’s bent over something, what looks like a desk, and she's exposed. Her underwear is torn, and…

I’m going to fucking kill them. I’m going to tear them apart limb by limb until they’re nothing but piles of flesh on the floor.

Until they’ve forgotten everything but their own agony.

There is nothing that will stop me now. The rage coursing through me is a living, breathing thing.

My fists clench so hard that my nails bite into my palms, drawing blood.

But I don’t feel it. All I can see is her.

Dylan, my Dylan, reduced to this. Broken and vulnerable in a way she should never have to be.

“Nathan,” I growl, my voice low and barely human.

He pauses mid-step but doesn’t turn back. He knows better.

“I’m already making calls,” he says, his voice steady but laced with urgency. “But Fletcher, think before?—”

“Don’t,” I cut him off sharply, my voice trembling with barely restrained fury. “Don’t tell me to think. Don’t tell me to calm down. You’ve seen what they did. There’s no ‘thinking’ my way out of this.”

He doesn’t respond, just gives a small nod before disappearing outside.

Alaska lifts her head from the floor, sensing the tension, her dark eyes on mine.

She whines softly, as if trying to pull me back from the edge.

But there is no pulling back now. I force myself to focus on the image in front of me.

Every detail sears itself into my memory.

The shadows on the walls. The faint pattern on the desk beneath her.

The bastards responsible for this don’t know what’s coming for them.

They think they’re untouchable. I slam my fist onto the table, the impact sending a glass tumbling to the floor.

Alaska startles and I mutter an apology under my breath, though I barely hear my own words.

My thoughts are consumed with plans. Calculations.

Revenge. If Callum doesn’t pop up soon, we’re going to make him, and we’re going to start by visiting his dad.

I’m about to leave the house, follow Nathan, and request everything he has on Callum's family, if that even is his real name, when I notice something else about the photo. There is a single sheet of paper, maybe a sticky note, pinned to Dylan’s shoulder by a thin blade.

The edges are crumpled, the paper stained with droplets of her blood.

The words scrawled across it are jagged, deliberate, written in bold black letters that are clawing their way into my chest:

Do you know how long she can scream?

My pulse hammers in my ears, drowning out everything but the silent promise I make to myself: that they’re going to pay.

I force my breathing to slow, focusing on the details so that I don’t spiral further.

There’s something intentional in the composition of the photo.

Dylan’s position, the faint smudge of a shadow in the background, the flickering light overhead—it all feels staged.

Planned. Like they want me to dissect it.

But I know it for what it truly is, a taunt. A reminder of the lack of power I have.

I grab my keys, yanking my jacket on quickly.

I’ve been back to the alleyway every day since she was abducted, searching for further clues, hoping to catch someone back there that looks out of place, but nothing has popped up.

Today, it feels colder than usual, despite the fact that the sun hasn’t dipped below the horizon yet.

I clutch my keys tightly, fingers pressing into the metal.

My mind spins in circles as I walk, each step feeling heavier than the last. I reach the alleyway and everything seems still.

Too still. My eyes narrow as I begin my search.

For what? I don’t know. This time I have to find something, anything, before I lose myself completely.

I move methodically, scanning the area around me.

The same old grime, the same neglected corners.

I can almost hear Dylan’s voice in my head, echoing with desperation, pleading for me to find her.

But it’s been days and all I’ve found are dead ends.

I approach the wall with the dumpster, prepared to rustle through it again, when something catches my eye.

Half-buried beneath a discarded newspaper, halfway under the dumpster, its edges curling with the dampness of the alley: a postcard, simple and ordinary at first glance, yet it feels like a signal.

The front of it is an image of a field. It’s tranquil, like the kind of place you’d expect to find in a forgotten corner of a vacation brochure.

I turn it over, my pulse quickening as I read about the location. It’s circled in red pen.

Dillard.

My hands shake as I absorb the message, and I can almost feel the air around me close in.

I pull out my phone, quickly doing a quick Google search which tells me the town population is less than five hundred.

This is the kind of place that people forget about, where houses stand empty or are barely clinging to life, where the people that live there are older folk with family ties.

And what do you know? It’s in Northern Georgia.

I’m not sure if this was placed here by the same person who took the photo of Dylan, who hurt her, or if it was Callum.

We could be chasing our tails, and I could be looking into something that’s truly nothing, but I don’t care.

Dylan is out there. I shove the postcard into my pocket, my thoughts racing.

I exit out of Google and dial Nathan. He picks up on the first ring.

“I have something.”

Nathan looks as though he is trying not to speculate on my assumption that Dillard is where Dylan is being kept.

I want to knock his teeth out for it. “It’s too coincidental to not be related to Nightfall.

Tell me why it was placed where it was, under the dumpster, and that the location was circled when it wasn’t there yesterday?

Tell me why I found it on the day we get that image of her! ”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Fletcher. But I also don’t want us wasting time and energy chasing ghosts.

I just think we need to make confirmations before we run head first into something without knowing what to expect.

If that is where she is being held, we still have to narrow down a building.

We still have to scope out our competition.

They aren’t going to make it easy for us to get in, and they certainly are going to do everything in their power to never let us out.

This is bigger than the two of us, man.” He runs his hand through his hair before offering me an empathetic look.

“But what if they?—”

He cuts me off, “They won’t. They are using her as leverage, likely as bait. That tells me that they want her alive. They also won’t miss out on an opportunity to make money off of her when the time comes. There is no way they’re going to just kill her, Fletch. ”

Every word that came out of his mouth grates against my skin, making me want to claw at it.

I have to hope that he’s right, there can be no other option.

But… “We can’t afford to let this take another week, either.

Every day, every minute, every second that she’s in their possession is one where they violate her. ” Where they touch what’s mine.

Nathan grabs my shoulder. “Let me just make some calls, confirm some locations, okay? If we get a positive hit, we can plan on our way down there. But like I said earlier, if we get caught, nobody is saving her and this will all have been for nothing. You need to keep your head about this, for Dylan.”