Page 46 of Peripheral Vision

“If you lose control, Fletcher then they’ll haveyou,too. Then who’s going to bring her back?” The words strike their mark ofcourse, 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—becauseifisn’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 herbound.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 barelyhuman. 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 thephoto. 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, wherehouses 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 looksas 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 secondthat she’s in their possession is one where they violate her.” Where they touch what’smine.

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.”

Chapter

Thirty-One

DYLAN

My shoulder burns in agony as I attempt to change out of the scrappy dress I was required to wear to my unc—Connor’s office. He already made it clear that we weren’t family. And after what he did to me… the ache between my thighs screams at me for considering such a thing. My eyes sting with unshed tears, afraid to look down at the evidence that I can feel between my thighs. A sob escapes my lips as I finally pull the dress over my head. Blood trickles down my back from where I was stabbed, the crusted over wound reopening from the movement. I close my eyes to stop the tears from falling or prevent myself from passing out, I’m unsure. I just want the world blocked out.

But images replay in my mind, and I still feel his touch, his rough hands, the way his cold and dead eyes looked at me as he took and took and took from me. The sound of his voice ricochets in my head, repeating all of the horrible things he said he’s going to continue to do to me. The room seems to close in around me, and I search for purchase on a nearby surface, but stumble and fall to the ground instead. The pain is overwhelming, physically and emotionally, as I fight not to break. But it’s no use. Curling into a fetal position, I allowa wave of nausea to roll over me and I begin retching onto the floor around me, my stomach emptying out the minimal contents it contained. The first tear falls and before I can prevent it, it mixes in with the blood and the vomit.

I lay there, trembling, the cold floor biting my skin as my body convulses in broken sobs. The room smells of copper and bile, the weight of the air pressing down on me like an iron shroud. My fingers claw at the ground, desperate for something solid to anchor me, but they only find purchase in the excrement of my body. The walls seem to whisper, the echoes of his voice weaving with the torment of my thoughts.You’re never leaving here, unless it’s in a body bag.That’s what he had said as he was in my body, taking something I could never get back. I knew that of course. He said I couldn’t after I’d seen his face. But a body bag is better than any time spent in this cage.

I still have no idea how long I’ve really been gone, nobody had bothered to disclose that, even when I asked. I don’t know where I am. My stomach growls in protest, but hunger is the least of my concerns. The real battle is against the terror clawing at my mind, the despair trying to smother the resolve I’ve held onto for so long.What would Dad think?A voice in the back of my mind whispers. And almost as if he was answering me, I hear it…

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