Collateral Damage

The ride to Duck’s house took an hour, but to Bethany it was a blur of headlights and rain-streaked glass. She cried the whole way, hot tears that soaked the collar of her jacket and left her voice raw. Every mile felt like a small excision — cutting herself loose from the life she had helped build, from the man who had promised her forever and traded it for a gambling habit and lies.

Colin sat in the backseat, legs swinging, oblivious in the way children were born to be: the world for him was still cartoons and snacks and the next adventure. He hummed to himself and chewed an apple, occasionally glancing forward to ask simple, trusting questions that Bethany answered with a voice that trembled but tried to stay steady. She wanted so badly to keep him in that small, safe bubble.

Duck’s house smelled like lemon cleaner and old wood. Nancy was all over Colin the moment they stepped inside, scooping him into a hug and steering him toward a sofa and a plate of cookies as if she had already been rehearsing how to be the normal anchor for whatever storm had arrived. Duck shut the door behind them, his face hard but not unkind. He moved around them like someone rearranging the furniture of a life that had been upended, practical and precise.

“You did the right thing bringing him here,” Duck said to Bethany in the kitchen, voice low, the way fathers use to keep their children steady. “We’ll get you squared away.” He met her eyes, and there was that familiar, fierce protection there. Bethany nodded, unable to form the kind of thanks that might have sounded like forgiveness.

That night, in the guest room where the sheets smelled faintly of laundry detergent, Bethany lay awake. Colin snored softly down the hall. Duck and Nancy spoke in the next room — muffled, urgent whispers that made her chest twist. She closed her eyes and tried to force herself into sleep, to pretend that for her son, this could be the moment everything was patched and normal. But every time she drifted, her mind gave her flashes: bills with red notices, the quiet click of the front door when Tevin left in the night, the heavy, hollow look in his eyes the morning she walked out. Those images kept her alert until dawn.

—

Back at the house that had once been warm with ordinary mornings, Tevin moved like a ghost in the rooms they used to share. He cleaned — not because he wanted the house pristine, but because motion steadied the panic that threatened to shatter him. He rinsed plates with hands that trembled and stacked them with a precision that felt frantic. Everything he touched felt lost; even the smallest act of domesticity was a reminder of how far he’d fallen.

By afternoon, the silence grew too heavy to sit in. He opened a cabinet and found the bottle he’d hidden months ago. One shot, he told himself. One would steady his stomach and make the world quiet. But one dissolved into another until the room tilted and his head thudded against the arm of the couch. Sleep took over.

The first blow came without warning. Pain exploded across his ribs, and then the world blurred into motion — masked men, fists, the dull thud of a bat. He tasted metal and blood and then nothing as darkness folded him into itself.

When he came to, one eye swelled shut and sunlight slanted hostilely through the blinds. He tried to sit and found his body refused the motion. Panic clawed his throat. He smelled gasoline — sharp, chemical, and horribly deliberate. Ropes bit into his wrists. His legs were bound. Around him, men in rough clothing shifted like vultures waiting for the carcass to twitch.

A voice spoke, full and cruel and seasoned with an accent that flattened the room into two realities: him and them. “It is clear that you don't have my money.”

Tevin’s jaw clenched. He wanted to vomit and found he could only make words. “I don't have it,” he said. “But I can get it. If you give me another month, I’ll have it.”

The man laughed, a dark sound that made one of the henchmen grin. “No. You won’t,” he said. “Because now I have added interest — triple what you owe. You will not have it. So where is that family? I told you that was the agreement: you give me my money, or I will end your family's life in front of you. Where are they?”

The accusation landed like a fist. Tevin’s throat closed. Images — Bethany’s packed bags, Colin’s small backpack flashed across his mind. He’d never believed the men would follow through. He’d thought threats were a form of theater, a savage way to frighten a man into paying faster. He had been wrong.

“I didn’t know what you meant,” he croaked.

“You knew exactly what I said and meant.” The man’s eyes slitted as he scanned Tevin’s face. “Where are they?”

Tevin tried to think. He tried to breathe. He heard the scrape of shoes on wood and the distant, steady tick of a clock. Every answer felt like a blade.

“She left me this morning,” he managed. His lips split on another breath. “They’re gone.”

The men exchanged looks, not the pity of men who’d been told a sad story but the calculation of men for whom leverage is a living thing. The leader smiled in a way that left no doubt about what he enjoyed. “Either you tell me where they are,” he said slowly, “or I will have to find them. And it will get messy.”

Tevin buried his face in his arms and wept — not just for himself but for the impossible choice he had put before them, the collateral he had literally signed away with his desperation. “Leave my family out of this,” he begged. The plea came from somewhere raw and small.

“You should have left them out of this.” The leader’s voice was almost conversational. “You put them up as collateral. You’re a dangerous man, Tevin. More dangerous than me.”

They spoke, circled, poked, and left him with the smell of gasoline and the knowledge that whatever safety Bethany thought she’d bought by leaving was fragile. The leader strolled to the door as if taking his time to savor a final act. He paused, looked back, and his last words were slow and sure. “You have thirty minutes to tell me where they are, or I will find them, kill them, and anyone they are around.

Then the door shut.

Tevin lay on the floor and listened to the house settle into an oppressive quiet. The ropes bit into his wrists and his breath came in broken sobs. He had nowhere to go, nothing to sell that would cover what he owed — not without endangering the two people he loved most in the world. For the first time, the full geometry of his failure enclosed him like a room with no doors.

Somewhere an engine puttered into life and then faded — a mundane sound that in the moment felt like a countdown. He thought of Colin’s laugh, the way the boy had thrown his arms around his neck that morning. He thought of Bethany’s last look. He wanted, with a force that felt like repentance incarnate, to fix it. But the chains at his wrists and the gasoline in the air made the impossible feel real.

Tevin realized that the distance might not be enough. The men had names. The men had time. And Tevin had only what he had always had — bad choices and, finally, a painful clarity about the cost of them.

He closed his swollen eye against the light and tried to imagine a way back.