The Devil's Silver (The Road Devils MC Book 2)

by Marysol James

  “That fucking bastard.”

  “He just kept escalating from there. He took money from the joint account and then shouted at me that I’d spent it on something frivolous like perfume, and I’d see it sitting there on my dresser and apologize profusely. He ordered expensive things from Amazon in my name and told me that I’d ordered them when they showed up on the doorstep. He told me about lunch plans with him, dates at the movies, travel plans together – and then when I showed up at the restaurant, the theatre, the airport, nobody would be there. I’d call him all upset and he’d convince me that I’d made it all up because he sure as hell hadn’t told me anything about a lunch, a date, a vacation.”

  Silver was utterly appalled. “This is the ultimate mindfuck, Jolene.”

  “And that’s what gaslighting is, at its core: a mindfuck of extreme proportions. The end game, of course, is that after it’s gone on for a while, the person that it’s happening to has no sense of reality anymore and is totally dependent on the gaslighter. I was especially vulnerable because I wasn’t working and I was home alone all day, so I had no sounding board of any kind. After three years of it, after something had happened almost every day to make me question myself, I had zero faith in my own eyes, my own ears, my own memory. I’d become utterly convinced that I was losing my mind and I was pathetically grateful that Brian stuck with me, because God knew that I was a hopeless mess. I mean, no wonder he refused to have a baby with me, right? I was a burden and a liability, and no way I could be trusted with a helpless little human being. Hell, I was just lucky that Brian loved me enough to forgive me for being such a head case.”

  “I hate this fucker,” Silver said quietly and with menace. “So. Much.”

  “Then hold onto your hat, querido, because it gets worse.”

  “I figured that it did. Unfortunately.”

  “We had our third wedding anniversary, and I completely messed the whole thing up by ordering a chocolate cake when I knew good and well that Brian hated chocolate. The truth is…” She paused, took a deep breath. “Well. The truth is that to this day, I don’t know how much of what went wrong around me was a form of sabotage by Brian, and how much I actually did myself and for real. I was so sleep-deprived and frantic, I had no attention span and no memories to count on, I very well may have called the bakery and ordered chocolate cake, not vanilla.”

  “People make mistakes, baby,” he said gently. “All the time and every day. I’m sure some of what happened was on you – but no way that’s a reflection on your character or intelligence. And let’s face it: if he made you so tired and distracted and crazy that you didn’t know which way was up, how could you not fuck some stuff up? I would, God knows. Hell, I haven’t been sleeping great lately, and the day after a night like tonight, I’m a goddamn zombie around work.”

  She gave him a grateful smile, then turned serious again. “So. The day after our third anniversary, he – he –”

  “He turned physical,” Silver finished for her; he’d been waiting for this. “He hit you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “And after – when I wanted to talk to him about it, he took one look at my black eye and he said – he told me –”

  “He told you that he didn’t touch you. That you banged your own damn face off the sink, or fell your own clumsy ass down the stairs, and you believed him. Right?”

  “God. Yes.” She gazed up at his face. “You get his game, huh?”

  “It ain’t hard to predict at this point,” he said tightly. “He’s a sick twisted fuck who was all about making your reality as unstable as possible and frankly, angel, I saw this coming from a mile away. If he could convince you that you put the keys in the freezer, and that you were remembering texts that never existed, and that you had hallucinated vacation plans, then how hard would it be for him to convince you that you imagined him laying hands on you? You were just fucking nuts anyway, right?”

  “He flatly denied touching me,” she said. “And then he was so concerned about my so-called false memory, he came over all loving and tender. Bought me flowers and a spa day because he said that I needed to relax. I was totally confused then, but this marked the beginning of a new phase of the gaslighting.”

  “Push and pull? Hot and cold? Love bombing and then withdrawing affection? Buying you shit and then ignoring you?”

  Astonished, Jo blinked. “Are you – have you been gaslighted?”

  “Nope and thank Christ, because it sounds like a goddamn living nightmare.” Silver’s chest was tight with rage for the emotional and mental wringer that she’d been put through. “And like I said, his game isn’t hard to rumble for someone like me – but for someone dependent on him and isolated and alone, it’d be damn hard to see. You’d be too busy trying to remember to fucking breathe to see the forest for the trees.”

  “The physical abuse went on for almost two years, right up until I left him.” She swallowed hard. “I left him exactly one month to the day that I met you.”

  Silver held her hand tighter, but could think of exactly nothing to say. The full realization that she’d walked away from that fucker and into his arms was humbling in its courage, strength and faith.

  She’d believed in him that night in The Red, and then he’d promptly turned around and shattered every iota of her belief in him and in herself too, he finally understood. Jolene would have spent the first few weeks in Denver looking at him – a man using a new name, a man who’d had a personality transplant and turned into an asshole – and she’d have wondered if she’d imagined the sweetness of that night together. She’d have doubted and second-guessed every word that had come out of his mouth that night as Zeke and she’d have questioned her memory of events, turned it over and over in her mind.

  If Silver had given her even one fucking second of a see-sawing sense of reality, then he was an absolute monster. God, he had some making up to do.

  “How did you get out, baby?” he asked her now. “How the actual hell did you realize what was going on and get away?”

  “Dr. Phil.”

  “OK, what?”

  “Well, I watched a ton of daytime TV because I wasn’t working and I wasn’t mentally strong enough for anything much more challenging than that. I was lying on the sofa one day, waiting for the laundry to finish, and there was a Dr. Phil episode about gaslighting and how it was a form of mental and emotional abuse. There was this panel of women guests talking about how scattered and hopeless they all thought that they’d been, because they were always doing things like putting their shoes in the fridge and the lasagna in the closet. They said that they clearly remembered conversations that their partners claimed never took place, and clearly remembered events that their partners claimed had never happened, and they explained that it had all been a massive manipulation.”

  “Wow. Light bulb moment.”

  “Huge. I sat straight up on the sofa and I was more focused and alert than I’d been in years. It was like looking in a mirror, or having my own life put on the screen for me to observe. That little bit of distance gave me clarity and perspective, as did the fact that there were five totally sane and normal women sitting there telling me that they hadn’t been crazy – they’d been controlled and gaslighted, for the sick thrill of someone else.”

  “That was the day that you saw it at last? Saw it for what it was?”

  “Damn right. That was the day that I realized that no, I wasn’t crazy. I was a pawn in a game that I hadn’t even known that I was playing. Oh, I just saw it all that day: I saw that it was all a slow, deliberate, prolonged campaign to throw me off balance and make it impossible for me to trust myself. I saw that Brian more than enjoyed torturing me mentally… he relished it. He loved it. He delighted in coming up with new and unique ways to mess with my head, and he devised more and more twisted ways of doing just that.”

  “I guess it made him feel like quite the big man.”


  “Yes. I finally understood that he was a coward and a narcissist, and doing that to me was his only real accomplishment and his only real source of power. I watched that show and all I could think was that gaslighting was just like brainwashing – and I finally understood that I was so exhausted from being in the spin cycle for over four years, I was brainless. Thoughtless. I was so broken that I didn’t even know that I was in pieces. That was the day that I began to want out, but I didn’t leave until nine months later.”

  “Nine months?” Silver was stupefied. “You waited nine months?”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes averted. “I just – I finally knew what was going on, but I still needed time to really, truly believe it. I also needed to plan and seeing as I couldn’t even trust that I knew where hair brush was on any given day, I was paranoid about forgetting something, missing a crucial step. I knew that I had just one shot to leave and if I screwed it up, he’d never let me get a chance again.”

  “I can see that,” he said reluctantly. “But still… nine months. That’s so long to live with that awareness.”

  “It was, but it was weirdly therapeutic too. Like, I was able to take a step back and see what he was actually doing. When stuff moved around and went missing, or when he told me that a conversation had or hadn’t taken place, I was like a scientist observing some bizarre anomaly. I saw it, I saw it all. I kept seeing and hearing those women from the show in my head, and I just got it. A few times I almost laughed in Brian’s face when he said something, just because it was so fucking ridiculous what he was doing, but then I wanted to cry because I’d believed exactly that kind of bullshit thing before. It was – it was an alternate reality. But I had woken up and it was reality. It was something that I could hold on to and trust at last, and that’s what kept me sane in those last few months.”

  “And he was still beating you,” Silver said. It wasn’t a question. “There you were, awake and aware at last, and he was beating you up.”

  “Yes. But when he did, I knew that he had. I didn’t let him convince me to forget or that I’d imagined it. I held onto every bruise, every cut, every broken bone. I stored them away in my memory and I didn’t allow him to pretend that they never happened. I hated every second of it, but in a strange way, it was good to look my reality in the face and see it. It was awful and dangerous, but I finally understood why it was. And I knew what I had to do to change it.”

  There was a silence, and then Silver asked, “What about money?”

  “It was a problem, but not an insurmountable one.” Jo traced the lines of the tattoos on his forearms. “I started a small accounting business in my own name and didn’t tell Brian. I was home alone all day, so it was easy enough to hide it. I took every kind of client, every size, and just worked my ass off and invoiced like mad for eight months. I also… erm… slightly fiddled with the household budget.”

  Silver was delighted. “You hid his own money from him?”

  “Damn right I did. Not much, but a bit. Enough that between my small business earnings and what I salted away, I was able to run one weekend when he was away at a legal conference. I rented a crap car, packed one suitcase and my laptop in my backpack. Walked out the door and drove to a cheap cash-only motel. Worked there on my clients’ accounts, job hunted, slept a lot and started to heal properly. Didn’t look back.”

  “And one month later, you met me and came to work for The Road Devils.”

  “Yes.” She gave him that shattering smile that he adored. “Here I am.”

  “I can see why you were so determined not to leave when I was being such a dick,” Silver said slowly. “I understand what you meant when you said that you were done with men telling you what to do and think.”

  “I’d made up my mind to stay,” she said simply. “I had just finally started to trust myself and to make my own decisions again, and I wasn’t going to back down from that. Not for you, not for anyone.”

  “You have such guts, baby. The heart of a goddamn warrior.” He hesitated. “You put me to shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “Yeah. I can’t imagine what happened to you, what you’ve been through.”

  “We’ve all been through something, Silver.” She spoke carefully, knowing that she was treading on dangerous ground here, inching out on thin ice on her belly. She knew that he had something on his mind and on the tip of his tongue – and she didn’t want to say anything to make him start to pull back now. “We all have things that get us out of bed in the middle of the night.”

  Silver shut his eyes and Jo just sat there, holding one of his hands in both of hers, and waited. If he was ever going to tell her why he was often up at 3 a.m. drinking whiskey, it was going to be now. It didn’t matter what she said or did – if he wanted to tell her, he would.

  She found herself praying that he would.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered under his breath. “You’re going to look at me differently after this, baby, I promise you.”

  “Maybe,” she said calmly. “But if you think that I’ll stop seeing the amazing man that you are, you’re as wrong as it’s possible to be.”

  He opened his eyes now, stared directly into hers. And there it all was: her good, sweet soul and her strong lioness heart were both shining up at him, so bright and pure and beautiful. He took a breath, drew some courage and grace from this woman – and for the first time in his life, he opened his mouth to talk about what had happened to him thirteen years before:

  “I told you that I went to jail for six years,” he said in a hushed tone. “I still don’t understand how it happened because I don’t understand how one woman’s word against mine was enough to find me guilty. But as much as that confuses me, what I really don’t understand is how I – a man of twenty-nine in peak physical condition, an ex-badass soldier, a guy who could defend and protect himself with barely an increase in his pulse – could have been sexually assaulted in jail.”

  “What?” she whispered. Oh, God, it was so much worse than she’d anticipated. “Sexually assaulted?”

  “OK, sure,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, as if he was talking to himself. “The skinheads moved in a pack of five. They had shivs. They overwhelmed and subdued bigger men than me pretty damn easy. I think that they actually really liked the challenge of taking down big, strong fellow prisoners, because that gave their attacks an added edge, an added bit of degradation and humiliation. I figure it’s because guys like me had no idea what it was like to be made to feel small and weak. Afraid.” He was quiet. “Those fuckers liked teaching us that. They liked it a lot.”

  “Silver… my God.”

  “In a way, I was lucky. It only happened to me once, but that’s because Cole and his two cell mates stumbled across us after each of the five had had their fun with me. I was on the floor bleeding and beaten within an inch of my life and thinking that I was dying, wishing hard that they’d just fucking kill me because I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror ever again. Cole and the guys showed up out of nowhere and just started swinging. I don’t know why they helped me, but they did and thank Christ. I don’t think I’d have been able to survive another attack. Some guys were raped every week, and it went on until they found some way to end it. Usually by hanging themselves, or an overdose with stolen meds.”

  She shook her head, tears in her eyes. She had no idea what to say.

  “Cole and his friends had my back after that, and so the fuckers never got close to me again. I watched them hurt others, though, and every chance I got, I stopped them and I did it as brutally as possible. Sometimes Cole was with me, sometimes I was on my own, but I didn’t care either way. I beat them as bad as I could before I was stopped and because of that, I served every minute of my six years. No time off for good behavior for me and it was fucking worth it. I’ll never be sorry.”

  “I can understand that.”

  �
��So I went into prison angry at being railroaded and came out fucking furious at being raped. I was beyond enraged that the very thing that I’d been falsely accused of had actually happened to me, and it had happened because a woman had lied about that horrible thing in the first place. It was so sick and convoluted, all twisted and mixed up, and I didn’t know where the hell to put my rage at all the unfairness. When Cole put my name forward as Prospect for the Road Devils, he gave me the chance to start a new life, but he also gave me the ultimate arena to be as violent as I wanted and needed to be right then.”

  “You mean doing stuff for the MC?”

  “Yeah. Back then, brutality of all kinds was the norm for The Road Devils, and I know that the expression is that violence never resolves anything – except in my case, it did.”

  “It – it helped you?”

  “I know that killing a child rapist or sex trafficker or drug runner isn’t recommended as therapy,” Silver said wryly. “But for me, it was what I needed. In the most fucked up way possible, it made me feel back in control and strong. I know that’s not healthy, I know that I should have worked through things in a more productive way, but it’s what was on the table at the time and I took it.”

  “Have you ever talked to anyone about it? A professional?”

  “No. Never.” He shook his had slowly. “My Dad died while I was in prison, not that I’d have ever told him anyway. I’ve never talked to Cole about it, ever though he knows what happened. I just got up every day and strapped on my gun and took my rage to the clubhouse. Talking seemed pointless and self-indulgent and weak for an MC bad-ass, and shooting people in the head felt more immediate and useful. It fueled all the anger at first and then… I don’t know. It tempered it, somehow, took the edge off of it. And finally one day, just out of the blue, I realized that I’d worked through all the destructive feelings and I was left with other stuff.”