Cary (Henchmen MC Next Generation 5)

I’d eaten it up.

“I moved in with him not more than two weeks later,” I admitted to Cary, feeling the food lose its taste in my mouth.

Had I just been a little more careful, a little more patient. Maybe all that happened after could have been avoided. Maybe he would have shown me his true colors before it was too late for me to get away.

“Hey,” Cary said, waiting for my gaze to lift to his. “You can’t blame your past self for not knowing any better. You didn’t have those kinds of tools then.”

That was fair.

But I wasn’t quite as forgiving of myself as he was willing to be of me.

“I should have seen the signs.”

“Love, maybe there weren’t any signs,” Cary suggested. “Serial abusers get to that point because they are good at it. They’re master liars. They know all the right things to say and do. To their victims, they would just come off as a man in love. And to a woman who hadn’t really known that, can you really blame a much younger version of yourself for wanting to believe it?”

“You’re right,” I said, exhaling hard.

No one had given me a relationship common sense toolkit. Because, to my family, my future was always going to involve me settling down with a man they approved of. And then nothing that happened to me at that man’s hands was any of their business, was well within his rights as my husband. Up to and involving mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

That was just how it was, how it had been for generations.

No one taught their daughters to be on the lookout for a good man. Our fathers would do that for us.

“To be kind to that version of myself,” I went on, “things were good at the beginning. Raúl, as it turned out, had a massive home and sprawling grounds, had everything that money could buy.”

“Fuck,” Cary hissed, reaching up to rub a hand over his beard. “I think I know where this is going.”

“Well, I didn’t,” I admitted. “To me, he was just a successful businessman. I didn’t even second-guess all the bodyguards around with guns. I figured that if you were a man of so much wealth, of course people would want to come for what you had, would be a threat to your safety.”

In the beginning, I’d been vain enough to think it was a sign of my own worth, to be attached to a man like Raúl.

“Did you ever ask what he did for a living?” Cary asked.

“Of course. He’d told me distribution,” I admitted with a little snort. “That had just gone over my head. I was more than a little taken with all the lovely things around, all the fancy dinners, the nice clothes he got for me. It didn’t even faze me that he slowly but surely started to choose all of my clothes, and tell me which ones to wear.”

It didn’t even occur to me, either, that he also took control over my diet. I think, at the time, I figured the chef at his home just made what he made, and that was what we all ate. It took me months to realize everyone else was getting eggs and meat and potatoes for breakfast. While I had nonfat yogurt and fruit. Maybe, if I was really lucky, a little granola to go with that.

“The weight started to fall off within three months of moving in there. And I didn’t want to rock the boat, so I never complained about being hungry.” Though, yeah, a part of me knew there was no way he didn’t hear my stomach growling all the time.

“Why do you think he starved you? Just for control?”

“I’m sure that was part of it. But I think it was more than that. He liked small and delicate-looking women. Maybe it made him feel more manly. I don’t know. But I also think, to an extent, keeping me thin and frail and weak made it easier to control me, made it harder for me to get away if I ever decided to.”

A muscle in Cary’s jaw started to tick at that as his gaze slipped away for a moment. “When did it take a turn for the worse? As if starving you wasn’t bad enough.”

“That’s hard. I think it was little things peppered in over a long period of time. He spent less and less time with me. He found more and more faults in me. But not so much that I immediately thought he was a jerk.”

“Just enough to start wearing down your self-esteem.”

“Exactly. And I didn’t have a whole lot of that to begin with. Really, most of what I had originally had come from the love-bombing stage with him. So I associated all my good with him. Which made it harder to think of him as the one at fault. I blamed myself for not looking or acting a certain way. I bowed and kowtowed to all his wants and needs and demands. And that went on until we hit the year mark.”