THE CONTROL: An Arranged Marriage Romance by Elena Monroe (ebook reader android .txt) 📕

his wounds. His skin looked abused and used in ways that would physically hurt to look at if you didn’t know he deserved it.

Rounding Elias, I watched him squirm, plead, and whine his way right into the cold parts of me that felt nothing. Any normal person would feel remorse, regret, guilt—not me. I was a horseman but acted more like an apocalypse: pure cataclysm of the end, and I knew it was for the better.

Yanking the knife out of his hand, I could feel the tug of war his skin played with it to stay in place, cauterizing the wound.

Wrapping my hand around the handle, I fisted his hair, pulling his head back until his neck was exposed for me to do as little as possible. He deserved a painful death that came as easy as breathing for me.

Looking straight ahead, I caught Eve’s eyes in the window, gliding the blade across his neck until I heard him choke on his own blood now building up in his throat.

I knew the disturbing fact that it would take him anywhere from seven to ten minutes to bleed out. He would suffer the last moments of his life and that had to be enough for me because Eve wasn’t going to wait for answers before coming to concrete conclusions.

The blood poured from his throat down his body and dripped on the stones that checkered their way to the pool from the house.

Fuck.

I knew I should have put tarp down before he stained the rocks. Blood on any kind of stone or concrete was nearly impossible to get out. After he’s dead I wanted no trace of him, nothing left but bad memories we were going to replace with new ones.

EVE

I closed my eyes before the blade had ended Elias’s life, ripping through every horrible desire to say any more awful truths.

I refused to see the parts of Bowen everyone else did—they all painted him black, calling him a lost cause. He was just a guy not broken enough to kill for other people.

Safely inside the house, peering out of the kitchen window that hung over the sink, I swallowed down the numbness trying to creep its way back in. I wanted to hold onto the anger as much as I could, as long as I could.

Price tag.

Hands of your husband.

All of his words poisoned me down to bare bones. I was a skeleton of anger trying to convince myself none of what he said was true when in reality, all of it made sense.

Bowen justified himself when he took the credit for saving me. Saving me after hating me enough to inflict pain and lick the wounds after like a false hero.

Opening the drawer next to the sink where I hid the key he didn’t know Khaos gave me, I decided I was going to make secrets a cardinal sin when I bolted to the library hidden behind the walls.

I figured Bowen would be busy dealing with the dead body on his hands when I twisted the key against the lock. Prying the door open, it wasn’t my first time inside and wouldn’t be the last as I headed for the desk nudged up against the window. I guess if you looked hard enough, space would be missing from the rooms boxing it in.

Like most girls handed a happy ending I refused to see the possibilities in it being ruined. Space included.

Rifling through the same drawers I did before, I needed to find anything linked to the price he may have paid for me and to Elias knowing who Bowen was already.

The library was sealed off from the noise of the neighborhood so well that it felt like you were actually trapped between the pages of a book. The shelves were floor to ceiling and all the almost black wood felt comforting.

Bowen had already made it clear it was off limits so naturally it was my favorite place to violate.

Nothing was off limits, not between us, and certainly not after those confessions.

I’d been working my way through the classics, all love stories he kept in the dark library just like where he kept all the love—somewhere dark and out of sight.

This was probably the only part of the old Bowen he held onto, his affinity for books and getting lost in worlds much better than this one. He always had a stack of books in his room like towers you had to avoid knocking over just to get to him.

Turns out, he’s always been guarded, and I just refused to see it.

I took my time, slipping my finger along the bindings of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. His taste ran darker now, just like him. I rounded the shelf, still curious as to why he would hide a desk in here.

I never even saw him disappear or do anything but drink, box, and sometimes when he felt frisky enough, he’d play the piano. He was too routine to fit in secrets that anyone could uncover. Bowen didn’t like to actively resemble who he used to be and when he did it was typically with the help of Hennessy.

Choosing the thickest folder I hadn’t noticed before, I let it fall to the desk with a thud. Peeling back the green folder with the Clave logo embossed on the front, I noticed the first page had my full name, birthday, and other obvious details not holding my attention when I skimmed over the words: recorded for buyer.

My eyes stilled on the words when his echoed between my ears: sold to the highest bidder and inflated price tag. Forcing my eyes to move, I continued to read the rest of the document and only stopped over choice