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

With a shrug, she patted the surface of the bed looking for her panties and clothes. Whatever she deemed as clothes. “They aren’t my parents. My dad ditched me, remember? He’s my stepdad.”

That’s what she’s stuck on? My misuse of the word parent?

“He raised you since you were thirteen, Eve, give the guy some credit.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she stood up, wiggling herself into small pair of panties before tying a robe around her body. “Raised me? That’s what you think he did? Raised me to be what, Bowen? Scared to be myself?”

Standing in front of me, I was seeing parts of Eve that I hadn’t seen in years. The anger and honesty looked good on her but how much she hated her stepfather equally matched Elias and it sent red flags up shooting up around me.

Still looking up at me with her arms crossed—all the tension between us screaming, and I just wanted to touch her. I just didn’t know how to go about doing that in this moment. She sliced through my thoughts when she asked, “Did Elias die too?”

Some weird combination of shrugging and shaking my head came out in a muddy version of I don’t know. I didn’t have any details, but I planned to get them.

Pushing past me, she forced me to follow her. “Eve! It’s your fucking mom!” I was trying to reason with the parts of her that didn’t care.

Turning around into me, her hands landed on my chest causing the robe to gape open, leaving her body on display again. She leaned into me, her lips so close and an orgasm I could still smell torturing me.

Her eyes locked on mine as she said, “If I’m sad, will you pity fuck me, Bowey?”

She was twisting my new rules into daggers, and let me tell you, daggers are motivating.

Clutching onto her hand, I leaned in dangerously close, so close our lips brushed with my words. “Maybe if you gave a shit, Evey.”

With her eyes dropping down under an angry brow, she huffed before pulling away. Walking straight towards the cabinet of Hennessy, her fingers landed on the most expensive bottle. It was the one tainted with the milestone of becoming a horseman. I left it there for the day I quit and await the bullet to the heart and head.

She was always forcing me to survive.

She had a taste for the finer things in life now, but I was just some dupe for the good guy I used to be.

Tossing the cap across the room, she laughed menacingly. “I’ll give a shit if that’s what makes you fuck me, Bowey. At least something good can come from her being an absent parent. Would you feel better if I weep, Bowey? You want me to be a mess for the woman who didn’t raise me, never believed me or protected me, left me in the hands of a family she barely knew?! She doesn’t deserve my love only in her death.”

I watched her closely, sitting on the armrest of the couch with my elbows digging into my knees as she drank from the bottle.

The demons I had were already rubbing off on her if the first thing she runs too in the face of trauma or annoyances is a bottle.

“I want you to feel whatever you feel. No refunds, Eve. You don’t have to justify anything to me, but you don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt either.” I kept my voice steady and soft; she was a wild animal right now, and I needed to keep my distance until I was beckoned.

She scuffed like she was suddenly invincible. “Says the guy who doesn’t have a single photo of Braeden.”

I had to pretend that didn’t feel like a dagger too.

“And? I can just look in a mirror. That’s the awful part of being a twin, Eve. Having photos or not, it doesn’t mean I don’t hurt.” Wounded or not, she was now turning my worry into irritation pretty quickly.

Dropping my jaw to my closed fist, I watched her drink some more—painfully. I was watching her destroy herself and suddenly I understood the pain of watching me survive.

Destruction is hard to watch in any form.

Shoving a finger in my direction, I watched her practically climb the coffee table over to me on her knees with the bottle tight in her grip. “I hurt for years, Bowen. This is my liberation.”

Dropping down the couch, I stretched my legs out, still watching her from out of the corner of my eye as she rattled off insults to go with the injuries. Letting my head fall back against the armrest, I decided to let her drink herself into oblivion if that’s what she needed to do today.

Finally sitting her half-naked ass down on the tabletop, she faced me. “You know… I went to her, crying my eyes out, and all she did was tell me I was ruining her happy ending? She took away the only happiness I knew as a kid by moving us there. But still, all she cared about was herself.” She paused, trying to hold back tears when she looked in another direction and paused as a single tear cascaded down her cheek. “I tried so many times to tell her I was miserable, that Elias—that Denmark was hell. I would ask her repeatedly to let me call you at least once… She just turned the other cheek every single time.”

I sank further into the couch being dragged back to the day everything fell apart. Every painstakingly bad memory flapped its wings like her precious butterfly in my mind, causing a storm I’d rather forget.

Age 13

Tuesday was the worst day of the week; it was the day Eve’s mom pretended to be a mom. It