Page 1 of Owen (Blue Team #1)

Life is about choices.

I’d read that somewhere.

Every choice you make, makes you .

I’d read that, too.

It was bullshit.

Obviously, the Maxwell guy who wrote that in one of his books about growth and leadership didn’t take into account there were some people who didn’t have choices.

I was one of those people.

I didn’t have choices .

Not if I wanted to stay alive.

My whole life, I was a woman whose decisions had been made for me.

I had no choice but to follow the rules.

This wasn’t a cop-out, it wasn’t a way to dodge responsibility, and it wasn’t because I was weak or stupid.

In the world I grew up in the only choice you had was to learn and do it fast. Learn to keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and do as you’re told.

If you didn’t, you’d find yourself swimming with the fishes with a pair of lead boots on your feet.

I wasn’t sure if my father, the crime boss, or my uncle, the new boss when my father bit the bullet—not literally but close enough—actually said stuff like ‘swim with the fishes.’ But in my head, it sounded better than what it really meant—murdered.

Which was how people in my world ended up when they didn’t follow orders.

When they thought for themselves, when they had morals, when they tried to escape, when they talked.

My father had tolerated me. This was because I was smart and kept my mouth shut. I did as I was told, didn’t question anything, and mostly stayed out of sight.

My uncle despised me for a variety of reasons.

His biggest issue with me was that I was breathing and not just currently—that started when I drew my first breath.

No, that wasn’t right. My uncle’s hatred started when I was a bundle of cells.

He had a wife, though she wasn’t my aunt—she was the woman of the house.

And like all the ones before her she was disposable.

Some of them had more freedom than others.

After my uncle divorced them, some were set up in brownstones close to where he lived, some disappeared and were just gone.

I assumed they were swimming with the fishes, though I never asked.

I did know the ones who were left breathing all lived on the same block. It was like my uncle was taking over a section of Chicago and making it his personal community of available pussy. That was what he called women—available pussy.

Unfortunately when my father died—meaning murdered by his brother—I was given to my uncle. Yes, the man who had killed my father.

Takeover.

It was the way of the world. When you’re the king, or The Boss as my father liked to be called, there is always someone plotting and planning to take you out.

My father was a lot of things, all of them despicable, but I never thought of him as stupid.

However, in the end, he proved to be a total idiot and never saw the knife his younger brother—The Advisor, his second in command—used to stab him in the heart.

So, really it wasn’t a takeover as much as it was a hostile-takeover-slash-murder. .

No choice.

No life.

My uncle took possession of me and made it known he wasn’t happy. I’d been twenty-five. I figured he would’ve married me off as soon as he could to get rid of me. But he had bigger plans. And when I no longer fit into those plans, or more aptly when I saw something I shouldn’t have, he sold me.

No choice.

Then I was saved from a life of being some sick, deranged man’s real-life sex doll.

And now I lived in a new kind of prison.

One that was far, far worse than my uncle’s.

I was not being held captive by sex traffickers or vile men.

Yet, I was still a prisoner. Sure, the locks on the doors were meant to keep people out and not me in.

Sure, I knew the code to the alarm which was set to keep me safe.

I had access to the phone, the outside world, anything and everything I could want, but I couldn’t leave.

Not if I wanted to stay alive.

I suppose that was a choice. If one could call choosing between life and death a choice.

Not that my life was worth much. I went from my father’s chilly disposition to my uncle’s cruelty, to the possibility of being a sex slave, and I now lived with a man who had risked his life to save mine.

He’d cared for me, nursed me back to health, had tended to my injuries with a gentleness I’d never known, and if all of that wasn’t enough, on the nights I woke up screaming, terrorized by nightmares he held me.

Owen Cullen.

The man of my dreams. The only man who’d ever touched me with kindness in the thirty-two years I’d been alive.

I was far from na?ve; I knew there was no such thing as happy endings.

People in my world tended to have a low life expectancy so it was doubtful I’d reach my fortieth birthday.

But Owen made me want to believe I had a future that didn’t include a pair of cement boots and a swim in Lake Michigan.

Though knowing my uncle he’d play it safe and dump me somewhere in Indiana—probably Cedar Lake—and some fisherman would be traumatized when they found my stiff, bloated body on the shore.

So, I was in a new prison with a man who was kind and gentle. In other words, Owen was the most dangerous man I’d ever known. He and his team of brothers.

Men who fought evil.

Good men.

Clean men.

A man who would be horrified if he knew I was in love with him.

I was Sarah Pollaski. Daughter of a crime boss. Niece of Wilco Pollaski the reigning king of Chicago’s underworld. I came from filth. My family’s crude, profane, vulgar deeds had leached into my skin, coating me in the most putrid stench that would never wash clean.

Owen would set me out of his house if he knew.

So I did what I’d been trained to do my whole life—I stayed quiet.

I didn’t touch things that didn’t belong to me—which meant I touched nothing because I had nothing.

I didn’t look around his house. I didn’t make myself comfortable even though he’d told me to.

I certainly didn’t tell him I was terrified every waking moment of every single day.

I didn’t tell Owen that my nightmares weren’t nocturnal figments of my imagination but very real things I’d seen.

I didn’t tell him he was the first man who was not related to me by blood who hadn’t looked at me like I was what my uncle called me, available pussy .

I didn’t tell him my tale of woe to protect myself; I stayed silent to protect him .

Even though I wanted to believe, I was constantly reminded I had no choice.

My life had been predetermined.

I was owned. My life was not mine and it never would be.

Those were my thoughts as I sat on the floor in the corner of Owen’s bedroom staring at an envelope with my uncle’s address embossed on the left corner, my name neatly printed a little off-center mid-height, and a postage stamp on the right.

He’d found me.

My hands shook as I held the envelope, trembled so badly it took me two tries to engage the cell phone Owen had given me, and even longer before I was able to tap on his name.

It rang once before his deep voice came over the line.

“Hey.”

“He found me,” I told him.

“Who found you?” Owen asked.

Gone was the smooth baritone that never failed to soothe me and in its place was a rumble of concern.

“My uncle,” I whispered as if saying his name would magically make him appear. The man was like the Boogeyman, Bloody Mary, and Freddy Krueger all wrapped up into one demonic nightmare. Only I lived my nightmare.

Wilco Pollaski was a living, breathing, walking demon.

“Is he there?”

Through the phone I heard something scrape, then footsteps.

He was coming. Owen would come.

“No. I checked the mail. There was an envelope with my name on it. Posted from Chicago.”

I was so stupid. Owen normally checked the mail; it was his house after all.

But Eva told me she ordered me a bottle of nail polish and it was being shipped to the house.

Months ago, Eva Brown sort of saved my life—actually there was no ‘sort of’ about it.

Eva was a pilot who’d been kidnapped by a man who wanted to use her skills to run drugs into Canada.

I was supposed to be on the flight, too.

But Eva was strong and brave and fought.

I had not. I begged her to let me die. It was my last chance—death was my only chance to be free.

That was the first time Owen had shown up to save me.

He and his team swooped in to rescue Eva.

My rescue had been accidental. Then he didn’t know what to do with me. I refused to tell him my name or where I’d come from. So Owen brought me home—to his home and promised me a safe place to heal.

Anyway, back to the mailbox. I’d checked the mail instead of waiting for Owen for a stupid bottle of nail polish. Something so trivial but that I wanted desperately. That was what my life had come to, a bottle of polish so I could have something pretty.

“The house locked up? Alarm on?” His words came out in fast pants.

He was running. I closed my eyes and answered, “Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

The only place in the world that makes me feel safe when you’re not home.

I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I said, “In your room.”

“Stay there. I’ll be home in ten minutes.”

I screwed my eyelids tighter in an effort not to cry.

I hardly ever cried, and only twice over something I loved.

The first time, I was maybe eight or nine when my cat died.

I’d been devastated; Peaches was the only thing I loved, the only thing that kept me company.

I cried and cried until my father backhanded me and told me Pollaskis didn’t show weakness and they never cried.

I’d never wanted to be a Pollaski but right then, holding my dead cat with my father’s mark on my face, I’d wished I was never born .

I didn’t want to think about the second time I’d cried. It was worse, and not that long ago.

“Thank you, Owen.”

“Ten minutes, honey. Sit tight.”

Then the line went dead.

I sat tight. I didn’t move a muscle.

Owen wasn’t home in ten.

He was there in five.

Which made the only decision I’d ever made for myself harder than I ever thought.