Page 2 of Owen (Blue Team #1)

He found me.

Christ, I couldn’t get the sound of Natasha’s terrified voice out of my head.

I checked my rearview mirror. My team leader Myles was in his beat-up Bronco and behind him my teammate Gabe was in his flashy, yellow Lexus with Kevin in the passenger seat. That was all the reminder I needed I wasn’t alone.

My team had my back. They always did. Not that there was much they could do.

Nat wasn’t talking. Hadn’t talked since I’d found her in Alaska, and after the last attempt on her life she’d shut down.

Not that I blamed her. There weren’t a lot of people who could say they survived being sold into the sex trade, and were rescued from that living nightmare only to be kidnapped by someone who they thought was a childhood friend, beaten to shit, almost shot, and witnessed their so-called friend killed in front of them.

But even with all of that, Nat hadn’t broken—she’d just clammed up. She’d cried when she saw Ashaki die in front of her, but not a single goddamn tear shed after that. The woman was stone cold .

I pulled into my driveway, heard the screeching of tires as both Myles and Gabe slammed on their brakes at the curb.

The drive from Z Corps’ headquarters to my house had been ten miles of pure hell.

I was no less calm now that I was unlocking my front door than I was when I got Nat’s call.

No less scared at what I would find. I was halfway through the living room when one of the guys unarmed the alarm and the beeping stopped.

I was in front of my bedroom door when I heard the front door close.

I paused just long enough to regain a minute bit of control so I didn’t scare the shit out of an already terrified woman.

I slowly opened the door and found her immediately. Ass on the carpet, knees bent, arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees, and her eyes on the door. She didn’t move, not a muscle, not even to blink. Stone cold dead eyes stared at me.

And that was when I vowed to kill Wilco Pollaski.

She wasn’t faking her fear. There was no faking that kind of fear, it rolled off her and filled the room.

“Nat?”

“Sarah,” she corrected.

It had been months since I’d learned her real name was Sarah. For months before that, I knew her as Natasha. The name she’d given me when I found her in Alaska. I’d never stopped calling her Natasha and she’d never before corrected me.

“He’s given me twenty-four hours to come home.”

I didn’t bother asking her who because I knew.

“You are home,” I told her.

“No, Owen,” she whispered. Her big green eyes finally lifted and our gazes locked. “This isn’t my home.”

My mind seized on a memory; one that all these months later still plagued my thoughts and made my heart clench.

The first time I’d looked into those soulful eyes.

She’d been scared stiff as I cleaned the gash on her forehead.

At the time, I’d been running on adrenaline and relief after the team and I had successfully rescued Max Brown’s woman Eva.

Natasha was an unknown, she wasn’t even supposed to be there.

I didn’t know why she was there. But the fear couldn’t be missed.

It shone in her eyes. It was in the rigid set of her shoulders.

But if I tried real hard—and I did, frequently—I could still hear her soft voice telling me she had no home.

And the deadened tone when she’d told me she was from nowhere.

I’d done everything I could think to do to give her a home.

Gabe, Kevin, and Myles had followed my lead along with Eva, Max, Tatiana, Brooks, Emmy, Thad, Anaya, and Kyle, all doing their part to make her feel safe.

Give her something to hold onto—friendship, trust, compassion.

Each and every one of them had reached out to her.

I don’t have a home.

That was what she’d said.

“Nat, this is your home. You’re not going back to your uncle.”

“Sarah,” she angrily corrected and tagged an envelope from beside her foot before she unfolded and surged to her feet. “My name’s Sarah. There’s no point in pretending anymore.”

“What are we pretending exactly?”

“That I’m not a Pollaski.”

I felt something unpleasant start to coil in my chest.

“What’s that mean?”

“You know what it means,” she spat.

“No, babe, I don’t.”

“I’m filth.”

Like a dart, her words pierced my heart, making that unpleasantness turn nasty.

She believed that, believed she was filth, believed she’d been pretending to be someone else when she wasn’t.

But she was dead wrong. She couldn’t hide the goodness inside her, even in the beginning when she’d refused to talk about herself, what had happened to her, and how she’d ended up on a tarmac in Alaska awaiting transport to Canada where she’d be delivered to a man who’d bought her. She couldn’t hide her kindness.

Nat hadn’t been concerned about her situation. All her anxiety had been for Eva and her sons Eli and Liam. Natasha asked about them every day—how the boys were doing after their mother had been kidnapped, how Eva was coping. She’d even asked about Max.

Sarah Pollaski—or Natasha No-Last-Name-Given—cared, and she couldn’t hide it.

It spilled out of her.

“Babe, you’re not.”

Nat winced and I was reminded there were times it hurt to look at her because another thing she couldn’t hide was her pain.

There were times when she smiled and it looked almost genuine but it wasn’t.

All she’d done was momentarily staunch the flow of anguish.

And like any wound that was left untreated, the gash would continue to bleed.

“It doesn’t matter. I have to go back.”

“You don’t and you’re not.”

With narrowed eyes, she took a wooden step toward me, and the ever-present ache to pull her close started to uncurl until my fingertips tingled with it.

This was my plight.

Need and sensibility.

The longer I was around her the harder it was to remember. The harder it was to hold on to my restraint. My need now outweighed my sensibility, turning my dilemma into a battle of self-control.

“You don’t get it,” she huffed and ran her fingers through her long sandy-blonde hair. Her movements were jerky and agitated. “I lied.”

“Lied?”

“To Amie. I knew. I knew everything. I knew what my dad was doing. I knew Amie’s parents worked for my dad.

I knew what they did for him. She was right.

I lived in that house and I saw it all. I lied and said I didn’t know, but I knew.

I just kept my mouth shut because I’m filth like the rest of them. ”

I didn’t want to think about the day the rogue CIA agent bypassed my security, broke into my home, and took Natasha.

By the time we’d found her, Amie, better known as Ashaki Maloof, had beaten the absolute fuck out of Nat and was readying to kill her.

That day still played out in my nightmares.

I hadn’t forgotten a single second of it, and the vivid way I remembered told me I would until the day I died.

“That bitch—”

“Was right about everything,” she cut me off. “You don’t know.”

“Five months ago—hell, two months ago—I would’ve agreed with you.

I didn’t know jackshit. But now, I do know.

I know about your dad. I know about your uncle.

I know your dad and uncle started their racket when they were in their teens and built from there.

Small-time burglary to start, worked their way up to bigger jobs.

Shit was different in the seventies when they started.

Easier to fence what they stole. Stay under the radar, especially in Chicago.

The murder rate had hit an all-time high, and Barny and Wilco used that to their advantage.

Once they had the funds, they started in the business of high-risk loans.

In other words, high-interest returns. That venture earned them the money they needed to buy muscle and get into the drug trade.

They played it smart, stayed on the fringe, and didn’t make their play for territory until they’d built an army.

Once they had the men, the guns, and the cops in their pocket they went for it and won a few blocks.

It took them years but they gained more and more ground doing that bloody and ruthless.

In the nineties, they added a stable of women and raked it in.

Drugs. Women. Gambling. Loans. That’s how the Pollaskis made their money. How your uncle still makes his money.”

“How do you know all of that?” she asked, her face pale.

“What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“You shouldn’t know that,” Nat whispered and dropped her gaze. “You can’t know that.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because…because…he’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, babe. I know he is. So what I don’t get is why the hell you’d think I’d let you go back to him.”

“ Let me?” Color rushed to her cheeks and fire sparked in her eyes—a flicker of anger I’d never seen come from her. Something that pleased me a great deal. “I didn’t know I was being held captive,” she finished.

“That’s how you’re gonna play this?” I shot back.

“Months, Nat, you’ve been here and when have I ever treated you like you were my captive?

Or better yet, when have I treated you less than someone I cared about?

I’ve done the best I could keeping you safe even though I was in the dark and had no clue what I was protecting you from. We all have.”

“You can’t protect me from him.”

“Wanna bet?”

“No. Me winning that bet means someone’s dead.”

She was perfectly serious.

Something else she believed, something I needed to correct.

“Wilco isn’t some supervillain, Nat. He cannot hurt you. Now that we know who we’re up against, we can make you safe. Trust us to do that,” I pleaded.