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 naïve; 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