Owen (Special Forces: Operation Alpha) (Blue Team Book 1) Read online

  Owen (Special Forces: Operation Alpha)

  Blue Team Book 1

  Riley Edwards

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Other Books by Riley Edwards

  About the Author

  More Special Forces: Operation Alpha World Books

  Books by Susan Stoker

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  © 2021 ACES PRESS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this work may be used, stored, reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations for review purposes as permitted by law.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

  Dear Readers,

  Welcome to the Special Forces: Operation Alpha Fan-Fiction world!

  If you are new to this amazing world, in a nutshell the author wrote a story using one or more of my characters in it. Sometimes that character has a major role in the story, and other times they are only mentioned briefly. This is perfectly legal and allowable because they are going through Aces Press to publish the story.

  This book is entirely the work of the author who wrote it. While I might have assisted with brainstorming and other ideas about which of my characters to use, I didn’t have any part in the process or writing or editing the story.

  I’m proud and excited that so many authors loved my characters enough that they wanted to write them into their own story. Thank you for supporting them, and me!

  READ ON!

  Xoxo

  Susan Stoker

  About the book

  Owen Cullen was a dream. Not a dream come true because I’d never dared to dream. He was my wildest fantasy, a hallucination, a delusion. The handsome man who’d saved my life—twice. He was a real-life hero, and I was…what was I? Filth, that was what I was. The daughter of a gangster, the niece of the reigning king of Chicago’s underground. I tried my best not to fall in love with Owen. I tried not to mistake his kindness. I tried to remember the lessons of my youth: Love was a weakness. Sex was a weapon. It didn’t work. I fell in love. Then my uncle found me, and I ruined everything.

  Natasha. It was a fake name. One she’d made up on the fly when my team had rescued her from a life worse than death. She had no place to go, so I took her home. It was supposed to be temporary, just until we learned who she was. But the woman proved to be stubborn and kept her secrets buried deep. She’d lived with me for months, and every day the pull of her called to me. I was living a nightmare of my own making. I didn’t trust women, especially the one sleeping in my guest bedroom. I’d fought the good fight. I’d held out for as long as I could. Then all of her secrets came out, but it was too late. I was in too deep. Natasha, the beautiful woman with no last name, was mine. But she had a last name—Pollaski.

  Everything came crashing down.

  I was no stranger to the battlefield. I was used to blood, guts, and no glory. What I wasn’t accustomed to was the feeling of my heart being torn from my chest. What I was not acquainted with was desperation. Natasha was gone, and I had less than twenty-four hours to find her, or she’d be gone in a different way.

  Welcome back to Z Corp and Special Forces—Operation Alpha. New team, new badass former military heroes. Like the teams that have come before, Owen, Gabe, Myles, Kevin, and Cooper are ready for action. With a little help from Susan Stoker’s unparalleled cast of heroes.

  For Susan

  Prologue

  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 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 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 I that 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.

  Chapter 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.

&nb
sp; 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.