Max Verstappen...

Monaco glowed in the setting sun. The streets were warm and lively, the air heavy with sea salt and a mix of aromas: expensive cologne, freshly baked bread, and too many people crammed into the narrow alleyways.

Max walked through all of this like a ghost.

And then...it stopped.

The smell hit him like a blow.

Sweet. Subtle. Perfect.

It was something he had never smelled before: warm and intoxicating, golden like honey in the sunlight. It pierced him instantly, ignoring logic, burning into the oldest and most primitive part of his brain. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, his knuckles white.

Omega.

It couldn't be.

It had been decades since there had been an unclaimed omega in Monaco, let alone one roaming free in the streets.

Find them

Sometimes, rarely, he wondered if things would have been different if Sophie had raised him alone. His mother, sweet and soft-spoken, tried to awaken the child within him, the one who might have been sweet if Verstappen hadn't been born.

"Maxie," he said, pulling back his hair like he used to when he was a child. "You don't have to be like him."

But Jos's voice always shone brightest in his head. "You're like me. You're mine. Never forget that."

Victoria had forgotten. Her older sister, an alpha like their father, had run away with a beta three years earlier, turning her back on the family legacy.

"Good for her," Max thought with a flicker of irony. He couldn't even imagine what freedom would be like.

But he didn't envy her. Freedom meant weakness. Freedom meant letting your guard down long enough for someone to stab you in the back.

No, he didn't want freedom. He wanted control.

And one day, like all of Verstappen's alphas before him, he would have an omega.

Omegas were nearly extinct, but that only made them more valuable. The Verstappen bloodline was known for hunting them down—no matter how rare or hidden they were—and for capturing, trapping, and breaking them down until they crumbled.

Jos had one. Sophie.

Max would have one too.

It didn't matter how long it took or how far he had to go. Every empire needed a jewel at its heart. Every predator needed prey.

And Max Verstappen never stopped getting what he wanted.

.

Force.

That was the first thing Jos Verstappen taught his son.

No love. No kindness. Not even loyalty. Just power. The ability to take, crush, dominate, because if you didn't, someone else would.

Max grew up with his father's lessons etched into his bones like brands.

"Weakness will kill you." "An alpha doesn't ask. He takes." "Empires are not inherited. They are seized."

At sixteen, Max no longer sought Jos's approval. There was no such thing as approval there, only calculation. At seventeen, he sat across from his father at the long oak dining room table, listening to him plot shipping routes and arms trafficking with the same cold precision with which most parents would discuss college applications. "Half the empire is already yours," Jos said then, his voice deep and harsh. "Take the other half when you're ready. Don't disappoint me."

Disappointment was seen as weakness. And in the Verstappen family, weakness was not tolerated.

Max hated university. He hated the classes, the idle chatter of the betas in the hallways, the way the professors dared to speak to him as if he were just another student. He could destroy the entire institution with a single phone call. Sometimes he amused himself by remembering it, sitting in a classroom, absentmindedly drumming his pen over his notes while plotting how to expand his territory into Marseille.

Jos had insisted on this. "Every self-respecting alpha heir spends time among the betas before ruling them," he had said. "Learn their weaknesses. Learn their thoughts."

And so Max endured.

When he wasn't studying, he was at the heart of the empire: meeting rooms, villas, warehouses. By 21, he already controlled half of it. Drugs. Weapons. Shipping routes stretching from Monaco to Shanghai. The name Verstappen meant something in every dark corner of Europe.

But it wasn't enough. It never was.