Page 16 of Filthy Beginnings

“So, I’m talking to the future champion, huh?” His new friend sized him up.

“No question.”

“So, ah, what the hells happened out there with the prize then? Was that also part your plan to win it all?”

Damien tensed.

Fuck if he knew.

Shehad definitely not been part of the plan.

One moment he’d been striding off the gangplank, eyeing the competition while going over what nutrients he still needed to consume to reach his proper intake, and calculating how soon he could get away from the distracting welcome hoopla and head to the training center, when an itch rolled across his skin. In the next heartbeat, aggression poured through him and he’d jerked forward like his body was on the edge of a tether. Sounds had amplified. Colors too.

He’d shoved his way through the throngs—and seen her.

The most beautiful female he’d ever seen in his life.

His cock had hardened to stone. His wrists burned as if dipped in fire.

And everything inside him—usually so jumbled and seething and wild—had just… settled.

Her body moved in time with his racing heart, stunning colors shimmering across her golden shimmering skin, exactly the same as the hues that glittered across the ice on his home planet when the suns hit just right.

There she was: his purpose.

His to claim. To rut. To knot.

Need and excitement had thundered through him and he’d taken a step toward her—only to notice the crystal walls imprisoning her, the lines of exhaustion on her pretty face. All the fuckers leering at her.

After that, things got a little blurry.

Every cell inside consumed with the primal need to seize the omega and take her some place where he could bury his dick inside her and breed her until his young was in there too.

But then he’d gotten shocked, and the worst of the rut lifted. He’d gained enough control to know his initial instinct was neither smart nor possible.

She might be his, but she was also a consortium prize. That meant she was a valuable asset, one protected by full-time security and, he suspected, a tracker inside her bloodstream.

Of course, he had enough connections to get his hands on a black-market tracker remover, but even after he removed it, the consortium would not let her go so easily. Too many fighters had come to win her.

They’d hunt for her—and whoever had taken her.

If it was only to make an example of them both.

The consortium did not take kindly to anyone messing with their property.

And once they found out who he was—which they would since he’d given his real name when he bought into the tournament—his brothers would bear the brunt of the consortium’s anger.

Rather than prove his family could count on him, he’d leave them worse off than before.

That he could not allow.

The Skolov family had already suffered enough. Been hunted enough. Hustled enough.

The whole reason he’d entered the tournament was to secure the kind of mind-boggling prize money that would enable his family to buy a seat at the Brotherhood table.

Membership to the most powerful crime organization in the galaxy didn’t come cheap, but it was the goal his brothers had been striving toward for as long as Damien could remember. Because if you couldn’t beat ‘em, best to join ‘em. And, as his eldest brother Nikolai liked to remind him, it was smart to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

But it would never happen if some hot-heated idiot in the Skolov family stole a consortium omega and went to ground.

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