Page 154 of The Devil's Thorn

Then his gaze dropped to my chest. “You’ll have to remove the dress. Tie the bikini differently, so I can get to where you want it,” he said. There was no flirtation in his tone. Just focus. Just the job.

Still, the room felt hotter.

I nodded and sat up, slipping the sheer cover over my head and letting it fall. I retied the bikini, shifting the straps so the skin between my breasts was bare. I wasn’t shy. Not with him. Not with anyone.

He met my eyes. “What do you want?”

“A red thread,” I said. “Coiled around a dagger. Here.” I touched the place between my breasts. “Delicate, but sharp.”

A grin tugged at his mouth. “I like it. It suits you.”

He pulled on his gloves and opened the antiseptic, wiping my skin gently. The scent of alcohol rose between us, sharp and clean. Then came the stencil, the whisper of contact as he pressed it against me, and when he pulled back, the outline of the dagger and thread sat against my skin like a promise.

“I did most of Rafael’s ink as I told you already,” he said, checking the stencil, fingers brushing lightly along the edges of the design. “He’s a masochist. Never flinched once.”

I didn’t answer. My eyes were on the needle as it buzzed to life.

He lowered the machine to my skin. Pain bloomed, bright and sudden. Not unbearable. Not unwelcome. Like being carved into. Like being claimed by something.

And Yuri was quiet as he worked, except for when he murmured, “You want to know someone? Watch them bleed.”

I didn’t flinch.

The room was silent except for the gentle buzz of the tattoo gun, the faint scent of antiseptic and Yuri’s rum mingling in the air. I lay still beneath him, my back resting against the reclined leather chair he’d pulled over. The see-through dress was discarded on a nearby stool, my bikini top tied in a way that gave him full access to the space between my breasts.

I felt the slight sting and vibration as he worked on the first outline, but it wasn’t the pain that had my heart thudding—it was the strange intimacy of it all. His focus, the weight of his body angled above mine, the heat of Cartagena clinging to my skin. There was no seduction in his touch, no flirtation in the glide of his gloved hand as he cleaned the ink or tilted my body slightly. Just intent. Control. And something unspoken threading between us.

“You know,” he said casually, eyes still trained on his work, “you might be the most interesting person Rafael’s brought into our world. And trust me, that’s saying a lot.”

I didn’t respond. Not with words. Just kept my gaze locked on the wooden ceiling beams above us and tried not to let my body react to the burn of ink being pushed into skin.

He kept talking. “I did this one for him,” he said, nodding toward his own shoulder, inked with a blackened wolf skull over roses. “He wanted something symbolic. Said it was for his mother.”

I turned my eyes toward him slightly, curious despite myself. “She the one who gave him the scar,” I murmured.

He nodded. “Yeah. That story’s darker than anything you’ve heard. He never talks about it, though. Keeps his past buried deep. But it’s in him. You can see it if you look close.”

I stayed quiet, letting his words hang in the air as the buzzing continued. He worked with a steady rhythm, wiping and shading and occasionally glancing at me to make sure I wasn’t about to faint.

“You’ve got a high pain tolerance,” he commented.

“You’d be surprised what kind of pain I’ve gotten used to.”

He smirked. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that.”

More buzzing. More silence. Then his voice dipped lower.

“Rafael and I… we’ve seen a lot together. And we’re not so different when it comes to certain things. He likes control. Power. Pain in the right places.”

I arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.

“He’s got kinks. The kind you don’t learn—you inherit. I’ve seen the women leave his place marked, bruised, still wanting more.”

My breath caught. Not out of shock. But from the way he said it. Calm. Certain. Like it was a simple truth, not something meant to scare or shock.

“And you?” I asked, finally.

He chuckled. “Oh, I’ve got my own tastes. Some that would make you curious. Others that would make you run. But I don’t push. That’s the difference between me and Rafael. He takes what he wants when he knows he can. Me? I wait to be invited.”