The needle’s buzz was a promise and a threat, a vibration that hummed through the steel table and into my bare back. Cold antiseptic swabbed a path low on my hip, a shocking contrast to the feverish heat of the room… and of him.

Kael’s shadow fell over me, blocking the single, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. His scent, dark bergamot and forged iron, filled my lungs, a possessive claim that had already marked me more deeply than any ink ever could. His rough, calloused hand pressed down on the small of my back, holding me in place. Not that I could move. Not that I wanted to.

“Almost ready, little one,” his voice was a gravelly rumble that went straight to my core, a low alpha command that made my body sing with submission.

I was stretched out on my stomach, a willing sacrifice on his altar of art and sensation. The air was thick with the smell of sterile metal, his intoxicating scent, and my own slick, a sweet, desperate perfume that admitted everything I was too shy to say. I was an omega, untouched, and I had begged him for this. For the mark. For the pain. For him.

The buzzing ceased for a moment. I heard the soft clink of a needle bar being fitted into the machine. My heart hammered against the cold steel table. Kael’s other hand, the one not pinning me down, stroked a slow, possessive path from my shoulder, down the dip of my spine, to the swell of my ass. A shudder, violent and delicious, wracked my entire body.

“So responsive. So perfect for me.”

Then his weight shifted. The denim of his jeans was rough against the backs of my thighs. He settled behind me, his heat an inferno. A blunt, thick pressure nudged against my dripping entrance, and a choked gasp escaped my lips. This. This was the other part of the ritual.

“The ink and the claim,” he had said, his dark eyes burning with intensity when I’d first pleaded with him in this very shop. “Together. They will be one memory. One sensation. Your body will never know where the pleasure ended and the pain began.”

He didn’t ask if I was ready. He knew. He could smell the truth of my need saturating the air. With one powerful, relentless thrust, he buried himself inside me, sheathing his entire length in my tight, virgin heat.

I screamed. It was a raw sound, torn from my throat, a perfect mixture of agony and ecstasy as my body stretched to accommodate his impossible girth. The pain was a bright, sharp star, but it was instantly soothed by the overwhelming rightness of it, the feeling of being utterly filled, claimed, and completed. Tears welled in my eyes, spotting the black leather of the headrest.

Before the echoes of my scream could die in the damp basement air, the buzz of the tattoo machine screamed to life right beside my ear.

“Now, omega. Now you take my mark.”

The needle bit into the tender skin of my hip at the exact moment he drew his hips back and slammed into me again. The world dissolved into a symphony of sensation. The searing, precise sting of the needle. The brutal, grinding fullness of his cock. The scratch of his jeans against my thighs. The smell of us, of sex and sweat and ink.

He moved in a steady, punishing rhythm, each thrust punctuated by the unrelenting buzz and bite of the needle. I was moaning, a continuous, broken stream of sound, my fingers scrambling for purchase on the slick table. My body was no longer my own. It was a canvas for his art, a sheath for his cock, a vessel for his pleasure.

“That’s it,” he growled, his voice strained with his own mounting control. “Scream for me. Let the whole block know who you belong to.”

The knot. I felt it begin to swell at the base of his length, a thick, impossible stretch that promised to lock us together. A fresh wave of panic and desire flooded me. I was so full, how could I take more?

The needle lifted from my skin. I heard a new, sharper clink of metal. My eyes, blurred with tears, widened. He wasn’t done.

“A final touch,” Kael rasped, his breath hot on my neck. His hand left my back and moments later, his fingers, slick with my own arousal, found the sensitive, swollen nub of my clit. He pinched it gently, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, and a bolt of pure lightning shot through me.

At the same moment, a cold, sharp point pressed against the same hyper-sensitive flesh. A clamp. A piercing needle.

His knot pressed insistently against my entrance, a relentless, stretching pressure. The buzzing of the tattoo machine started again, this time accompanied by the cold feel of a new needle.

“Now.”

He thrust forward, his knot finally, devastatingly, popping inside me, locking us together in a blinding flash of pain-pleasure so intense I saw white behind my eyelids. My inner muscles clamped down on him in a writhing, involuntary spasm of ecstasy.

The piercing needle punched through my clit at the same moment the tattoo needle dug back into my hip, and his cock began to pulse deep inside my clutching heat.

I shattered. There was no other word for it. A scream was ripped from my soul, raw and unfiltered, as my body convulsed around him. The pain of the needles was utterly consumed by the tidal wave of my orgasm, each pulse of his hot release inside me triggering another catastrophic contraction of my own.

He flooded me, his seed pumping into my depths in hot, seemingly endless jets, each one a claim, a branding from the inside out. I felt so full, so utterly claimed, so completely ruined and remade. The noises I made were inhuman, guttural sobs of pleasure, my body dancing on the table between the twin violations that felt more like benedictions.

The machines fell silent. The only sound was our ragged breathing and the wet, obscene sound of my body still milking his. He collapsed over me, his broad chest damp with sweat pressing against my ravaged back, his teeth finding the mating gland on my neck in a final, possessive promise.

He didn’t bite down. Not yet. But he held me there, on the precipice, as his knot kept us tied, as his seed continued to fill me.

“Mine,” he breathed into my sweat-damp skin, his voice thick with satisfaction.