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It was his good fortune that the man was collapsed near the door, and Dimitri was able to pull him free. But by the time he reemerged, Meg had gone missing.
Even now, Dimitri remembered the terror of losing her. The paralysis, empty and cold amid all the hot chaos.
She’d become everything to him, to the man of thirty who’d spent most of his life buried with books and studies and had had little time or experience with the feminine gender. His Romanian mother, in adopting her new homeland of England, had embraced the Puritan tenet that affection toward children led them away from godliness. Thus she’d been remote and cool throughout all of his youth.
His father the earl, a Royalist who’d remained in England during the Cromwell years, took care to stay below the notice of the new government and taught his five sons to do the same by also seeming to adopt the simple, rigid Cromwellian ways. They had little social engagement and spent much of the time during the Lord Protector’s reign away from London.
Thus, the sensual, earthy Meg—who was several years older than he—had changed Dimitri’s world, bringing in a breath of life to an otherwise staid and bland one. She told him about her exciting, dangerous life as an actress in Southwark’s stealth theaters during the time when the public stages were shuttered under Cromwell. Filled with enthusiasm and smiles, she was a bold woman who exuded sensual promise.
Meg had become his life. She lured him, the proper and staid fifth son of an earl, into her bed, and in doing so, wholly snared his heart and mind.
In retrospect, Dimitri had come to realize that she wasn’t nearly as in love with him as he had been with her. Meg was enamoured by the thought of him being a peer and of a wealthy family, and what that might mean if they were attached, but she was not of his class, nor, more importantly, of his moral makeup. She lived for the moment and was scandalously loose while the genteel Dimitri lived only for the future.
Yet, that hot, red night when he emerged from saving the man from a house afire and found Meg missing, Dimitri’s life stopped. He simply couldn’t imagine his world without the sloe-eyed, coy-smiling, curvy redhead and he stood in the burning street, frantic.
Then, somehow, above all of the chaos around them, he heard her voice.
There, up in the window of the room they’d let at the small inn, next to the flaming house. He saw her leaning out the window, screaming for him. She’d gone back inside? Why? Then he saw the ruby necklace dangling from her fingers.
She’d gone back in to retrieve the most recent gift he’d given her.
His mind blank and terrified, Dimitri thought of nothing but saving her. He bolted through the door of the inn, which had just begun to catch fire. Inside it was already filled with choking ash and the heat radiated from the buildings around it.
But he could save her. There was time.
He ran up the stairs, already narrow and steep, but now darker and clogged with hot smoke. Stumbling, staggering, he went two flights until he found the room they’d used, blind and hot, barely able to breathe. The roar of fire filled his ears, the sounds of timber shuddering and heaving as it crackled into debris, the walls warm and rough beneath his fingers.
Somehow, he found her, his hands filled with the soft, familiar warmth of Meg, who’d collapsed on the floor near the door. He gathered her up and fell more than ran down the stairs, his eyes stinging with smoke, gritty and blind. The roof above was now ablaze, and falling pieces from the rafters scattered in front of him, tumbling down the steps and catching against his legs and trousers.
Down, down, down he went, staggering against the walls, at last reaching the bottom. Just then, a loud rumble filled his ears, followed by a horrible crash.
The next thing he knew, there was pain and heat bearing him to the ground, and everything was light…tinged with red and orange leaping everywhere. He coughed, tasted smoke, choking out her name and tried to crawl toward what he thought was the door.
Dimitri dragged them to the opening, his body weak and burning, his lover boneless and unmoving, the ruby still clutched in her hand, the chain wound around her wrist.
Save her. I’ll do anything. Save her. Save us. Anything to live.
The thoughts ran over and over in his mind as he crawled with superhuman strength, over rubble and coals, burying his face in the ground to keep from breathing the smoke.
It was a miracle that he made it from the smoking, blazing building, and even more of a miracle that he was able to pick Meg up and carry her down the burning streets, staggering west and away from the rage of fire.
At last, he collapsed, coughing, his eyes gritty, his hair and back singed and his body screaming with pain. He couldn’t catch his breath. All he could smell was smoke. Her body was warm and comforting next to him.
And Dimitri collapsed there, curling with his lover under a bridge as the fire raged in the distance. The sun had begun to rise in the distance, but the sky was already an arc of red over London.
He closed his eyes, feeling the strength sap from him. Meg hadn’t moved, even when he shook her, tried to listen to her breathing. But his ears were deafened from the great noise, and he couldn’t tell if her chest moved with breath.
Anything. Save us. Let us live.
He fell into sleep, or a faint, or something…and that was when the dark, fallen angel Lucifer visited him. Offered him precisely what he wanted.
I can give you what you want, Dimitri. I can save her for you. Both of you. Live forever. With the woman you love. Will you agree to it? Both of you. Forever. Will you save her?
Even now, Dimitri felt the rush of cold over him when he remembered that moment. The clear blue eyes and the handsome face of the visage in his dreams.
What must I do?
Lucifer smiled. You need do nothing but live. Forever. Enjoy life. You’ll save hers by doing so, and ensure your long life with her.
Dimitri remembered the vague feeling of evil, the cold skittering deep inside him. He opened his mouth—or perhaps only the mouth in his dream—to say no, to ask more, to question, perhaps even to pray…but Luce continued: Do you not love her enough, then? Not enough to save her?
Meg shuddered at that moment, and Dimitri felt her body as it gasped for breath. She was dying. He was losing her. No. He looked at his nocturnal visitor. We’ll live forever? Together. You’ll live forever. Lucifer’s hand reached out in the dream, settling on Dimitri’s left shoulder. Do you love her enough? Do you truly? Will you agree?
Yes. I’ll save her.
The devil’s hand rested on his skin and a blaze of pain seared through him, from beneath his hair, radiating over his left shoulder and scapula. And so it will be.
