The most easily lured and tricked.

“Release me, you damned bastard!”

But Dimitri already knew there was no way out. He’d already attempted it, tried to break the covenant in the last year since he’d left Vienna. He’d already denied himself what Lucifer had recreated him to need, twenty-five years ago: blood. Rich, warm, life-giving.

The devil’s Mark, depicting the insidious crack in his soul, was imprinted on his back and would never leave him. Thus it had been, for two decades.

And his attempt at self-denial, his attempt to thwart the devil and to break free?

The result was on the floor, a horrifying mess of limbs and tendons and mutilated flesh, destroyed. Dead.

Murdered.

Dimitri pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, a black ball of anger swelling inside him. His eyes stung.

Damn it all…he’d tried.

He’d left Vienna after the fire, left a world of opulence and hedonism that he’d never truly enjoyed, and refused it all. A year ago.

For a year, he refused to feed, to drink from anyone. He’d die first, damned or no. Surely if a vampire didn’t drink of the lifeblood, he’d grow weak and die. He’d force Lucifer to release him.

But it hadn’t worked at all, and it was his very weakness that had caused this tragedy.

For when the old woman had found him, near death, weak after a year without sustenance, he’d been naught but a loose-limbed mass of bone and flesh. Ready to leave the life he’d been tricked into, back when he’d saved Meg twenty years ago. When he’d given up everything for her.

The old woman found him here, and tried to help him—for she couldn’t have known. She was an innocent. She induced him to drink ale and broth, neither of which could save him.

And Dimitri: all through the night and into the day, day after day, he watched those solid blue veins. He lusted for the curve of her plump neck. He had to close his eyes to keep from taking what every humor in his body demanded.