Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,112

put his arm around Therese, drawing her in tight against him.

The crowd started to chant. “Ten, nine, eight…”

He leaned to her ear. “I love you.”

She smiled up at him. “I love you, too.”

“…seven, six, five…”

Glancing to his left, he smiled at iAm and maichen, who was just starting to show. They smiled back at him.

“…four, three, two…”

With one, unified voice, everybody in the house yelled, “Happy New Year!”

As “Auld Lang Syne” started up, and couples kissed, Trez stared into the eyes of his one true love.

“Forever,” he said.

Therese nodded. “Forever.”

They kissed, and as he straightened, he caught sight of Lassiter, the Fallen Angel. The male raised his champagne glass in their direction with a self-satisfied expression. Then he pointed to his throat and gave the thumbs-up, like he approved of Trez’s gift.

“A job well done indeed,” Trez murmured as he hugged his female and thanked every blessing he had ever been given.

Turned out that star he’d been born under? It had been a pretty damn good one, after all.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With so many thanks to the readers of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books! This has been a long, marvelous, exciting journey, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in this world we all love. I’d also like to thank Meg Ruley, Rebecca Scherer and everyone at JRA, and Lauren McKenna, Jennifer Bergstrom, and the entire family at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

To Team Waud, I love you all. Truly. And as always, everything I do is with love to and adoration for both my family of origin and of adoption.

Oh, and thank you to Naamah, my WriterDog II, who works as hard as I do on my books!

Keep reading for an exclusive excerpt of J. R. Ward’s

THE SINNER

The eighteenth Black Dagger Brotherhood novel!

Coming March 2020 from Gallery Books

CHAPTER ONE

Behind the wheel of her ten-year-old car, Jo Early bit into the Slim Jim and chewed like it was her last meal. She hated the fake-smoke taste and the boat-rope texture, and when she swallowed the last piece, she got another one out of her bag. Ripping the wrapper with her teeth, she peeled the taxidermied beef free and littered into the wheel well of the passenger side. There were so many others like it down there, you couldn’t see the floor mat.

Up ahead, her anemic headlights swung around a curve, illuminating pine trees that had been limbed up three-quarters of the way, the puffy tops making toothpicks out of the trunks. She hit a pothole and bad-swallowed, and she was coughing as she reached her destination.

The abandoned Adirondack Outlets was yet another commentary on the pervasiveness of Amazon Prime. The one-story strip mall was a horseshoe without a hoof, the storefronts along the two long sides bearing the remnants of their brands, ghostly laminations and off-kilter signs with faded names like Van Heusen/Izod, and Nike, and Dansk. Behind the dusted glass, there was no merchandise available for purchase anymore, and no one had been on the property with a charge card for at least a year, only hardscrabble weeds in the cracks of the promenade and barn swallows in the eaves inhabiting the site. Likewise, the food court that united the eastern and western arms was no longer offering soft serve, Starbucks, or lunch.

As a hot flash cranked her internal temperature up, she cracked the window. And then put it all the way down. March in Caldwell, New York, was like winter in a lot of places still considered northerly in latitude, and thank God for it. Breathing in the cold, damp air, she told herself this was not a bad idea.

Nah, not at all. Here she was, alone at midnight, chasing down the lead on a story she wasn’t writing for her employer, the Caldwell Courier Journal. Without anyone at her new apartment waiting up for her. Without anyone on the planet who would claim her mangled corpse when it was found from the smell in a ditch a week from now.

Letting the car roll to a stop, she killed the lights and stayed where she was. No moon out tonight, so she’d dressed right. All black. But without any illumination from the heavens, her eyes strained at the darkness, and not because she was greedy to see the details on the decaying structure.

Unease tickled her nape, like someone was trying to get her attention by running the point of a carving knife over her skin—

As her stomach let out a howl, she jumped. And went diving into her