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“What’s going on,” Lydia asked as she wrapped her arms around herself.
He got the location on Google Maps and made sure he knew where he was going. “Gus. Something bad’s happened. We need to go to Plattsburgh.”
“Is he all right?”
“I have no idea.” Extending his hand out to her, he said, “We shouldn’t waste any time, okay?”
Abruptly, Lydia’s chin lowered and her eyes gleamed with a predator’s menace. “If anyone’s hurt that man?”
Daniel nodded. “It goes without saying. We take care of it.”
Lydia nodded grimly, gripped his palm, and hopped back on the bike. As her arms came around him again, he gave them a squeeze. Then he started the engine with a jump, pumped the gas—
—and tore off down the lane.
For that physician? For everything the man had done for him over the last six months?
Daniel was going to find out what the hell had happened—and with Lydia’s help, he was going to make sure if there were any wrongs to be righted…
The ledger was balanced.
The proper way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WITH SO MANYthanks 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 Hannah Braaten, Jamie Selzer, Jennifer Bergstrom, Jennifer Long, 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 Writer Dog II, and Obie, Writer Dog-in-Training, who work as hard as I do on my books!
Turn the page for an exclusive excerpt from:
The next installment in J. R. Ward’s #1New York Timesbestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series!
CHAPTER ONE
5.8 miles north of Great Bear Mountain
Adirondack Park, Upstate New York
IN THE GLOAMING,the mountain air smelled of pine and earth, the scents carried on a lazy draft that trickled down the elevation, weaving around and over boulders and branches, weeds and wildlife, the frigidity of space encroaching upon the planet. Across the valley, the sun’s very last rays created a hearth in a juncture of peaks, the intersection of surging topographies forming a cup of hands in which the light could nestle for a brief, dying time, only embers now, no warmth to speak of.
As Lassiter, the fallen angel, emerged from the cave, he thought of McDonald’s.
And not because he was hungry.
Drawn by the finality of the peach glow, hestepped forward to a keyhole view of the splendor. Like the Golden Arches memory that was suddenly dogging his brain, the sight before his eyes was a distillation of experience rather than something currently sensed, a refraction of the world as opposed to that which was in-the-moment sensed and seen.
It was as if the present was the past, a memory that was subject to faulty interpretation and accuracy.
Had it been a Big Mac and fries?he wondered idly.Or a Quarter Pounder?
Maybe it had been neither.
Those specifics were gone now, but he had most of the rest of the details surrounding the events that had started him on the path that led here, to this night, this view. Two years ago he had been sent by the Creator to rescue the Black Dagger Brother Tohrment, son of Hharm, from grief. The mission had been an oxymoron combination of promotion and punishment. Lassiter hadn’t been looking for the former, and had had too much of the latter, but in any event, his opinion about his fate was as irrelevant as where it took him.
The Creator had had a plan for him, and like destiny, hadn’t cared about what he thought.
