Where Winter Finds You
The other half was avoiding New Year’s Rockin’ Eve like the plague.
*cough*V*cough*
The food had been a great hit all around, however. Trez had ordered the event catered from the very best Italian restaurant in town, and iAm had more than delivered on the eats. Everybody had tucked into the food, and with the clock closing in on twelve midnight, it was Korbel time.
“You need someone to ride herd on the flutes?” Xhex asked from over at the kitchen table.
The two of them had been catching up on all things shAdoWs, and he was almost ready to sign the club over to her. Saxton was drawing up the paperwork, and Trez was looking forward to surprising her with the gift. And after that?
Well, he was thinking about joining Gareth on the human-law train. And getting into real estate.
“Sure do,” Trez said as he popped the first cork.
There was a cheer from the living room, and he leaned around the archway and waved as Butch and Marissa came in the front door.
Then, he shifted his eyes over to the love seat. Therese’s parents were sitting together, holding hands and smiling like newlymateds. Then again, they were newly back together, in a way. Larisse had rebounded beautifully, and there was hope, with more aggressive management, that she had plenty of good, healthy years ahead of her. And hey, she was making it to midnight, which was awesome considering she had only been released the night before.
Under doctor’s orders, though, Trez was closing the party down at 12:45 on her behalf. And also because he and his Therese had some more private celebrating to do. That quickie on the counter in the bathroom had only whetted his appetite.
As Xhex brought the tray of flutes over, Trez started pouring—
“Uncle Trez, that’s my card!”
He glanced behind himself. Bitty was standing in front of the refrigerator and pointing at the Christmas card she had made for him.
“Yes,” he said. “I told you I love it.”
“Right on your door!” She skipped over and tugged him down to give him a kiss on the cheek. “I need to go find Auntie Therese.”
“She’s playing Mario in her brother’s room downstairs.”
“Thank you,” the little female said as she skipped off through the crowd.
For a split second, Trez stared at the drawn image of him next to his female, her with her silver skin and her smile, him holding her hand, a big gold star over them both.
It was the most perfect depiction he could imagine of his life, of the union between him and his mate. Somehow, he knew the truth behind the impossibility. He knew that his female was back with him, had never really left him. He couldn’t describe the particulars—somehow, they were out of reach, but he was at peace with the blind spot.
As was everyone else.
It all just made… sense, somehow.
A puzzle completed, with no missing pieces.
And yup, today, when he’d been downtown, heading for the club in his car, he’d passed by a jewelry store with this display of engagement rings and glittering things in the window. Not really understanding why, he’d felt compelled to park in a surface lot and walk three blocks in the cold to stand in front of the store. There had been a lot of those rings, but Therese wasn’t flashy like that. As she’d said, she’d much rather have the money go to her PhD in civil engineering.
Which was going to help when she worked with Wrath on some building projects. She just didn’t know that was going to happen yet.
Trez had looked at all the jewelry store’s wares, all the crosses, too, but nothing had really felt right. Except then he’d seen the angel.
Perfect, he’d thought. Even though he’d never really had an affinity for them before.
“Trez?” Xhex said softly. “You okay?”
He shook himself back to the present and smiled at his old friend. “I think you know the answer to that.”
Those gunmetal grays were warm as she smiled back. “I do. I really do.”
“This is going to be a great year coming up, I can just feel it.”
“You know, I have to agree with you.”
As the minutes got tighter before midnight, somehow they all squeezed into the basement, with Therese’s parents being given the best seats in the house, right in front of the TV. With champagne at the ready, and the ball in Times Square beginning to drop, Trez 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.