Release Day Spotlight + Giveaway: Claimed by J.R. Ward

 

 

Claimed (Lair of the Wolven #1)
Author: J.R. Ward
Release Date: July 27, 2021
Publisher: Gallery Books 

Description:

A heart-pounding new series set in the Black Dagger Brotherhood world, with a scientist fighting to save the timber wolves—and getting caught in a deadly trap herself...

Lydia Susi is passionate about protecting wolves in their natural habitat. When a hotel chain develops a tract of land next to the preserve, Lydia is one of the most vocal opponents of the project—and becomes a target.

One night, a shadowy figure threatens Lydia’s life in the forest, and a new hire at the Wolf Study Project comes from out of nowhere to save her. Daniel Joseph is both mysterious, and someone she intrinsically wants to trust. But is he hiding something?

As the stakes get higher, and one of Lydia’s colleagues is murdered, she must decide how far she will go to protect the wolves. Then a shocking revelation about Daniel challenges Lydia’s reality in ways she could never have predicted. Some fates demand courage, others require even more, with no guarantees. Is she destined to have true love... or will a soul-shattering loss ruin her forever? 

CLAIMED

Chapter 1

Town of Walters, est. 1834
Upstate New York

Lydia Susi’s Destiny came for her in the veil, on a random Thursday in the early spring.

As she ran along the wooded trail, two miles into a loop that would take her through the preserve’s northeastern acreage, she was measuring the glowing line that topped the contours of the mountains. Soon, the stripe would expand to an aura, and after that, the sun would accept the handoff from the moon, and day would arrive.

Her grandfather had always told her there were two twilights, two gloamings, and if you wanted to find your past, you went into the pines in the evening as the sun went down. If you wanted your future to come to you, you went alone into the forest in the veil, during that sacred transition of night into morning. There, he’d told her, when the distinction between that which ruled the light and that which held domain over the dark was at its narrowest, when the moon and the sun reached for each other before the rotations of their orbits tore them asunder, there was when the mortal could brush up against the infinite and seek answers, direction, guidance.

Of course, that did not mean you got good news. Or what you wanted.

But life was not an à la carte buffet where you could choose everything that went on your plate—another words-of-wisdom from a man who had lived to be 101 years old still smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of sima after his dinner year round.

Why limit spring to just Vappu? he’d said.

Lydia had never believed in his superstitions. She was a researcher, a scientist, and the kinds of things that her isoisa had gone on about did not fit in with that Ph.D. in biology she’d bought on layaway from the federal government and was still paying off.

So no, she was not out looking for any prognostication from the universe this morning. She was getting her workout done before she headed into her office at the Wolf Study Project. With the way things had been going lately, she was going to blink and it would be seven at night. Short-staffed and under-funded, everything was a fight for resources at WSP, and by the time she locked things up every evening, she was exhausted. So Carpe Cardio was her motto and why she was out in this misty darkness—

Lydia let her stride peter to a halt.

Her breath pumped in clouds that captured and held the moonlight, and as a breeze came across the trail, her body did the same with the chill, grabbing it out of the air and bringing it in under her wind-breaker.

As she shivered, she looked behind herself. The trail she was on was the widest one in the preserve, a highway rather than a street, but she couldn’t see much into the trees. Pines crowded up close to the shoulders of the packed path, and the fog wafting through the craggy trunks and fluffy boughs obscured the forest even more.

In a quick calculation, she figured she was a good three miles from any other human, two miles from her car at the trailhead’s parking area, and a hundred yards from what had caught her attention.

There, up ahead, something was close to the ground, moving.

Fight or flight, Lydia, she thought. What’s it going to be.

She reached around to the small of her back. There were two cylinders mounted on the strap of her fanny pack, and she left the Mace where it was. Clicking on her flashlight and bringing it forward, she swung the beam in a wide arc—

The eyes flashed over on the left, a set of retinas flaring the light back at her as pinpoints. The stare was about three feet from the ground and the pupils were set close together, as predators’ were.

Lydia looked around again.

“I’m not going to bother you,” she said. But like the gray wolf spoke English?

The growl was soft. And then came the rustling. The animal was prowling toward her.

“Oh, shit.”

Except...

Lydia kept the beam down on the fallen pine needles as she, too, walked forward. Something was wrong with the wolf, its gait wobbly and uneven. Yet the spirit of the hunter remained undeterred—and she was identified as its target.

She was about twenty feet away when she got a sense of the fully mature male. He was filled out, at a healthy weight of about a hundred and thirty pounds, and his mottled white, gray, and brown fur was thick and lush, especially at the tail. But his head was hanging at a bad angle, and he was dragging his back paws as he continued to close the distance between them.

It was obvious when the wolf was going to collapse. Though his head remained forward, his body listed to the side, his will staying strong even as his rear legs, and then his forelegs, gave out.

He landed on the soft bed of pine needles on his side, and the struggle was immediate, useless paws batting at thin air and ground cover. As Lydia drew a little closer to him, he snarled, flashing long white fangs, his golden eyes narrowing.

“Shh...” she said as she kneeled down.

Her hand shook as she got out her cell phone. As she called a number from her favorites, she tried to keep her breathing steady.

In the flashlight’s beam, she could see the grayness of those gums. The wolf was dying—and she knew why.

“God damn it, pick up, pick up—” Her words ma-chine gun’d from her mouth. “Rick? Wake up, I’ve got another one. On the main trail—what? Yes, it’s the same—enough with the talking, get your ass out of bed. I’m on the loop, about two miles into the—huh? Yes, bring everything, and hurry.”

She cut the connection as her voice gave out.

Letting herself fall back to a sit, she stared into those beautiful eyes and tried to project love, acceptance, gentleness...compassion. And something got through, the majestic male’s muzzle relaxing, its paws falling still, his flank rising and falling in a shuddering breath.

Or maybe it was dying right now.

“Help is coming,” she said hoarsely to the animal. 

J.R. Ward is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels, including the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. She lives in the South her family.

Links: http://www.jrward.com/

  

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Spotlight + Excerpt: The Jackal by J.R. Ward

THE JACKAL (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)
Author: J. R. Ward
Release Date: August 18, 2020

Description:

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sinner brings another hot adventure of true love and ultimate sacrifice in the Black Dagger Brotherhood world.

The location of the glymera’s notorious prison camp was lost after the raids. When a freak accident provides Nyx clues to where her sister may still be doing time, she becomes determined to find the secret subterranean labyrinth. Embarking on a journey under the earth, she learns a terrible truth—and meets a male who changes everything forever. 

The Jackal has been in the camp for so long he cannot recall anything of the freedom he once knew. Trapped by circumstances out of his control, he helps Nyx because he cannot help himself. After she discovers what happened to her sister, getting her back out becomes a deadly mission for them both. 

United by a passion they can’t deny, they work together on an escape plan for Nyx—even though their destiny is to be forever apart. And as the Black Dagger Brotherhood is called upon for help, and Rhage discovers he has a half-brother who’s falsely imprisoned, a devious warden plots the deaths of them all…even the Brothers. 

Western New York State, Present Day

The whole “life is a highway” metaphor was so ubiquitous, so overused, so threadbare and torn-patched, that as Nyx sat in the passenger side of a ten-year-old station wagon, and stared at the moonlit asphalt trail cutting through brush and bramble in west-ern New York State, she wasn’t thinking a damn thing about how sim-ilar the course of roads and lives could be: You could get sweet-sailing easy declines of coasting. Bad, bumpy, rough patches that rattled your teeth. Uphill hauls that you thought would never end. Bored stretches between far-apart exits.

And then there were the obstacles, the ones that came from out of nowhere and carried you so far off your planned trip that you ended up in a completely different place.

Some of these, both in the analogy and in fact, had four legs and a kid named Bambi.

“Watch out!” she yelled as she clapped a hand on the steering wheel and took control.

Too late. Over the screeching of tires, the impact was sickeningly soft, the kind of thing that happened when steel hit flesh, and her sister’s response was to cover her eyes and tuck in her knees.

Not helpful considering Posie was the one with the access to the brake pedal. But also completely in character.

The station wagon, being an inanimate object set into motion, had no brain of its own, but plenty of motivation from the sixty-two miles an hour they’d been going. As such, the old Volvo went bucking bronco as they left the rural byway, its stiff, cumbersome body heaving into a series of hill-and-dale dance moves that had Nyx hitting her head on the padded roof even though she was belted in.

The headlights strobed what was in front of the car, the beams point-and-shooting in whatever direction and angle the front grille hap-pened to be thrown in. For the most part, there was just a leafy morass of bushes, the green, spongy territory a far better outcome than she would have predicted.

That all changed.

Like a creature rising out of the depths of a lake, something brown, thick, and vertical was teased in the verdant light show, disappearing and reappearing as the shafts of illumination willy’d-their-nilly around.

Oh, shit. It was a tree. And not only was the arboreal hard-stop an immovable object, it was as if a steel crank-chain ran between its thick trunk and the undercarriage of the station wagon.

If you’d steered for a collision course, you couldn’t have done a better job.

Inevitable covered it.

Nyx’s only thought was for her sister. Posie was braced in the driv-er’s seat, her arms straight out, fingers splayed, like she was going to try to push the tree away—

The impact was like being punched all over the body, and there must have been a crunch of metal meeting wood, but with the airbags deploy-ing and the ringing in Nyx’s ears, she couldn’t hear much. Couldn’t breathe well. Couldn’t seem to see.

Hissing. Dripping. Burned rubber and something chemical.

Someone was coughing. Her? She couldn’t be sure.

“Posie?”

“I’m okay, I’m okay . . .”

Nyx rubbed her stinging eyes and coughed. Fumbling for the door, she popped the release and shoved hard against some kind of resistance. “I’m coming around to help you.”

Assuming she could get out of the damn car.

Putting her shoulder into the effort, she forced the door through something fluffy and green, and the payback was that the bush barged in, expanding into the car like a dog that wanted to sniff around.

She fell out of her seat and rolled onto the scruff. All-four’ing it for a spell, she managed to get up on to her feet and steady herself on the roof as she went around to the driver’s side. Peeling open Posie’s door, she released the seat belt.

“I got you,” she grunted as she dragged her sister out.

Propping Posie against the car, she cleared the blond hair back from those soft features. No blood. No glass in the perfect skin. Nose was still straight as a pin.

“You’re okay,” Nyx announced.

“What about the deer?”

Nyx kept the curses to herself. They were about ten miles from home, and what mattered was whether the car was drivable. No offense to Mother Nature and animal-lovers anywhere, but that four-legged scourge of the interstate was low on her list of priorities.

Stumbling to the front, she shook her head at the damage. A good two feet of the hood—and, therefore, engine—was compressed around a trunk that had all the flexibility of an I beam, and she was hardly an automotive expert, but that had to be incompatible with vroom-vroom, home safe.

“Shit,” she breathed.

“What about the deer?”

Closing her eyes, she reminded herself about the birth order. She was the older, responsible one, black-haired and brusque like their father had been. Posie was the blond, good-hearted youngest, who had all the warmth and sunny nature that their mahmen had possessed.

And the middle?

She couldn’t go down the Janelle rabbit hole right now.

Back over at her open door, Nyx leaned in and moved the deflated airbag out of the way. Where was her phone? She’d put it in a cupholder after she’d texted their grandfather as they’d left Hannaford. Great. Nowhere to be found—

“Thank God.”

Bracing her hand on the seat, she went down into the wheel well. And got a palm full of bad news.

The screen was cracked and the unit dark. When she tried to fire the thing up, it was a no go. Straightening, she looked over the ruined hood. “Posie, where is your—”

“What?” Her sister was focused on the road that was a good fifty yards away, her stick-straight hair tangled down her back. “Huh?”

“Your phone. Where is it?”

Posie glanced over her shoulder. “I left it at home. You had yours, so I just, you know.”

“You need to dematerialize back to the farmhouse. Tell grandfather to bring the tow truck and-”

“I’m not leaving here until we take care of that deer.”

“Posie, there are too many humans around here and—”

“It’s suffering!” Tears glistened. “And just because it’s an animal doesn’t mean its life doesn’t matter.”

“Fuck the deer.” Nyx glared across the steaming mess. “We need to solve this problem now—”

“I’m not leaving until—”

“—because we have two hundred dollars of groceries melting in the back. We can’t afford to lose a week’s worth of—”

“—we take care of that poor animal.”

Nyx swung her eyes away from her sister, the crash, the crap she had to fix so goddamn Posie could continue to give her heart out to the world and worry about things other than how to pay the rent, keep food on the table, and make sure they had such exotic luxuries as electricity and running water.

When she trusted herself to look back without hurling a bunch of be-practical f-bombs at her fricking sister, she saw absolutely no change in Posie’s resolve. And this was the problem. A sweet nature, yes. That annoying, bleeding-heart, emphatic bullcrap, yes. Iron will? When it came it down to it, boatloads.

That female was not budging on the deer thing.

Nyx threw up her hands and cursed—loudly.

Back in the car. Opening the glove box. Taking out the nine milli-meter handgun she kept there for emergencies.

As she came around the rear of the station wagon, she eyed the re-usable grocery bags. They were crammed up against the bench seat as a result of the crash, and it was a good news/bad news situation. Any-thing breakable was done for, but at least the cold items were clois-tered together, united in a fight against the eighty-degree August night.

“Oh, thank you, Nyx.” Posie clasped her hands under her chin like she was doing a devotional. “We’ll help the—wait, what are you doing with the gun?”

Nyx didn’t stop as she passed by, so Posie grabbed her arm. “Why do you have the gun?”

“What do you think I’m going to do to the damn thing? Give it CPR?”

“No! We need to help it—”

Nyx put her face into her sister’s and spoke in a dead tone. “If it’s suffering, I’m going to put it down. It’s the right thing to do. That is the way I will help that animal.”

Posie’s hands went to her face, pressing into cheeks that had gone pale. “It’s my fault. I hit the deer.”

“It was an accident.” Nyx turned her sister around to face the station wagon. “Stay here and don’t look. I’ll take care of it.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt the—”

“You’re the last person on the planet who’d intentionally hurt any-thing. Now stay the hell here.”

The sound of Posie softly crying escorted Nyx back toward the road. Following the tire gouges in the dirt and the ruined foliage, she found the deer about fifteen feet away from where they’d veered off—

Nyx stopped dead in her tracks. Blinked a couple of times. Considered vomiting.

It wasn’t a deer.

Those were arms. And legs. Thin ones, granted, and covered with mud-colored clothes that were in rags. But nothing about what had been struck was animal in nature. Worse? The scent of the blood that had been spilled was not human.

It was a vampire.

They’d hit one of their own.

Nyx ran over to the body, put the gun away, and knelt down. “Are you okay?”

Dumbass question. But the sound of her voice roused the injured, a horrific and horrified face turning up to her.

It was a male. A pretrans male. And oh, God, the whites of both his eyes had gone red, although she couldn’t tell whether it was because of the blood running down his face or some kind of internal brain injury. What was clear? He was dying.

“Help . . . me . . .” The thin reedy voice was, interrupted by weak coughing. “Out of . . . prison . . . hide me . . .”

“Nyx?” Posie called out. “What’s happening?”

For a split second, Nyx couldn’t think. No, that was a lie. She was thinking, just not about the car, the groceries, the kid who was dying, or her hysterical sister.

“Where,” Nyx said urgently. “Where’s the camp?”

Maybe after all these years . . . she could find out where Janelle had been taken.

This had to be Fate.

J.R. Ward is the author of more than thirty novels, including those in her #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series. There are more than fifteen million copies of her novels in print worldwide, and they have been published in twenty-six different countries around the world. She lives in the South with her family.

Don’t forget to sign-up for exclusive Black Dagger Brotherhood original content: https://jrward.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9963a331604291f164fc10413&id=2c5b6cefec

Purchase Link: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Jackal/J-R-Ward/Black-Dagger-Brotherhood-Prison-Camp/9781501195068

Where Winter Finds You Blog Tour: Excerpt + Giveaway

WHERE WINTER FINDS YOU: A Caldwell Christmas (Black Dagger Brotherhood #17.5)
Author: J. R. Ward
Release Date: November 26, 2019
Publisher: Pocket Books

Description:

#1 New York Times bestselling author J.R. Ward is heating things up this winter with a holiday novel featuring some of her most iconic Black Dagger Brothers. 

When Trez lost his beloved to a tragic death (The Shadows, Black Dagger Brotherhood #13), his soul was crushed and his destiny seemed relegated to suffering. But when he meets a mysterious female, he becomes convinced his true love has been reincarnated. Is he right? Or has his grief created a disastrous delusion?  Therese has come to Caldwell to escape a rift with her bloodline. The revelation that she was adopted and not born into her family shakes the foundations of her identity, and she is determined to make it on her own. Her attraction to Trez is not what she’s looking for, except the sexy Shadow proves to be undeniable.  Has fate provided a grieving widower with a second chance...or is Trez too blinded by the past to see the present for what it really is? In this sensual, arresting book full of the themes of redemption and self-discovery, two lost souls find themselves at a crossroads where the heart is the only compass that can be trusted...but that may require a courage that neither of them possesses.

Purchase Link: 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Winter-Finds-You/J-R-Ward/The-Black-Dagger-Brotherhood-World/9781982135478 

  “Holy f--k,” Trez yelled as a semitrailer truck the size of a building went blasting past the front bumper of his brand-new BMW. 

Like right past. Like . . . nearly peeling off the hood of the damned car. 

As his four-wheel drive, heavily treaded snow tires abruptly grabbed at that which they had been spinning on, and a pedestrian who’d slipped suddenly righted himself out of the way of the truck, Trez decided that the definition of in-the-nick-of time was exactly what just happened. If he’d been able to go when the light had turned, if that pedestrian hadn’t caught himself just when he had, they would both have been filing their termination papers tonight. 

Because about a split second prior to the almost catastrophe going down, Trez had been debating whether or not to just drive on. And not merely through the intersection. 

Having spent two decades in Caldwell, watching with his Shadow eyes the way a couple generations of humans built up the city, he knew exactly where this particular street in this particular section of town ended up. 

At the Hudson River. 

So if he hit the gas and kept on a direct, no wavering course until the street ended, he could take a Fast & Furious jump off the concrete embankment under one of Caldie’s two bridges. The BMW would not last long in the free fall, the sleek car having been built to fly over asphalt, not literally fly, and soon enough, both he and all this expensive steel, leather, and plastic would be sinking beneath the cold, sluggish waters of the Hudson. 

As his eyes had flashed peridot, his brain had imagined what it would be like. At first, the water would infiltrate through seams and vents, a trickle, not a rush. But that would change as he used the last of the electrical system’s power to lower the windows. After that, he would sit and wait for his drowning to take place, probably with his hands still on the wheel, maybe not, his seat belt remaining pulled across his chest, his clothes dampening and then clinging to his warm body with the clammy touch of the corpse he would soon become. 

He would not struggle. He would keep his eyes open. He imagined himself feeling a calmness that had been missing since all the light in his world went out in that hospital room about twenty miles, and some distance underground, away from where he himself would die. He would be so relieved. Even as the water reached his throat, then proceeded over his mouth and into his nose and ears, even as his body temperature tried to rally against the icy submersion and failed to conserve any warmth, even as his air supply dwindled to that which was in his lungs and no more, he would be at peace. 

The death throes, when they came—and they would, for his body was, as all were, evolutionarily adapted for survival, the conscious mind in charge only up to a dire point, whereupon autonomic function took over and things went haywire—would thrash him about in the bucket seat, throwing his head forward and back, his mouth opening and drawing in water as a reflex, as a desperate hope that his lungs were merely being denied oxygen as opposed to there being none available to them. He was under no illusions that it would be easy. There would be suffering from the suffocation, burning inside his body, perhaps even some last-moment panic kicked over his mortal transom by the lizard part of his brain. 

But then it would be over. Done with. The whole miserable biological accident of his life dusted, in the bin, over and out. 

A void, and nothing more.  

Which was heretical. 

As a Shadow, he had been raised in a slightly different belief system than regular vampires. His people, an evolutionary extension within the fanged species, relied a great deal on the stars in the sky, the traditions of the s’Hisbe a variant of what was accepted as the way the afterlife worked. The core tenets, however, were the same for both. It was like Protestants and Catholics—same essential language, but different dialects—and as such, his kind, too, had the theory that after you died, you went up unto the Fade, and lived out eternity with your loved ones under the benevolent auspices of the Scribe Virgin. Assuming you hadn’t been a total douche down on earth. If you had been an asshole, you were relegated to Dhunhd, also known as Hell, which was where the Omega and his minions hung out. Either way, your conduct over the course of your mortal nights determined your final zip code, and there was something after your last breath to look forward to—or dread—depending on your worthiness. 

It was an okay theory, and a construct that he understood was, in its own fashion, to be found on the human side of things as well. Not the Fade or Dhunhd, perhaps, not the Scribe Virgin or the Omega, exactly, but rather other, similar belief systems that covered both how you treated yourself and others while you were mortal, and also considered what happened to you after your coil, so to speak, got popped. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and countless other religions, they were all efforts to give more of a vista after death than just a coffin and a grave. Or a pyre. 

He knew from pyres.  

God, did he ever. 

What he no longer knew from, however, what he no longer believed in, was all the rest of that stuff. He’d never been particularly spiritual, but man, you didn’t know how much you had been until you were not any longer. 

At all.  

Anyway, prior to the whole truck/intersection/ almost-obliteration thing, he had been considering what was not exactly a sin, but rather a really, very not-so-hot idea. Assuming you were a believer. In the lexicon of both vampires and Shadows, if you took your own life, that was it. No Fade for you, motherfucker. Now, no one had been able to provide him with a good explanation of what the alternative repercussions were—sure, lore had it you were closed-door’d on the whole Fade thing. But where did you end up? Dhunhd? Worm food? Who knew. Yet everyone and their uncle was damn clear on the fact that you weren’t going to be elbows deep in people you liked for the next jabillion years. 

The message apparently being, if you took your own life, well, then, to hell with you if you didn’t appreciate the gift you were given at birth. 

Yeah, like this whole breathing/heart-beating thing had been such a fucking prize, these years he’d been upright and walking around such a goddamn joy. He’d been destined for a loveless mating since the night he was born, been responsible for the senseless suffering of both his parents, watched a dear friend get tortured by a psychotic cunt for a good twenty years—that was fun—been a pimp, a drug dealer, and an enforcer. 

Real partridge-in-a-pear-tree shit.  

And then that heaping sundae of shit-chip ice cream—which he’d self-medicated with an outstanding sex addiction, thank you very much—had been cherry-topped by the granddaddy of all gutwrenchers. 

He’d met the female of his dreams, fallen in love . . . and, after what felt like twenty minutes of happiness, had had to hold her hand as she died of a wasting disease right in front of him. 

Honestly, he hadn’t just been born under a bad star; he’d been born under one that kicked him in the nuts so badly, he’d coughed them out in his hand. 

So now he was here, in this BMW he’d just bought, on this snowy night, during the motherfucking human season of cocksucking joy, contemplating suicide—only to have the GODDAMN ACCIDENT THAT COULD HAVE MADE IT ALL COME OUT ALL RIGHT DENIED TO HIM BY A SET OF ALL-SEASON RADIALS THAT HAD WORKED JUST FINE AT EVERY OTHER FUCKING INTERSECTION HE’D EVER DRIVEN THROUGH. 

Not to put too fine a point on things. 

But FFS, he couldn’t even have a chance to get dead in such a way that he could both end this bullshit AND not run afoul of the maybe truth that suicide got you, literally, nowhere. 

Not that he believed in the afterlife anymore anyway. No matter what he’d thought he’d seen after Selena had died. 

Hell, if there was anything that the last three months had taught him, it was that death was a hard stop. Especially if you were the one left behind. 

Well, Trez thought, as he sped along in the snow, at least there was still the embankment option. 

There was that to look forward to.

J.R. Ward is the author of more than thirty novels, including those in her #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series. There are more than fifteen million copies of her novels in print worldwide, and they have been published in twenty-six different countries around the world. She lives in the South with her family. 

 Don’t forget to sign-up for exclusive Black Dagger Brotherhood original content:  

https://jrward.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9963a331604291f164fc10413&id=2c5b6cefec 

(1) Finished copy of Where Winter Finds You - Open to US entries only!

a Rafflecopter giveaway